Patterns Day 2019 - Heydon Pickering

This one was hard to write notes for, partly because it was code-heavy and partly because I had just been to MEATliquor for lunch. There is one note however that somehow didn’t make it to this list: Heydon wore lobster hands through his entire talk. I really enjoyed the talk, at first I didn’t really understand (I was one thinking “just use media queries!”) but it turns out he was trying to teach axioms to the browser. Guide instead of tell, which I think is what we all try our best to achieve when trying to work with such a fluid medium as the web.

Here’s my notes:

• Flexbox holy albatross
• “Layout primitives” reusable
• “Media queries are a hack” because you don’t know context
• Point is to make it able to layout itself without having any relationship to window
• Container queries aren’t available
• Using css properties 1/0 for border on border off etc
• Used min and max width with very big or very negative numbers
• Using flexbox for any amount of children means you can put the calculation in flex box. Negative will be 0, large number be 100%
• Give it axioms, work with the inbuilt algorithms
• Be the browsers mentor not micromanager
• For SSR takes margin attribute etc and puts together into a string -(I’m not sure a benefit though, why not just use data attributes?)