CSS and design systems people - BlogFlock

Page View Count Regression Fixed - Adam Argyle

2026-10-03T20:45:16.000Z

Page view counts regressed Oct 1 and were fixed just now. Hopefully those historical counts can be retrieved or fixed; working on it.

Transitioning Field Sizing Content With CSS - Adam Argyle

2026-10-03T00:04:08.000Z

Neat CSS trick:

Use anchor to track the size changes in a textarea (or whatever) and transition instead of instantly update 🤘🏻

See on Codepen

How IT can get more sustainable quicker: notes from Green IO - Hidde's blog

2026-10-02T00:00:00.000Z

At Green IO this week, I heard about offshore wind, sustainability data, and cloud certification. This post has some notes I took. They all in some way relate to what can get us to more sustainable IT quicker.

Better sustainability data

It's really hard to reason about your organisation's impacts without data. Hannah Smith (virtual) and Oliver Cronk (in-person) talked us through a new Green Web Foundation community project that helps with better data: Digital Impacts Schema and Taxonomy (“DIST”).

DIST has three parts:

a taxonomy (ensures you can compare “apples to apples” by categorising impacts in upstream impacts like software and hardware, operational impacts like employee devices and cloud services, and downstream impacts like end-user devices),
methodologies to measure, calculate, and estimate impacts, tagged with DIST categories,
a structured data format to exchange the collected data in a standardised and machine-readable manner.

So it answers what data to collect, how to collect it, and how to describe it once you've got it, all in one system.

Offshore wind

In "Can offshore wind power the AI boom?", professor Susan Gourvenec of the University of Southhampton talked to us about offshore wind. She debunked some myths, like how much space they use: only a very small proportion compared to other bits. Do they kill birds? Yes, but cats are their main killer by a long mile. Is it expensive? The cost of delaying decarbonisation is much higher, both in terms of economic (productivity) and social costs. Aren't the materials environment unfriendly? Yes, but greener steel is in the works. My main takeaways: offshore wind takes relatively little space (in relation to other offshore activities), there is a lot of it possible, and it could be enough to power the AI boom.

Measuring internal AI emissions

Mark Buss of OVO Energy shared how they ended up measuring their internal AI usage. OVO give everyone who works there “enterprise level productivity tooling” and engineers access to Claude, i.e. they use a lot of it. Some of the staff started asking about the impact of that usage, people wanted to know for a myriad of reasons. So OVO ran a series of in person workshops, focused on environmenral impacts of AI, making space for both positives and negatives. There's many ways to look at it, Mark explained, saying that “you can't decarbonise a cow but you can lower emissions from data centres”. He emphasised context: when calculated all their AI use, and compared it to emissions associated with other processes at OVO, and saw it was only marginal compared to cloud cost (a bit more), business travel (much more), and the fossil part of the energy they sell (magnitudes more).

Standardising energy use of streaming

Marisol Palmero of IEEE got us up to speed with the standardisation of energy-aware streaming. She explained that only in 2025, AI energy usage overtook that of streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. But they are quite different: most energy use of streaming associated with the user's devices (battery needed to power graphics on screens etc), whereas most energy use of AI is associated with data centres. Marisol explained measuring emissions associated with streaming is increasingly less voluntary: there's more preasure from regulation (CSRD, SEC Climate Disclosure Rule, UK SDR) and Omnibus 1 means evidence will be required. It's tricky as standards around this aren't interoperable yet. IEEE works on Trustworthy Energy Attribution & Measurement (TEAM) to help solve for this. And such efforts can have an impact: “standards are how we move individuals to collective action”, Marisol said.

A pipeline GreenOps observability

Diana Todea of VictoriaMetrix and Julien Nioche of DigitalPebble discussed how we already have the data we need for GreenOps. We all know that cloud providers give data that isn't very useful or actionable, Julien explained. Open Source projects can help, including SPRUCE, which can come third-party data, is actively maintained, and available free. Diana showed how she used SPRUCE and a number of other tools to build a pipeline for observability of GreenOps including a cool dashboard, and in general, the importance of observability. What's promising in that regard is that the Green Software Foundation (GSF) are taking their Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) to OpenTelemetry through semantic conventions.

Certification for data centres

“Please raise your hand if you fully understand the environmental and social impact of your cloud usage and were aware at the time of procurement”… tricky questions were asked during the session by Emily Watson-Breeze and Barton Finn of TCO Certified, who built a certification for “cloud resources” over the last few years to answer questions like that. So not data centres per se, but the cloud services that run in them. It looks at requirements for physical layer (data centre facility), IT hardware layer (servers, storage, network equipment), and operations & management (certified cloud resource). And it even looks at the very common case where cloud resources are offered as a service: you're not buying a server, but paying to use it for a specific time. It's really hard because there is hidden structure, a complex value chain, and data that is hard to compare due to lack of standards and incomplete datasets. This kind of certification can help both procurers and suppliers. I cannot wait for hyperscalers to get on this, and until they are, I guess we should all be pushing for that when procuring cloud products.

Wrapping up

It wasn't because before lunch started, the host announced “the afternoon will be all about AI at scale” that I missed taking notes for a lot of the afternoon sessions: I ended up having some great hallway chats and left a little earlier to get on my train back.

I enjoyed meeting folks at Green IO and learning about a wide variety of topics. I even got to hang out a little bit with people from the ClimateAction.Tech community, which unites tech workers that try to change the system to face the climate crisis (there's a very active Slack instance you can join if you're interested!).

Originally posted as How IT can get more sustainable quicker: notes from Green IO on Hidde's blog.

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Front End Fast Money With Kevin Powell - Adam Argyle

2026-10-01T23:57:57.000Z

30s on the clock, how well do my CSS answers stack up against Kevin's audience?

Watch on YouTube

WWW Ep254 From Geocities To Gpt Brad Frost - Adam Argyle

2026-09-24T07:00:00.000Z

Ep #254
With Brad Frost ✨

Robbie and I welcome Brad Frost to talk grief and acceptance around AI, the Orchid synth, snowboarding as a metaphor for finding your line through chaos, why domain expertise matters more than ever, Van Halen's green M&Ms, and Brad's AI and Design Systems course.

⤷ whiskey.fm · spotify · apple · youtube

BanjoCSS - Adam Argyle

2026-09-19T15:42:16.000Z

Banjo, guitar, drums, trees, n' mountains.

Chris and I met halfway between our homes to jam.

We met at a tiny campsite, where we hoped the lack of amenities would mean no neighbors.

It worked.

We were the only campers at the site, which meant we could make some noise!

Time to bum-ditty 🤘🏻

Couple a banjo dorks #

We brought tons of instruments, played them until it got dark. Was Awesome.

We caught a couple early jams on video.

(Chris tell me the name):

Fire On The Mountain:

Shoes & Stockings:

Overall Chris is MUCH better than me, so I watched and learned as much as I could.

A few pics #

Mt. Hood was lookin great.

And here's a nice pano of the trip down the mountain:

Didn't really chat about CSS #

We coulda, but we didn't.

Jev - Adam Argyle

2026-09-17T05:05:56.000Z

I am very excited about Jev. Typesafe.ai has something fresh, powerful, unique here. I'm mentally infactuated.

Attributes of Jev that stood out to me:

common-sense judgments over unstructured data
machine interfaces matter more than the chat interfaces
code owns the workflow and AI handles narrow, structured decisions

We get the tokenization LLM powers to breakdown input (token window) but without the word vomit. No hallucinations because it's not using probability to hopefully create a pleasing string.

It's exposing the intricate connections it made to the input data. To extract meaning from that super brain that just ingested your JSON, you ask it blunt questions in near natural language.

It's like a fast path to machine learning.

Where you used to need a ton of data and custom machine learning, then run that somewhere and have it probably be slow. Jev is fast, learns data patterns near instantly, and lets you ask questions and make decisions about it's processing of the data.

I don't know how many of those words will resonate with you.

But I urge you to sit down for more than an hour with this. Run through all the tutorials, watch a few of their videos and read the docs.

I think we're looking at a next-gen programming model.

My Playground #

Here is a playground I made to see what Jev thinks about agent assisted art and whether or not a human or an agent is actually the creative.

Comment out one of the stories so the dataset is lopsided, run it and observe the question scores. Then switch to the other story, run it, observe the scores.

This is powerful stuff.

System One #

System One has some really compelling examples, and of course I loved the Doom example.

Since Jev is fast, it can process the game's structured data (enemies, room details, etc) and "make common sense judgements", AKA play the game damn good.

Questions #

Q: Jev doesnt want to own the code, but does want to own narrow structured decisions… which shouldnt the right line of code be a narrow structured decision?

Seems to me like someone could make a Claude Code out of this.

Q: At first I felt the usages of Jev were limited, but I think we're looking at more of a programming model shift then some new tool?

It's fundementally making me think different about how I could write logic to create systems.

Q: What kind of apps does it unlock because it's so fast?

A lot of early use cases will be periodic queries, but if you can get intelligent judgements multiple times a second…

WWW Ep253 Experts Agree Yelling At Computers Is The Future - Adam Argyle

2026-09-10T17:51:24.000Z

Ep #253
Experts Agree: Yelling at Computers Is the Future

Robbie and Chuck reunite over Jim Beam White Label to catch up on Chuck's move to Italy, AI as tech leads, CodeRabbit versus GPT for code review, SOC 2 compliance workarounds, and why GitHub bots might unlock dark factory workflows.

⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Stylex At Shopify - Adam Argyle

2026-09-03T19:55:34.000Z

Did a deep dive to see if StyleX would work at Shopify.

Turned out to be a wash, similar to my other explorations into OOCSS.

Small things like these - Robin Rendle

2026-08-23T20:39:41.000Z

Claire Keegan’s novella Small things like these is very sweet and the ending is so triumphant and satisfying and punk rock that it’s going to stay with me for a very long time. I leave this rare book recommendation without a quote or much of a description simply because I don’t want to ruin anything. But what I will spoil is that Keegan’s writing is clear and precise, like ice made in laboratory conditions.

I spotted this interview that captures how she writes:

“A lot of my work goes into taking any traces of my labours out,” says Keegan, when I talk to her in Edinburgh, a few hours after she gave a reading at the city's book festival. “It's essentially about trusting in the reader's intelligence rather than labouring a point. To work on the level of suggestion is what I aim for in all my writing. There are so many things the short story cannot do; it's by learning those limitations that I am cornered into writing what I can.”

Cybernetics and Ghosts - Robin Rendle

2026-08-23T17:07:06.000Z

In November 1967 Italo Calvino gave a lecture called Cybernetics and Ghosts where he talked about writing machines and the future of literature:

...will we have a machine capable of replacing the poet and the author? Just as we already have machines that can read [...] will we also have machines capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels?

I am thinking of a writing machine that would bring to the page all those things that we are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes of our psychological life, of our daily experience, our unpredictable changes of mood and inner elations, despairs and moments of illumination.

I didn’t expect Calvino (of all folks!) to be comforted by a machine that could write If on Winter’s Night A Traveler, but ok:

...what I instinctively feel is a sense of relief, of security. The same sort of relief and sense of security that I feel every time I discover that a mess of vague and indeterminate lines turns out to be a precise geometric form; or every time I succeed in discerning a series of facts, and choices to be made out of a finite number of possibilities, in the otherwise shapeless avalanche of events. Faced with the vertigo of what is countless, unclassifiable, in a state of flux, I feel reassured by what is finite, “discrete,” and reduced to a system.

So if a computer can take writing, language, and the messiness of putting words together and do that work for us, Calvino believes it might remove all the dark magic out of literature. Or if a machine can process writing into a series of operations like a program then making a novel or a poem won’t be as frightening for us? That’s a weird take that I don’t fully get it, but it’s an interesting idea I guess?

I have to admit that whenever folks start to talk like this I feel this desperate need to defend personhood, humanity, novels, the humanities, liberal arts, books, all of it. My hackles go up reading this stuff because it’s usually coming from folks who don’t know anything about writing or literature and it feels like they’re stomping all over a vulnerable and delicate thing that they don’t understand.

But when Calvino says it we ought to pay attention.

Although, when he finds solace in literature being reduced into a series of rules and regulations, I feel great relief knowing that this is impossible. I love the mystery of novel-making. I want it to be this impossible thing. I hate all the rules and regulations of writing and want to break them in the same way that all great novels do. There are no rules! And that, to me, is liberating, exciting even.

But just as I was about to dismiss Italo as a traitor to the cause—a backstabbing, synth-sympathizer—he does the rather lovely thing that Italo always does. He hops around, tries this idea on for a moment, before jumping out of a closet with an altogether opposite-shaped idea that makes you smile:

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

After this 180, Calvino leaves the lecture in an oddly hopeful place by the end. He wants the machine to remove the mystery out of literature, to tell us all the rules and copy all the styles, only so that we can see those rules clearly. Then, Calvino argues, we can study them, break them.

And make something entirely new.

WWW Ep251 Guppy Pimpin In Trip Pants While Debugging Ie5 - Adam Argyle

2026-08-18T17:24:04.000Z

Ep #251
Guppy Pimpin In Trip Pants While Debugging IE5

Robbie and I do a mostly whatnot episode about our path getting into tech, playing in bands, and getting into trouble. We sip Glen Morangie "A Tale of Ice Cream" and share some stories.

⤷ whiskey.fm · youtube · spotify · apple

Scotch Malt Whisky Society Member - Adam Argyle

2026-08-16T04:38:35.000Z

New member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society

The day of small things - Robin Rendle

2026-08-15T16:12:06.000Z

I spotted this quote by Shirley Hibberd on the side of an enormous glass case, just outside the departures gate at SFO:

Let us not despise the day of small things. A windowsill garden is better than no garden, and the dark area where cats quarrel and damp makes patches of unsightly mould, may be made bright with healthy vegetation that shall be worth a little care and very much love.

This lovely quote is from Shirley’s book, published in 1870, called Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste and just look at this punk thing. For all the lovely feel-good-vibes and gardening advice of that quote above, it’s clear that this book is a cursed object that beckons from beyond our realm. Although, making a gardening book exclusively for goths like me is kinda neat.

Anyway, Shirley’s quote, the glass case, and the whole exhibit at SFO is called Indoor Eden: Victorian Jardinières and I feel like it was setup exclusively to ruin my day. The exhibit is a celebration of art nouveau Victorian pottery and I can’t think of much else in life that we should be actively rooting against: stumpy dark green leaves fold over ceramic fish with their mouths wide open; an ugly brown vase stands proud with a few ugly dandelions haphazardly carved into it; a psychedelic, gaping-wound-red butterfly has been stamped onto a tall pot that’s perched on an equally upsetting, even taller pot.

It’s all just profoundly ugly. Overly complicated. Frilly. The colors are wrong. All the pots on display beg for attention in a way that feels embarrassing, reminding me of stuffy rooms in England with silverware locked in cabinets and nice china brought out for special occasions. Or it reminds me of pictures of the Queen printed on tacky plates and all the weird romanticism in England about what the Victorian era was, and what the Empire did. Each piece in these glass cases fail so profoundly and in such remarkable ways that it draws me in, pulls me close. For a while I forget where I am, that I’m at the airport to say goodbye to my father in-law, and instead I’m locked in an eternal death stare with these ugly 150 year old pots.

I know, I know. This meanness is unpleasant and these ugly things are expertly made and technically competent beyond anything I could ever manage with my enormous sausage fingers and terrible hand-eye coordination. A lot of care and attention, decades of experience, was poured into making these objects. But a bad song or a bad movie or a bad anything is still bad, despite the effort made.

Here’s how I excuse myself when being a grump.

When I complain I’m honoring the effort of whoever made these things by trying to understand why I hate them. It’s genuinely interesting to me! A lot of folks dismiss their hatred or are mean about what they dislike in boastful ways but I want to understand why and how these things suck. I want to learn more about them in the hope that I can avoid making anything like it. It’s useful information about myself, like knowing that I’m never going to enjoy karaoke. It’s just too late, okay? I’m thirty six years old and I’ve spent enough time pretending to have a good time singing Shania Twain. It’s ok to hate karaoke! Let me live!

Back at the airport, I chuckle to myself.

Shirley is trying to be nice. In her book and in that quote she’s trying to remind me that great things can come from small problems. That all I have to do is tidy up, clean up a garden, remove a weed, or do small things for the sake of small things. But here I am—a total grump—despising the smallness of these acts. I want to yell at Shirley: no, actually, a windowsill is not better than a garden goddammit. A damp patch in your house is gross and instead of fixing it you should run away, get a new apartment, burn the place to the ground. Small, ugly things should be unacceptable. Fix this minor inconvenience by changing everything about your life and move a thousand miles away, change your name, forget everyone you love, adopt a whole new identity.

And please, for the love of all that his holy in this world, stop making these goddamn Victorian Jardinières.

(Ahem. Sorry, Shirley).

Websub - Adam Argyle

2026-08-13T06:31:25.000Z

WebSub support added.

Creativity On The Internet At Sxsw - Adam Argyle

2026-08-13T05:01:20.000Z

Jack (CEO of Patreon) gives a great talk about the struggles of being an artist with the internet from the 90s to today, a history of tech and art, and lessons learned.

Heartfelt insights into working through 2026 "content creation" culture.

Watch on YouTube.

Contextualism At CSSday 2026 - Adam Argyle

2026-08-12T18:26:00.000Z

Watch my talk "Contextualism" from CSS Day on Conffab

2026 Open Agentic Tools - Adam Argyle

2026-08-10T16:52:03.000Z

Some "open" agentic tools:

Wonder if they use Open Props 😏

Scroll Axis Lock - Adam Argyle

2026-08-10T16:04:51.000Z

I first noticed web scroll areas had scroll locking behavior when making 2D scroll snap demos; I couldn't scroll diagonally without getting hijacked and locked into an x or y axis.

Even on a touch device, where a diagonal gesture is so easy and natural.

See the Pen by Adam Argyle (@argyleink) on CodePen.

Thanks to Bramus's rad interactive blog post I saw Chrome 153 with the remedy:

.scroller {
  overflow: auto;
  overscroll-behavior: contain;
  scroll-axis-lock: none; 👈
}

spec | check for support

Freedom from the axis lock 🤘🏻

Use cases #

I was thinking:

swipe to dismiss interactions
flings
maps or infinite canvas navigating
datagrids or tables
image zoom scrolling around
360 pano images or 3D model panning
data vis exploration

Just seems worth while to use the natural inertia, tensions, perf and feels that scroll snap has for the snap feedback of "didnt swipe far enough" and the browser owned easing.

Can also mitigate scrollTo strangeness that might do x then y.

I did log a bug #

I saw some performance regressions in the first 2 demo's I pulled up to test with

Filed a bug.

I wouldn't necessarily file this as perfectly fixed, I still felt it was a bit clumsy or not enabling diagonal scrolling as smoothly as I'd like.

Overall exciting and meaningful IMO tho.

Your thoughts?

Ranting Devigner - Adam Argyle

2026-08-08T05:46:10.000Z

My Blogspot in 2011: Ranting Devigner

see what tech articles I was reading ^lol
dev and design rants I was making ^{also lol}

Devigner = Designer + Developer
Before "Design Engineer" was coo