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Monthly Meanderings: July 2026

2026-08-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another roundup post. This month has been very… exercise-y. Which is, for the record, not normal for me. For the previous year my only source of exercise has basically been walking, but that’s not a great fitness activity for me. When my regular walks entered the 10-15km territory it got more and more annoying to find the time and/or an interesting route.

I also managed to injure my knee while walking through a particularly muddy field, and spent a few months going slightly stir crazy. Coming out of that I started running three times a week, bought a bicycle, and added in some strength exercises along with the ones the physio recommended. If you told me a few months ago that I’d be annoyed at not being able to exercise too much on rest days I’d think you were mad.

Website updates and other projects

Before we talk even more about exercise, let’s do the usual topics I cover in these posts. The only website update this month has been a post about… exercise. Maybe I have a problem. Anyway, in Tracking PBs without the dark patterns I talk about building a slimmed-down, single-player Strava to track my personal bests, without all the nonsense that annoys me.

Other than the PB tracker, I’ve not been working much on personal projects. I’ve not really had any other itches that need scratching, just the usual background noise of dependency updates and other project maintenance.

Entertainment

Behold, the section where I normally talk about the films, TV programmes, and board games that have kept me entertained this month: […]. Yep, not a single one.

I have played a few games, though. A friend and I finally got around to trying out Escape Simulator 2, and it’s just as good as the original. The rooms feel a bit more detailed, and there are a few cool interactions that probably wouldn’t be possible in the old version. There’s also a hard mode for all the rooms which we’ve not yet tried, but sounds like it’ll keep us amused for a bit longer.

I’ve also been playing a bit of World of Warcraft, but it’s now in the awkward stage where I’ve done most things I can reasonably do this season, and there’s not really any point in doing anything else. All the gear will become mostly irrelevant in a few weeks when season two releases, and we’ve hit the major milestone achievements for Mythic+. Feels a bit anticlimactic to get to a fairly good stage and then just… not play for a bit.

Fitness

Given how much exercise I’ve done, it probably deserves its own section in these monthly posts. I have the vague idea of aiming to run a marathon before I turn 40 (i.e., within around 15 months). That’s both scary and yet not completely impossible. I’m going to work up through the distances and see how it goes. A 5k at the start of September, 10k in November, half marathon around Easter next year, then a full marathon just before my birthday in October. That way even if it gets too tough or something goes wrong I’ll have accomplished something.

New hobbies mean new toys. My bike is nothing particularly special: a hybrid from Halfords that’s about one step up from entry-level. But it gets the job done, and has helped me remember how much I enjoy cycling. The infrastructure around here is pretty terrible, though. There are lots of little bits of multi-use paths and a few dedicated bike lanes, but they’re not joined up or signed well in the slightest. In most cases it’s easier to just stay on the road and deal with the traffic. It’s a bit sad that they’ve spent time and money to do something and it’s not very useful.

On the running side, I picked up a Garmin Forerunner 165 watch. I’ve been wearing an Apple Watch for a little over a year now, but using the touchscreen to navigate screens and start/stop activities while running is annoyingly fiddly. The digital crown keeps getting gummed up with sunscreen and requiring cleaning, too. The Forerunner has physical buttons, and is much better at showing the data I want to see in a clear format, and letting me set things up like target pace or distance on the watch itself, instead of via a phone app. Oh, and the battery seems like it’s going to last for a week rather than a day, which is a nice change of pace.

I’m going to need to make a nice widget to show off my monthly runs and bike rides, but for now here’s some artisanal stats:

I went out for 14 runs, totalling 48km, although a significant portion of that was walking for warmup, cooldown or recovery.
My longest actual run was a 20 minute straight run covering 2.5km.
My average running pace is 8min/km, which is a “conversational” pace for me right now.
I went for 9 cycle rides: 2 on rented mountain bikes, then the rest on my own bike. They covered 128km.
When cycling I made 8 coffee shop stops, which works out to exactly one every 16km on average.

Next month I’m hoping to ramp the running up to hit 5k by the very end. I’m mostly following the NHS Couch to 5k plan but I’m tweaking it a little bit as otherwise I’d finish on 3.75km at my current pace. I guess “Couch to 30 minutes of running” isn’t quite as catchy. I made a Couch to 5k page to track my progress and adjustments.

Around the web

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

I often look at my own posts and think, “There’s nothing novel, or important, or deep in here at all — is this even worth saying?”

I’ve written before about The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging, and this is a very similar take from Jim Nielsen, but it’s still super interesting to see a similar idea expressed in another way by another person.

I Built a Voice Opening Door to Moria (My Garage)

A YouTube video documenting a really cool project. What grabs me is the amount of disciplines he dabbles in: he’s part blacksmith, part carpenter, part electrician, part programmer, and so on. It’s one of the best examples of maker culture I’ve seen in ages.

There’s one bit in particular that sticks in my mind: he tried to find a rendering of the door online, and realised all the existing ones were gibberish or illegible, so he downloaded a font and worked out the exact inscription himself. It makes my inner perfectionist feel validated.

Linus Torvalds on AI in the Linux kernel

LLMs are very divisive, and there are a lot of unsettled moral and ethical issues. But at the end of the day they’re a tool that’s not going to go away any time soon. There are people on crusades to try and ban LLM tools in projects, boycott any projects that accept contributions, and so on. It’s a bit like militant veganism. I can understand where they’re coming from, but also please stop shouting at me. Anyway, this take from Linus seems pretty spot on to me.

Buttons

An interactive, graphical history of how buttons have been rendered in various operating systems and desktop environments over time. Maybe it’s just my age and nostalgia, but it really does feel like they peaked around the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m not quite sure why we went from elegant skeuomorphic buttons to ugly plain squares with weird accent colours when you click them.

Rotating sandwiches

For some reason I expected this to be static pictures of sandwiches which spun in a circle, but it’s actually recordings of sandwiches rotating on a turntable. It’s oddly mesmerising. I wonder why I’ve never seen a restaurant menu with gifs like that?

Tracking PBs without the dark patterns

2026-07-23T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently been bitten by some kind of strange exercise bug. I’ve gone from being mostly sedentary to struggling to not go out for a cheeky bike ride on a day that’s meant to be a rest day. Maybe this is what a midlife crisis feels like?

Anyway, one of the things I’ve enjoyed about this development is seeing my personal best efforts gradually go up. There’s something incredibly rewarding about doing a run, and then seeing a nice little gold medal because as part of that you ran your fastest 1km ever. Unfortunately the only software I’ve found that does that is Strava, and boy do I not get on with it.

The many shortcomings of Strava

Strava is basically the app for running and cycling. Everyone talks about it. It sounds like they like it. But I really, really don’t. It’s like someone went through a catalogue of user-hostile behaviours and said “we’ll take them all!”.

The problems started in the setup wizard: it touts a load of privacy features, but doesn’t offer any way to enable them. All your activities are public by default, and you have to spelunk around in the settings to turn that off. I wasn’t actually sure if I wanted my activities to be public or not, and ended up flip-flopping around a bit. There is a clunky workflow to bulk change past activities, but it’s arbitrarily time-gated so you can’t use it too often…

The bulk operations are extremely limited, too: you can set the activity visibility, and your heart rate visibility, and that’s it. Want to bulk delete things? You’re out of luck. Bulk rename? No chance. You either do them one-by-one or use some janky third-party script. I think I pressed around 300 little ‘delete’ links in the course of trying to get my activity history imported in a way I liked.

Those problems give a bit of a signal about Strava’s priorities, but I could live with them. Once I’ve stopped faffing with the initial import I’m not really going to want to change the privacy settings or bulk edit things. Alas, the problems didn’t end there.

Look at me! Look at me! GIVE ME ENGAGEMENT!

The most obvious one is that everything is an upsell. Vast swathes of the app are premium-only, and they don’t ever get out of your way: they stick around acting as adverts. We’re all used to freemium apps that try to hawk upgrades, but the sheer amount of screen real estate taken up by these is egregious. I started a premium trial, expecting things to get a lot better, and… they didn’t really. All the premium features are still branded as such, so now instead of “look at what you could have if you paid us” it’s “look at what you’re getting for paying us (don’t even think about cancelling)”. Subscribing also makes your avatar get a premium outline, and there’s no way to disable it. I really hate that. Now I’m an advert myself. I don’t want to be part of their weird dark patterns, thank you very much.

And while we’re talking about dark patterns: there’s so much engagement bait that I physically cringe at it. You get a notification for logging an activity with a vague call to action to check it out. You get a separate notification when you break or come close to one of your PBs, but it doesn’t tell you which; there’s plenty of space in the notification for it, but they want you to hit the app instead. It all just feels so slimy to me. I don’t know whether it doesn’t bother other people as much, or if they’re desensitised to it, or just don’t realise how pleasant things could actually be.

Making a replacement

I realised pretty early on that if I only want automatic PB tracking, I could just write something myself to do it. I already use Health Auto Export to exfiltrate data from Apple Health, including workouts. I can just make a service that receives that data, crunches some numbers, and activates the dopamine receivers in my brain when I set a new record. But I didn’t really want to bother doing that if I could avoid it. I tried a whole slew of different apps and none of them did the thing, at least not without a subscription. And Strava had soured me on fitness subscriptions. I finally resigned myself to making something.

And by “myself” I mean “an LLM”. This is one of the first projects where I’ve not written a single line of code, and I’ve barely even reviewed anything produced by the LLM. I gave it an overall architecture and some sample data, and had it write a plan. I critiqued the plan, had it broken down into a few different phases, and then had it work through them. I occasionally stopped it when I saw it doing something stupid, and gave it a couple of technical steers, but my feedback has mostly been functional. I’m probably not going to be releasing it publicly any time soon for that reason — I don’t want to publish it under my name when I’ve not even looked at the code. I also wouldn’t be comfortable making software this way if other people were going to rely on it, but for non-critical, personal-use-only software I’m happy with the approach.

Anyway, I called it “Pompei Band”. Project names are hard. One of my common techniques is to put a term into an anagram finder; in this case “PB dopamine” anagrams to “Pompei Band”, and it even abbreviates to PB. Weird, but I like it. This is how it shows recent activities on the homepage:

Dashboard entry for a recent run in PB

You can click through to see the standard activity details most tracking apps show: a map, heart rate, pace, gradient, and heart rate zones. You can also click on each effort to see a history of them, which gives a nice overview of progress:

1 mile run PB history

It pretty much does exactly what I want, and has none of the annoying behaviours that Strava leans into. When I first drafted this post I wrote “there’s a few more bits I’d like to add at some point, but I can happily prompt them into existence when I want them”, but in the time I spent procrastinating before taking screenshots I ended up implementing them all. My favourite is this little history widget I added to the homepage, shown here next to Strava’s:

Recent activity calendar in Pompei Band and in Strava

The Strava one just confuses me. I’m not sure what the scale of the circles means. I’m guessing it’s time, which in effect means it just highlights my bike rides which are longer than runs. The colours for the line charts don’t work for me, and I’m not sure what three zig-zag lines are meant to represent. Pompei Band’s version uses distinct, obvious colours for different activities, and scales the brightness independently for each type of activity based on length (so long cycle rides don’t affect the short runs). I also flipped the axes so it looks more like a GitHub activity timeline, because that’s how my brain works. Nothing groundbreaking, but also none of the paper-cuts the Strava version inflicted on me.

Software doesn’t have to be awful

This blog post has been rattling around in my head for a few days. I didn’t want it to just be a litany about Strava being bad, and I didn’t want to sound like an LLM hype piece, which made it tricky to figure out what I was actually trying to say. I think the core of it is: software doesn’t have to be awful.

Everyone’s heard of enshittification, and it’s so prevalent that it’s easy to accept it as a fact of life. That’s just how late-stage capitalism works, right? But we can just make better software. And as LLMs slowly become more and more capable, that “we” grows to a broader and broader group. It’s easy to be negative about that: we’re going to drown in vibe-coded products, much like we’re already drowning in written LLM slop. On the other hand, a future where you can just say “make me single-player Strava without all the dark patterns” and get something that works just how you want it is pretty exciting.

The one thing I can’t decide: if everyone can whip up their own individual software, will the existing platforms actually improve? If Strava didn’t have all the dark patterns and engagement bait I would have just have paid for it. Will they realise that? Or will they double down even harder, try to lock you into their platform, and build moats around user data? Now I’ve said it, it seems pretty obvious they’ll try to do that. But I hope they won’t.

Monthly Meanderings: June 2026

2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

Writing these monthly posts is making me very aware of how quickly the year is going. I’m not sure I like that at all. June saw some truly horrible hot weather in the UK; it’s almost like murdering the planet with CO₂ emissions was a terrible, terrible idea.

My dodgy knee that I mentioned way back in the April post feels like it’s finally back to normal. I had low expectations of the physio service, and I’m glad to find I was utterly wrong. When I self-referred I got an e-mail the same day with some tailored exercise suggestions, and I’ve had two in-person sessions since. I managed to get some longer walks and a jog in this month, when I wasn’t camped in front of a fan to try and keep cool.

Website updates

Another month with no new posts. I’m just in one of those slumps where nothing quite takes my fancy. It’s a bit upsetting that the three most recent posts are all going to be monthly meanderings, though.

I did spend some time adding standard.site metadata and records for blog posts. In theory that means it’ll show up a bit nicer when presented on Bluesky, but I’ve not actually tested it in anger yet. As well as pretty embeds, having a standard schema for describing publications and posts feels like it could enable a lot of cool discovery/directory uses.

Other projects

Centauri, my reverse proxy, got a whole bunch of new features in response to some requests and problem reports from a friend. Mostly the changes were exposing more options for finer control over how certificates are obtained. Providers other than Let’s Encrypt require extra account details, have different rate limits, and so on.

The only other project of note this month is a new World of Warcraft addon called Who’s Got the Keys? that shows on-screen who has a keystone for the dungeon you’re currently waiting to start. I really like being able to scratch itches like that.

Entertainment

I mentioned my wax-and-wane hobby cycle last month. This month apparently films are back in for me:

There were some big surprises for me in both directions: films I expected to like such as Disclosure Day and Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die absolutely missed the mark; meanwhile Midsommar I didn’t have any particular expectations of and it ended up stealing the top spot on my watched films ranked list.

Most of my other entertainment is still coming from World of Warcraft. I’m now reasonably comfortable with my spec, and my regular group of friends is well on the way to reaching a Mythic+ score of 3400 before the end of the season. Amusingly I’m currently in the top 20 for my spec on my realm, but that says more about the low population of the server than it does about my skill, I think!

My character is now about as fully geared as they’re going to get this season. There are some minor upgrades I could make but it’s not really worth it with only weeks remaining. I now also don’t get any real benefit from doing the standard open world weekly activities, so I’ve been spending a bit more time farming mounts and transmog in old content. I’ve also levelled a whole bunch of alts, but I’ve failed to find a single DPS spec I actually like. I’m now trying alternative healers just to get some variety when we do runs where we’re not pushing keys.

Around the web

Suspicious discontinuities

An old article by Dan Luu that recently resurfaced on Hacker News. It’s an interesting look at various series that have discontinuities and the reasons for those. I’m easily won over by cool graphs, so it’s not a surprise I saved this link.

Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM

A very funny spoof vulnerability disclosure that pokes fun at all the failure modes of LLM security tooling and the possible consequences of that.

Help I accidentally a wigglegram

Fun article where the author describes how they automatically made a bunch of “wigglegrams” (stereoscopic animated gifs) from their iCloud photo library. It’s interesting how just taking multiple versions of a photo can result in something novel like this.

Finding the Best Dog Treat with Statistics

I’m pretty sure this is actually some devious attempt to make me learn statistics, but it features a dog called Bebop, so I’m going to allow it.

Monthly Meanderings: May 2026

2026-06-01T00:00:00Z

Another month, another wrap-up post. This is the first one I’ve felt reluctant to write, and I think it’s because I feel like I didn’t really do anything last month. Other than play a lot of World of Warcraft.

Website updates

No new posts this month, but I finished off the refactoring I mentioned in the last update. It’s been a very satisfying process, and working on the site feels a lot less like a chore now. Features are now entirely self-contained, instead of having bits and pieces scattered everywhere, and everything is wired up together with some automatically generated code. I’ll probably write a longer post about the architecture and the refactoring process at some point.

My World of Warcraft page got some updates, now showing achievements and stats about Mythic+ runs. It’s always nice to take a break from the game… and code things relating to it instead.

Other projects

I finished off glauncher, my native alternative to ulauncher and am now using it day-to-day, which is nice. I’ve never really liked making native user interfaces, but having an LLM generate code for Gio UI was pretty much pain-free. I’m now toying with replacing a few other simple apps I currently rely on that use Electron or Webkit with Go versions.

Entertainment

Let’s start with the non-World of Warcraft updates. I seem to be on a one-film-a-month cadence recently. This month’s was fine but not earth shattering:

This Is Spinal Tap

2026-05-30

Quite funny, and it’s interesting to watch something that’s become such a cultural touchstone, but coming to it 40 years on I find it a bit slow and meandering.

SNL UK wrapped up this month, but has thankfully been picked up for another season. I really enjoyed it, despite my initial misgivings about it. I’m now back down to exactly zero TV programmes I care about.

A few board game plays this month, but overall still in the “wane” phase of my wax-and-wane hobby cycle:

4 plays
3 plays

Then, finally, there’s World of Warcraft. I started playing a new class:

Level 90

Female Night Elf

Mistweaver Monk

307 average item level

Miraceth-Terenas

Professions

Midnight Leatherworking		100/100
Midnight Skinning		100/100
Midnight Cooking		100/100
Midnight Fishing		110/300

Mythic+

Altar of Fangs	+9	~~31:31~~	273
Den of Nalorakk	+10	27:22	325
Kings' Rest	+8	25:34	283
Murder Row	+10	32:00	322
Ruby Life Pools	+10	26:39	322
Temple of Sethraliss	+10	27:08	326
The Blinding Vale	+9	~~33:10~~	271
Voidscar Arena	+10	24:28	327
Total M+ rating	2450

View on blizzard.com View on raider.io

I’m still mostly playing as a healer, but this one is a melee fighter who heals while doing damage. I previously shied away from melee classes as being right on top of the enemies always felt too chaotic compared to parking at the back of the room, but I’m actually really liking it. Once you get used to it, it’s a lot easier to keep track of the fight when you’re in the middle of things instead of hanging out at the back. This spec is currently one of the flavours of the month, it’ll be interesting to see if I still enjoy it as much when it falls out of favour.

Around the web

Making an original Jubilee line door button into a Hue light switch

A really cool electronics project, that does exactly what it says in the title. The finished product looks stunning, though.

llama.ttf

“llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.”

Departure mono

This is a really nice looking pixel font, and the web page demonstrating it is well done as well. Definitely going to be using it next time I need to render text in a small space.

Mitigating floods of posts in Artemis

James has been documenting his development of Artemis, a ‘calm web reader’, and I’ve been enjoying reading along. This particular post is interesting to me as it deals with a common problem with RSS readers (“the website has altered their feed in a bad way, now there are 50 ’new’ posts that you’ve already seen”) in a novel way that just seems so obvious in hindsight.

Modern CSS is fun

2026-03-17T00:00:00Z

I’ve been doing a bunch of CSS tweaking recently, and keep being surprised by how nice modern CSS is to work with. As someone grey-haired enough to remember writing HTML without CSS, it’s amazing to think how far along web technology has come¹. I wanted to demonstrate some of the handy bits and pieces I’ve used recently.

:has

The :has selector allows you to effectively query for child elements. While a span will match a <span> within an <a>, a:has(span) will match an <a> that contains a <span>. This really shines when combined with more complex selectors, for example:

input {
    border-radius: var(--border-radius);

    &:has(+ .results:not(:empty)) {
        border-bottom-left-radius: 0;
        border-bottom-right-radius: 0;
    }
}

This is part of the styling for my film search box. When the search box is presented initially it has fully rounded corners. But when it is followed by a non-empty results element, it removes the rounding on the bottom corners so that the border continues in a straight line down into the results. You can see it in action below; just enter a few characters (like “the”) to get some results:

You could achieve the same effect by having JavaScript add a class to the <input> element, but I’ll take a CSS solution over a JavaScript solution any day.

Nested rules

You probably spotted this in the example above. It’s what finally made me switch from SCSS to plain CSS. If you have a rule for .foo and a rule for .foo .bar you can just nest them. Not only does it save repeating yourself an awful lot, it keeps everything organised nicely. For example, the CSS for my film list embeds looks like this:

a.film-list {
    display: grid;
    grid-template-areas: "header images" "description images" "meta images";
    grid-template-columns: 1fr auto;
    grid-template-rows: auto 1fr auto;
    row-gap: var(--small-space);

    @media (width <= 800px) {
        grid-template-areas: "header" "description" "images" "meta";
        grid-template-columns: 1fr;
        grid-template-rows: auto auto auto auto;
    }

    & + & {
        margin-top: var(--medium-space);
    }

    h3 {
        font-size: var(--font-size-xxlarge);
    }

    .description {
        /* ... */
    }
}

Everything is wrapped up in a single bundle, including the @media rules for changing the layout on smaller screens, the lovely little & + & rule that adds some extra margin if there are two lists in a row, etc. The & syntax refers to the parent selector, so & + & in this case is the same as a.film-list + a.film-list: it’s very handy! The best part about this is that it’s the exact same syntax as SCSS, so converting is easy². The styled element looks like this:

Watched films ranked

Every film I’ve watched since I started logging, ranked.

Obviously super subjective, and subject to change often and arbitrarily.

264 films

Media range syntax

Once again, you might have spotted this in the previous snippet. I’m not deliberately teasing things, I promise! Back in the day, you did media queries like so:

@media (min-width: 1000px) and (max-width: 2000px) {
    /* some rules that work for screens at least 1000px wide and at most 2000px wide */
}

I always hated this syntax. I always got muddled up as to whether I wanted “min” or “max”, and whether they were inclusive or not. It’s easy to reason through, but it never came naturally. Fortunately you can now just use ranges:

@media (1000px <= width <= 2000px) {
    /* some rules that work for screens at least 1000px wide and at most 2000px wide */
}

I find this style so much easier to write and understand.

Anchor positioning

Trying to dynamically position one element next to another used to exclusively fall within the purview of JavaScript. Fortunately anchor positioning fixes all this. I use this in the film search field I showed above:

.film-search {
    input {
        anchor-name: --film-search-box;
    }
    .results {
        position: absolute;
        position-anchor: --film-search-box;
        position-area: bottom center;
        position-visibility: always;
        width: anchor-size();
    }
}

This does lots of fun things. The .results element is anchored to the input field (via the --film-search-box name), and it’s positioned on the bottom, directly under the anchor. The position-area rule describes a 3x3 grid, with the anchor at the center, so top left would put it diagonally adjacent to the anchor. Next, position-visibility keeps the .results element visible when the anchor isn’t; otherwise when you scroll the anchor off the screen the results would immediately vanish. Finally, the special anchor-size() function makes the .results element take up the same exact width as the anchor.

All-in-all, this puts the results exactly where I want them, without having to deal with any JavaScript at all. I can see how it’d also be amazingly useful trying to do tooltips or other forms of ‘floating’ content too. You can even leave the positioning up to the browser, giving it hints about which order to try, or what property to optimise for (e.g. you can say “anchor to the left or right, whichever has more horizontal space”).

attr() function

This one blew my mind a little. In some of the elements on the site, I’ve added a little label to the top. It looks something like this:

It’s meant to just be a visual flourish, not a semantic title or anything, so I initially just added a ::before selector to each element, customising the content to have the right value. I didn’t like the duplication, though. Now, instead, I do this:

&::before {
    content: attr(data-title);
}

Each component defines its title in a data attribute: <div class="raised-box" data-title="an example">, and the attr function plucks it out and puts it in the content rule. It’s worth noting that this is only widely supported for the content rule, you can’t yet use it for colours or dimensions or other things. It still feels a bit magical, though. Like you’re making a reusable, customisable component with just HTML and CSS.

layers

I’d come across layers a few times, but I never found a need for them. It seemed like something you’d only really need with complicated design systems, or something. Then I had a problem and layers were the perfect solution!

The headings on this site have a whole bunch of CSS attached to them. Currently they look a bit like blue painter’s tape with handwriting on them. This style is applied to all headers, and then the various places that don’t want it had to manually reset everything. I got fed up with that, so decided to add a plain-header class which would “disable” the extra styling:

h2,
h3,
h4,
h5,
h6 {
    /* common styles for all headers, regardless */
    font-family: "Chris Hand", sans-serif;
    font-size: var(--font-size-xxlarge);
    color: var(--text-highlight-colour);
    margin: var(--medium-space) 0;
    line-height: 1;

    &:not(.plain-header) {
        /* do fancy stuff if it _doesn't_ have the .plain-header class */
        transform: rotate(-0.15deg);
        padding: var(--smedium-space);
        font-weight: 800;
        filter: drop-shadow(3px 3px 5px rgb(0, 0, 0));

        a {
            background: none;
            text-decoration-skip-ink: auto;
        }
    }
}

This might seem a bit backwards but I want the default to be styled, as those are far more common. I added this change, sprinkled around some “plain-header” classes, tidied up a lot of duplicate CSS, and things mostly worked. Mostly. Some things stopped working. In a few places the headers had slight tweaks, and they stopped working entirely.

It turns out in moving the rules from a plain h2 selector to a h2:not(.plain-header), I’d made them more specific. Previously a selector like h2.special would have been more specific, so its properties would override those from the less specific h2 selector. My first reaction was to try and hack around it. Changing all the overrides to body h2.special would make them more specific again, but I didn’t want to have to remember to do that forever more.

Instead, I defined some custom layers, and put the header definitions in one:

@layer reset, links, headings

@layer headings {
    h2,
    h3 {
        /* etc */
    }
}

The first @layer rule defines some layers that will be handled in a specific order: first the “reset” layer, then the “links” layer, then the “headings” layer, and then anything not in a layer after that. Rules in one layer don’t have to worry about beating the specificity of rules in another layer, because they’re handled separately.

Note that I couldn’t just put the headings in a layer and call it a day: their rules have to come after the CSS reset, and after the normal link styles, as headers have a bit of extra styling for nested links. If the CSS reset weren’t in a layer, then the * { margin: 0; padding: 0; } type reset would apply over the rules from the headings layer.

Using layers is definitely a bit fiddly, and is not necessary for a lot of sites, but it’s a much cleaner alternative to ugly specificity hacking.

Things I’m looking forward to

There are a few things that aren’t (widely) available yet, that particularly interest me:

sibling-index() and sibling-count()

These new functions are available in WebKit and Blink based browsers, but not Firefox. They give you the index of the element within its siblings, or the count of siblings. For the film list component above, I currently have this abomination for the overlapping posters:

&:nth-child(1) {
    z-index: 5;
    left: 0;
}
&:nth-child(2) {
    z-index: 4;
    left: calc(133px * var(--overlap) * 1);
}
&:nth-child(3) {
    z-index: 3;
    left: calc(133px * var(--overlap) * 2);
}
&:nth-child(4) {
    z-index: 2;
    left: calc(133px * var(--overlap) * 3);
}
&:nth-child(5) {
    z-index: 1;
    left: calc(133px * var(--overlap) * 4);
}

These could be replaced with something like:

z-index: calc(1 + sibling-count() - sibling-index());
left: calc(133px * var(--overlap) * (sibling-index() - 1));

As an added bonus, it would scale to any number of posters. index being 1-based not 0-based is a bit unfortunate as it makes using it in calculations awkward (see 1 offset in both of those rules!), but it’s leagues better than writing 5 separate rules.

random()

Currently only available in Safari. There are a few places where I’d like to have slight random variations of the style. Things like elements that are rotated slightly for aesthetics; they look a bit silly if they’re all identically positioned. I also randomise the icons and positions of my rating stars to break up the visual monotony. Here are a few examples:

Currently I do the stars by hardcoding a bunch of classes and having the backend randomly apply one when it generates the markup for stars. Being able to do it in CSS would be great, though.

Mixins

This one’s so far off it’s not even listed on caniuse.com yet. Mixins are another handy feature of SCSS, that allow you to define reusable blocks of rules, then import them when needed:

@mixin fancy-background {
    background: /*...*/;
}

.some-element {
    @include fancy-background;
}

#other-element {
    @include fancy-background;
}

This would be particularly useful if you can’t easily control the markup to add classes to everything. For example, my footnotes are rendered by a markdown plugin, and don’t easily have a way to add extra classes to them. To style it the same as another element, I currently duplicate a bunch of rules between them both. Mixins would allow me to define those rules once, and then import them in both places.

Aside from JavaScript, which seems to just endlessly reinvent new frameworks and ways to make the most sprawling dependency tree possible. ↩︎
It also means that if your website’s syntax highlighting library doesn’t seem to understand nested rules, you can just pretend your perfectly valid CSS is actually SCSS and it’ll magically work. Grumble, grumble. ↩︎