
Z’s Still Not Dead Baby, Z’s Still Not Dead - matthberg
https://24ways.org/2019/zs-still-not-dead-baby-zs-still-not-dead/
======
janpot
maybe a bit unrelated, but Why would you use a selector like

    
    
        [src*="figure"] {
    

? It's as if you're trying to set up a time bomb to blow up in a few months.
"hey, can you change that image from /figure.png to /image.png", boom, half
your styling broken. I'd use a class instead, not only would it be more
readable and intuitive and performant, it would also be less likely to break
when doing unrelated changes.

------
dralley
Before clicking, I was pretty sure this article was going to be about IBM Z
mainframes.

~~~
RickJWagner
Yeah, me too.

I read a bit of the article, considered trying to educate myself on design
issues, and quickly decided not to.

Hats off to the web-design types. It's not for me, but I'm glad that somebody
cares deeply about this stuff and makes our web pages pretty.

------
pjmlp
While a very enjoyable article, also a good example how much one has to go for
recreating in the browser what native graphics engines have provided since the
last couple of decades.

------
chrismorgan
> Almost universally, contemporary browsers support the same compositing tools
> we’ve used in graphic design and photo editing software for years.

I (subjectively) don’t think this is _quite_ a fair thing to claim: some still
don’t, and those that do can be _very_ buggy, sometimes unusably so.

For starters, IE and Edge don’t support it. The article, incidentally, notes
this for Edge, then suggesting using `@supports not (background-blend-mode:
normal)`. I would suggest considering (whether you decide to do it or not)
using progressive enhancement rather than graceful degradation, putting any
necessary fallback in place by default, and adding the blending functionality
in `@supports (background-blend-mode: normal)` instead: this will make it work
for IE, which doesn’t support @supports. Plenty of people still use IE, and
it’s generally desirable to structure things to support it where there is no
particular cost to doing so. (I’m _not_ suggesting pandering to IE; for my own
stuff now, I make sure the content will still be accessible, but care naught
about the accuracy of its formatting.)

Next, blending is one of the buggier areas of browsers, an area where it’s
common to encounter serious bugs (because GPUs are awful, mostly). For
instance, for my website redesign a few months ago
([https://chrismorgan.info/blog/2019-website/](https://chrismorgan.info/blog/2019-website/))
I designed it in Firefox using blending on my left sidebar and experienced no
trouble; but when I checked it in Chrome, I was forced to gave up after a
while because I kept running into _severe_ bugs there. I think there were
three major bugs that I came across; one I don’t recall, but the other two I
do:

•
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=711955](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=711955):
two and a half years ago, mix-blend-mode on the body regressed, breaking the
very first example in the relevant spec. Quite a few people have complained,
and the bug has clear and simple reproduction steps; but no action has been
taken.

•
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398):
if you try to blend a large element (like some of my blog posts, when trying
to blend essentially the entire page), it stops rendering after 8,192px (or
probably 16,384 device pixels, but I haven’t confirmed that), so that half the
page is just _missing_! I failed to devise a workaround. (Others have then
claimed performance problems on such large surfaces, and I think it was
measurably harming memory usage too, but I didn’t measure it particularly
carefully at the time.)

So I ended up with a genuinely crippling bug in rendering so that I _couldn’t_
use it the way I wanted to in at least Chrome on Windows, and a total lack of
confidence in browser blending.

------
skavi
Wouldn't this stuff still be considered flat design? There weren't any
gradients apart from the image of the car.

------
sudhirj
Please add a comma after "Dead". This indicates that the Baby Z is still not
dead, and I'm wondering what this baby has done to deserve its fate.

Z's Still Not Dead, Baby, Z's Sill Not Dead

------
corvuscorvid
Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

~~~
vinniejames
Who's motorcycle is that?

------
Ice_cream_suit
Disappointing.

I had hoped that it was about the Z notation.

