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ruined_chapel_feedjefftk_feedAs I wrote about last week, it's worth it for everyone to have an elastomeric respirator in case of emergencies: the chance of a severe pandemic is high enough that even under reasonably conservative assumptions the return on investment is ~10x. Because not every mask fits every face and a poorly fitting mask will leak air around the seal—it doesn't matter how good the filters are if they're bypassed—it's good to try on a range and see what's good. I invited some people over to try out a range of masks and play with fit testing.
There are a range of ways to see if a mask fits. A good first test is to put it on and see if you feel air leaking around it. If it's possible to cover the intake you can breath in while wearing it, and you should feel it pull tight against your face. These tests are often enough to rule out masks, and are pretty quick.
Once you've identified a mask you think is plausibly a good fit you can do qualitative fit testing. The idea is, you make some particles with a strong taste or smell, and see how well they can get in while you're wearing the mask. If they can't get in, especially as you move your head around, talk, and grimace, then your seal is pretty good. I got a kit (Gerson QLFT50M) which included several components:
A hood the test subject wears over their head, so you don't need to fill the whole room with particles.
Saccharin (sweet) or Bitrex (bitter) solution, which have a strong taste you should notice clearly if it makes it through the mask.
A squeeze-bulb nebulizer, to turn the strong-tasting liquid into tiny strong-tasting particles.
You put the liquid in the nebulizer, poke the nebulizer through a hole conveniently provided in the front of the hood, and squeeze out particles.
One key thing about the setup is there are two solutions and two nebulizers. One is the weaker sensitivity solution, which you breathe maskless to ensure you can detect the test particles, and the other is a stronger [1] test solution, which ideally doesn't make it through the mask in detectable quantities.
While this seems to be a common design, I really don't like how it relies on the two nebulizers performing identically. Especially since initially mine didn't: the sensitivity testing nebulizer worked great (easy to squeeze, you can see the little bubbles going, fine mist) while the fit testing nebulizer worked much less well (harder to squeeze, needed more adjustment, much less little bubble movement, less mist). After people went home I played with the nebulizers and got a better feel for how to adjust them to get them both performing well. This would have been good to do before!
I'm planning to bring the masks and test kit to LessOnline, which I expect to be enriched for people who would be interested in this sort of thing.
[1] You use a much
larger difference for saccharin (100x in the fit test) than Bitrex
(12.5x). I'm still confused about this, but some asking Gemini
suggests it's because "the 'low, but generally detectable'
concentration and the 'significantly stronger, but not unbearable'
concentration are vastly different relative to each other for these
two substances due to their intrinsic taste properties."
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conulyboston_restaurant_feedA new Asian dining spot appears to be on its way to Cambridge, and it will be replacing a Chinese restaurant that had been around for approximately 10 years.
According to a poster within the Friends of Boston's Hidden Restaurants Facebook group page, Chef Zhang Cuisine & Bar is planning to open on Mass. Ave between Harvard Square and Central Square, taking over the space where Cilantro had been. Very little is known about the upcoming place other than a license commission hearing page on the city's website saying that it plans to have seating for 60 and would be open for lunch and dinner daily, and that it hopes to acquire a wine, malt, and distilled spirits license. (The manager listed is Jinou Zhang.) It appears that Chef Zhang Cuisine & Bar will be a Chinese restaurant but this has yet to be confirmed.
Cilantro first opened in late 2014, moving into a space that had been home to several other businesses, including restaurants such as Zoe's and Dolphin.
The address for the upcoming Chef Zhang Cuisine & Bar is 1105B Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 02138.
(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)
scalziwhatever_feed
The world can be a dark and scary place. It would be foolish not to acknowledge this, but to author Christy Climenhage, it’s also important to acknowledge the ways in which we all keep on keepin’ on in the trying times. Follow along in the Big Idea for her debut novel, The Midnight Project, and see how the world is ending, and yet still going.
CHRISTY CLIMENHAGE:
There are lots of themes underlying my debut sci-fi thriller, The Midnight Project: genetic engineering gone wrong, man-made ecological collapse, what it means to be human, what exactly is wrong with late-stage capitalism and the commodification of science. But for me, the Big Idea behind my book lies in the resilience of the two main characters who just keep going as everything collapses around them. The book asks: how do we live a good and meaningful life in a crumbling world? How do we muddle through the pre-apocalypse?
I’m slightly appalled by how familiar this fictional dystopian world feels – powerful billionaires, dying pollinators, corporate greed, off-the-charts scientific possibilities but everything is spiraling into disaster. These days (today, I mean), I can read about ultra-rich men with a messianic complex who want to save humanity while carelessly destroying the environment, or mining companies that want to strip the ocean floor before even bothering to map its ecosystems. Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler would weep. J.R.R. Tolkien would be mightily pissed off at the companies stealing words from his realms to name their businesses.
I suppose the world of The Midnight Project is rooted in reality as well as fiction. I wrote it and re-wrote it during the darkest part of the covid-19 pandemic when we were all just getting up and getting on with it. The bad news “out-there,” until it encroached on “in-here.” The work piling up even while the stores closed, the hospitals filled and everyone stayed home. The kids still in school, online, then in-person, with the rules changing every five minutes to try to keep them safe. No enrichment, no entertainment, just everyone hiding under their rock, trying to get by, putting food on the table, getting the laundry done. I suppose it’s typical of late-stage capitalism that even as the world was crashing down, everyone still needed their paycheque to cover groceries.
Of course, when I talk about today’s world in pre-apocalyptic terms, I’m not being prescient. I’m recognizing the fear and anxiety that underlays much of what is happening in the world right now. And the feeling of powerlessness that might make a person desperate enough to attempt to create an oceanic hybrid human just to feel they could make a difference. In Frankenstein, the monster’s creator is motivated by a dark ambition to create life and then is horrified at the result. In The Midnight Project, Raina is motivated by money and ambition but also wants to salvage something good out of the circumstances she finds herself in. In her heart, she is motivated by a desire for redemption.
In the midst of cataclysmic problems around the world that just keep piling up, our two genetic engineer heroes see an opportunity to do some good in the world, or at least try to prevent someone else from doing worse. It’s not much, but it’s within their control, and their abilities.
Going back to the today’s reality for a second, I think it’s normal to wonder how to live a meaningful life in our current circumstances too—how to lead a life filled with hope, ambition and purpose. And I can’t deny how much I relate to the two main characters of The Midnight Project, Raina and Cedric, just getting up and going to work every day, in spite of everything barreling toward them. So, according to the story, and my own experience, how does one muddle through the pre-apocalypse? Let’s take a lesson from our plucky heroes.
First, Raina and Cedric hold onto their comforting routines. They drink coffee together every morning out of the same mugs, watch the Holo-News and compartmentalize their lives. Then they turn to the hard work of inventing deep-sea human hybrids. The big bad world out there, the safe world inside their laboratory. They keep tabs, they know what’s happening in the outside world, but they hold it at bay and get on with the things they need to do to get by. They ignore some things. As Raina says, “They were trying times and I only wanted to try in certain ways.” They get up, they go to work, they keep solving their problems. One step at a time. One foot in front of the other. With perseverance. With persistence. With, occasionally, steely-eyed determination.
Second, at the heart of everything, Cedric and Raina hold fast to meaningful relationships, even if they’re isolated and cut off. Even if those relationships are themselves imperfect. They cling to comfort and each other and keep drinking their coffee to the bitter end (bitter, get it? Because it’s coffee).
And finally, through it all, they try to do just a little good in the world, even when it feels like the world is too big and too far gone to make much of a difference. As Cedric says, “We cannot fix the world. But in this tiny corner of it, perhaps we can control our own destiny, at least for a while.” This little bit of agency and momentum is the way they light a candle against the darkness. This is the way they cleave to hope in the pre-apocalypse.
And maybe there’s something in that for our trying times too.
boston_restaurant_feedA new restaurant and pub has opened south of Boston.
According to a source, Downtown Public House is now open in Norton, moving into a space on W Main Street where The Downtown had once been. The menu for the new spot shows such options as wings, nachos, clam chowder, fish tacos, French onion soup, smash burgers, steak tips, macaroni and cheese, salmon bowls, and pizza, along with beer, wine, and cocktails.
The address for Downtown Public House is 292 W Main Street (Route 123), Norton, MA, 02766. Its website can be found at https://www.dtownpub.com/
(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)
boston_restaurant_feedA local restaurant chain that features vegetarian fare is closing one of its Boston locations, though a new location could open somewhere close to the outlet that is shutting down.
According to an article from Universal Hub, Clover in Downtown Crossing is saying farewell today, with an email sent by Clover CEO Julia Wrin Piper saying the following about the School Street spot:
I wanted you to be the first to know - we have decided to close CloverDTX this year in favor of opening a new, exciting Clover location nearby. Official announcement coming soon!
UH says the email mentions that all workers at the location that is closing have been offered jobs at other outlets, including one nearby on Federal Street in the Financial District.
The address for Clover in Downtown Crossing is 27 School Street, Boston, MA, 02108. The website for the company is at https://www.cloverfoodlab.com/
(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)
scalziwhatever_feedNot a plumbing emergency, thankfully, but we need to replace some things, and as it happens the (multiple) plumbers needed to replace these items all had today available, so: Plumbingpalooza! The backing up of computers is coincidentally timed, but, you know, today is as good a day as any. While I’m dealing with that, here are some photos of flowers from the house and Camp Krissy. Enjoy!
Atlantic Camas.
A yellow rose!
Midnight irises.
English lavender.
— JS
cocktail_virgin_feed
schneiersecurity_feedTechnology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.
Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement has significantly declined. What might we be missing?
In software development, the concept of user experience (UX) is fundamental to the design of any product or service. It’s a way to think holistically about how a user interacts with technology. It ensures that products and services are built with the users’ actual needs, behaviors, and expectations in mind, as opposed to what developers think users want. UX enables informed decisions based on how the user will interact with the system, leading to improved design, more effective solutions, and increased user satisfaction. Good UX design results in easy, relevant, useful, positive experiences. Bad UX design leads to unhappy users.
This is not how we normally think of elections. Campaigns measure success through short-term outputs—voter contacts, fundraising totals, issue polls, ad impressions—and, ultimately, election results. Rarely do they evaluate how individuals experience this as a singular, messy, democratic process. Each campaign, PAC, nonprofit, and volunteer group may be focused on their own goal, but the voter experiences it all at once. By the time they’re in line to vote, they’ve been hit with a flood of outreach—spammy texts from unfamiliar candidates, organizers with no local ties, clunky voter registration sites, conflicting information, and confusing messages, even from campaigns they support. Political teams can point to data that justifies this barrage, but the effectiveness of voter contact has been steadily declining since 2008. Intuitively, we know this approach has long-term costs. To address this, let’s evaluate the UX of an election cycle from the point of view of the end user, the everyday citizen.
Specifically, how might we define the UX of an election cycle: the voter experience (VX)? A VX lens could help us see the full impact of the electoral cycle from the perspective that matters most: the voters’.
For example, what if we thought about elections in terms of questions like these?
Thinking in terms of VX can help answer these questions. Moreover, researching and designing around VX could help identify additional metrics, beyond traditional turnout and engagement numbers, that better reflect the collective impact of campaigning: of all those voter contact and persuasion efforts combined.
This isn’t a radically new idea, and earlier efforts to embed UX design into electoral work yielded promising early benefits. In 2020, a coalition of political tech builders created a Volunteer Experience program. The group held design sprints for political tech tools, such as canvassing apps and phone banking sites. Their goal was to apply UX principles to improve the volunteer user flow, enhance data hygiene, and improve volunteer retention. If a few sprints can improve the phone banking experience, imagine the transformative possibilities of taking this lens to the VX as a whole.
If we want democracy to thrive long-term, we need to think beyond short-term wins and table stakes. This isn’t about replacing grassroots organizing or civic action with digital tools. Rather, it’s about learning from UX research methodology to build lasting, meaningful engagement that involves both technology and community organizing. Often, it is indeed local, on-the-ground organizers who have been sounding the alarm about the long-term effects of prioritizing short-term tactics. A VX approach may provide additional data to bolster their arguments.
Learnings from a VX analysis of election cycles could also guide the design of new programs that not only mobilize voters (to contribute, to campaign for their candidates, and to vote), but also ensure that the entire process of voting, post-election follow-up, and broader civic participation is as accessible, intuitive, and fulfilling as possible. Better voter UX will lead to more politically engaged citizens and higher voter turnout.
VX methodology may help combine real-time citizen feedback with centralized decision-making. Moving beyond election cycles, focusing on the citizen UX could accelerate possibilities for citizens to provide real-time feedback, review the performance of elected officials and government, and receive help-desk-style support with the same level of ease as other everyday “products.” By understanding how people engage with civic life over time, we can better design systems for citizens that strengthen participation, trust, and accountability at every level.
Our hope is that this approach, and the new data and metrics uncovered by it, will support shifts that help restore civic participation and strengthen trust in institutions. With citizens oriented as the central users of our democratic systems, we can build new best practices for fulfilling civic infrastructure that foster a more effective and inclusive democracy.
The time for this is now. Despite hard-fought victories and lessons learned from failures, many people working in politics privately acknowledge a hard truth: our current approach isn’t working. Every two years, people build campaigns, mobilize voters, and drive engagement, but they are held back by what they don’t understand about the long-term impact of their efforts. VX thinking can help solve that.
This essay was written with Hillary Lehr, and originally appeared on the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center’s website.
conulynostalgebraist_feedSure.
I went back and added a "#litcrit" tag to a few posts like that that I could remember offhand:
That's all that comes to mind right now – historically, I've mostly put that kind of thing on Goodreads rather than here. But if there are other posts you have in mind besides the ones listed above, LMK.
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thisfinecrewconulyboston_restaurant_feedAn Italian restaurant in the western suburbs of Boston has closed after only a few months in operation.
According to a poster within the Friends of Boston's Hidden Restaurants Facebook group page, Sul Tavolo in Sudbury is no longer in business, with a Facebook post from the Hudson Road spot saying "Thank you for your loyal support over the years. It's been an honor to serve you. As of [yesterday], we are permanently closed." The restaurant first opened in January of this year, replacing a Mexican spot called Sobre Mesa that was under the same ownership, and previous to that, the space was home to 29 Rustic Mediterranean which also had the same ownership. (A popup version of Sul Tavolo briefly resided at the site in 2023.)
The people behind Sul Tavolo also run Nan's Kitchen, which can be found in Stow, Southborough, and Westford, with a new one soon opening in Andover.
The address for the now-closed Sul Tavolo was 29 Hudson Road, Sudbury, MA, 01776.
(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)
overcoming_bias_feedIf you want to get paid for abstract analysis that is not mainly organized around current cultural or political fights, academia is pretty much the only game in town. So I am quite grateful that academia exists, and has included me.
But I do have a complaint. In most areas of life, activities are typically justifies in some detail in terms of the accepted purpose of that area. E.g., hospitals save lives, businesses serve customers, roads support travel, armies deter fights, and so on. But though the accepted purpose of academic research is to either answer deep important questions, or to help non-academics somehow, academics rarely explicitly justify their work in such terms.
For example, polls found that these goals best explain ~7% of which research projects academics pick, and ~9% of which papers/projects academics approve via peer review. Such choices are instead explained 32% and 58% respectively by topic/methods being in fashion. The remaining 62% of project choice is explained by building on prior work/skills, and the remaining 33% of peer review choice is explained by work showing impressive abilities.
You can also check this yourself by asking individual academics to explain how their work could plausibly contribute to answering deep important questions, or to non-academic value. Most will be surprised by the question, having never been asked, and answer poorly.
Yes, in principle the fashions that drive these choices could themselves be driven by processes that induce fashion to track deep important questions and non-academic value. But I’ve been in academia for four decades now and I just don’t see this. Changes to academic fashion, like other fashion, instead mostly results from individuals competing to gain their usual selfish rewards.
The arts are the other main area of life where specialists poorly justify their specific actions in terms of the usual area purposes. So if the arts are mostly about showing off personal abilities, and abilities to judge such abilities, likely so is academia.
sorcyressHowever, I talked to ksatyr....he is *way* over-reacting. You think you're not ready for a relationship? I'm sorry, but this is a demonstration of not being ready for a relationship.
solarbirdI’ve been checking hardware stores the last couple of weeks, mostly because there are things I need, but a little because I’m watching their stocks fall.
Smaller hardware stores are having a harder time covering the stock gap than larger ones. That makes obvious sense; they have less to begin with, so the duplications and outright gaps are more clearly visible. Hand tools in particular are getting pretty thin on the ground at this point; screwdriver bit replacements – well, lots of particular varieties are no longer available. Stuff like that. It’s been a multi-week process, not all-at-once – though it will probably look that way in retrospect.
Today, though, I had a somewhat more pointed experience.
Yesterday, Home Depot had 34 of a particular China-made mini circular saw available. It’s inexpensive because it’s corded; it’s from WEN, who make very basic but generally adequate enough kit for people on a budget. A chonkier Ryobi, perhaps. And last night, they had 34 of these saws available for store pickup or delivery.
This morning, when I woke up, they had 17.
An hour later, they had 15.
I was going to buy this with credit union rewards points, but it seems that was going to take too long. So I shelled out the cash, buying it immediately instead. It’s not a big deal for me, we’re still within our current tight budget this month.
So now they have 14.
Maybe that big drop was a one-off, a fluke – an organic surge, rather than someone grabbing a set for their employees while they could. Maybe Home Depot’s remaining 14 are enough that they’ll still have 10 in another month.
Or maybe it was scalpers. I don’t know how quickly these things sell, as a rule.
But that… that was a surprise.
Most people won’t notice stock thinning, I don’t think. Not quickly. I don’t have a reason for that other than recent experience shows that most people don’t notice a single goddamn thing until it punches them, personally, in the face. They to go get a thing, and it won’t be there, and then they notice.
A lot more people are probably pretty close to that moment of noticing.
They’ll notice it even more when their Medicare gets its $350 billion dollar cut.
It’ll be a moment of awareness, a moment of panic. It won’t last long – the fascist noise machine will do everything it can to patch it over – but it’ll be there.
Are you ready to take advantage of that? Particularly with your Trumpy relatives?
Maybe you should be.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
boston_restaurant_feedA new dining spot that focuses on chicken is getting ready to debut in Somerville.
According to a source, Crispy Chick is opening in the city's Winter Hill neighborhood on May 24, with a Facebook post from the Broadway spot saying the following:
GRAND OPENING ALERT! Join us at Crispy Chick on Saturday, May 24, 2025, as we open our doors at 12 PM at 288 Broadway, Somerville, MA! Come experience the Golden Crunch with a FREE chicken meal for all our opening day guests! Don't miss out on the crispiest, juiciest chicken in town! Bring your friends, bring your appetite, and let's celebrate together!
The Facebook page for Crispy Chick mentions that the place will be offering wings and "crispy chicken," though a menu has not been seen as of yet.
The address for Crispy Chick is 288 Broadway, Somerville, MA, 02145.
(Follow Marc on Bluesky at @marchurboston.bsky.social)
scalziwhatever_feed
Inspiration can come from anywhere, even from a nautical legal case from the 1700s. Author Adam Oyebanji lets us glimpse into some marines’ tragic pasts in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Esperance. Dive in and see where the waves take you.
ADAM OYEBANJI:
If I were ever reckless enough to confess my faults, I’d admit to being nosy, easily distracted and addicted to tea. To my mind, at least, these are forgivable foibles. People in glass houses and all that. However, I’m also a lawyer and pretty freaking unrepentant about it. A wig and gown in England, charcoal suits in Illinois, juries in both places. Feel free to judge, but if you do, remember that judges are lawyers too. I’m just saying.
Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student. In England. Which is important, because law in England is an undergraduate program in a country where the legal drinking age is eighteen. Torts in the afternoon, tequilas in the evening, and who has time for mornings? The high-pressure seriousness of a US law school is mostly missing. I say “mostly” because some people are incapable of a good time at any age. So, let’s acknowledge them in passing and move on. Law school English style is one part learning, one part good times with a dash of heartache. Oh, and get this. In my day it was ABSOLUTELY FREE. We got paid to go there. Hand to God.
Admittedly, this was a long time ago. So long ago, in fact, that we cracked open actual books instead of laptops. Books that, in addition to the assigned reading, contained hundreds of cases that were of absolutely no interest to my professors.
But if one happened to be a hungover law student who was both nosy and easily distracted, the assigned reading could rapidly lose its allure. Who cares about the rule against perpetuities anyway?
Now that I come to think about it, and having practiced law for more years than I’m going to admit to, I still don’t care about the rule against perpetuities. But I digress.
The point about a nosy, easily distracted law student poking about in a book is that it’s a book. Books, unlike a computerized law report, are completely non-linear. You can riffle the pages and land on something completely different almost without conscious effort. Forward, backward, upside-down if you like, it’s all too easy to get lost in other people’s long-ago legal troubles, because those, let me tell you, are way more interesting than whether X has created a future interest in property that vests more than twenty-one years after the lifetimes of persons living at the time of the creation of the interest. (You cannot make this stuff up).
Rather than deal with the assigned boredom, I spent a chunk of this particular afternoon in the Eighteenth century: duels, infidelity, murder and, of course, marine insurance.
Now, when it comes to boredom, the law of marine insurance is hard to beat. Except for this. If a marine insurance case makes it into a law report, the underlying disaster, the thing that triggers the insurance claim, can be kind of interesting. In this particular case, from 1783, the claim arose out of a voyage of such incompetence and cruelty that just reading about it took my breath away. People died. A lot of people. And all anyone seemed to care about afterward was the value of the claim. I had nightmares about it. Even now, I sometimes have dreams so vivid I can hear the waves slapping against that ancient, wooden hull, the screaming of lost souls as things go horribly, irretrievably sideways.
And that might have been it, had it not been for my addiction to the stuff that made Boston Harbor famous. I’m standing on my front porch, well into my sixth cup of tea when it hits me: the big idea. Why not use the facts of this nightmarish shipping claim as the inciting incident of a novel? And not a historical novel, but a sci-fi one, where the consequences carry forward to the present? A story about a Chicago cop who’s in way over his head, chasing a seemingly invincible criminal dead-set on writing an old wrong. A story about a woman out of her own time and place prepared to do drastic things in expiation of sins that are not her own. A story where human justice clashes with inhuman crimes in a deadly conflict of values. Why not, once I’ve finished my beverage, go back inside and write that story?
So I did. I called it Esperance.
Esperance: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop
Author socials: Website
meyerweb_feedThere’s a layout type that web designers have been using for a long time now, and yet can’t be easily done with CSS: “masonry” layout, sometimes called “you know, like Pinterest does it” layout. Masonry sits sort of halfway between flexbox and grid layout, which is a big part of why it’s been so hard to formalize. There are those who think of it as an extension of flexbox, and others who think it’s an extension of grid, and both schools of thought have pretty solid cases.
So that’s been a lot of the discussion, which led to competing blog posts from Google (“Feedback needed: How should we define CSS masonry?”) and Apple (“Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS”). Brian and I, with special guest star Rachel Andrew, did an Igalia Chats episode about the debate, which I think is a decent exploration of the pros and cons of each approach for anyone interested.
But then, maybe you don’t actually need to explore the two sides of the debate, because there’s a new proposal in town. It’s currently being called Item Flow (which I can’t stop hearing sung by Eddie Vedder, please send help) and is explained in some detail in a blog post from the WebKit team. The short summary is that it takes the flow and packing capabilities from flex and grid and puts them into their own set of properties, along with some new capabilities.
As an example, here’s a thing you can currently do with flexbox:
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
flex-direction: column;
If the current Item Flow proposals are taken as-is, you could get the same behavior with:
display: flex;
item-wrap: wrap;
item-direction: column;
…or, you could more compactly write it as:
display: flex;
item-flow: wrap column;
Now you might be thinking, okay, this just renames some flex properties to talk about items instead and you also get a shorthand property; big deal. It actually is a big deal, though, because these item-* properties would apply in grid settingsas well. In other words, you would be able to say:
display: grid;
item-flow: wrap column;
Hold up. Item wrapping… in grid?!? Isn’t that just the same as what grid already does? Which is an excellent question, and not one that’s actually settled.
However, let’s invert the wrapping in grid contexts to consider an example given in the WebKit article linked earlier, which is that you could specify a single row of grid items that equally divide up the row’s width to size themselves, like so:
display: grid;
grid-auto-columns: 1fr;
item-wrap: nowrap;
In that case, a row of five items would size each item to be one-fifth the width of the row, whereas a row of three items would have each item be one-third the row’s width. That’s a new thing, and quite interesting to ponder.
The proposal includes the properties item-pack and item-slack, the latter of which makes me grin a little like J.R. “Bob” Dobbs but the former of which I find a lot more interesting. Consider:
display: flex;
item-wrap: wrap;
item-pack: balance;
This would act with flex items much the way
text-wrap: balance acts with words. If you have six flex items of roughly equal size, they’ll balance between two rows to three-and-three rather than five-and-one. Even if your flex items are of very different sizes, item-pack: balance would do always automatically its best to get the row lengths as close to equal as possible, whether that’s two rows, three rows, four rows, or however many rows. Or columns! This works just as well either way.
There are still debates to be had and details to be worked out, but this new direction does feel fairly promising to me. It covers all of the current behaviors that flex and grid flowing already permit, plus it solves some longstanding gripes about each layout approach and while also opening some new doors.
The prime example of a new door is the aforementioned masonry layout. In fact, the previous code example is essentially a true masonry layout (because it resembles the way irregular bricks are laid in a wall). If we wanted that same behavior, only vertically like Pinterest does it, we could try:
display: flex;
item-direction: column; /* could also be `flex-direction` */
item-wrap: wrap; /* could also be `flex-wrap` */
item-pack: balance;
That would be harder to manage, though, since for most writing modes on the web, the width is constrained and the height is not. In other words, to make that work with flexbox, we’d have to set an explicit height. We also wouldn’t be able to nail down the number of columns. Furthermore, that would cause the source order to flow down columns and then jump back to the top of the next column. So, instead, maybe we’d be able to say:
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: repeat(3,1fr);
item-direction: row;
item-pack: dense balance;
If I’ve read the WebKit article correctly, that would allow Pinterest-style layout with the items actually going across the columns in terms of source order, but being laid out in packed columns (sometimes called “waterfall” layout, which is to say, “masonry” but rotated 90 degrees).
That said, it’s possible I’m wrong in some of the particulars here, and even if I’m not, the proposal is still very much in flux. Even the property names could change, so values and behaviors are definitely up for debate.
As I pondered that last example, the waterfall/Pinterest layout, I thought: isn’t this visual result essentially what multicolumn layout does? Not in terms of source order, since multicolumn elements run down one column before starting again at the top of the next. But that seems an easy enough thing to recreate like so:
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: repeat(3,1fr);
item-direction: column;
item-pack: dense balance;
That’s a balanced set of three equally wide columns, just like in multicol. I can use gap for the column gaps, so that’s handled. I wouldn’t be able to set up column rules — at least, not right now, though that may be coming thanks to the Edge team’s gap decorations proposal. But what I would be able to do, that I can’t now, is vary the width of my multiple columns. Thus:
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: 60% 40%; /* or 3fr 2fr, idc */
item-direction: column;
item-pack: dense balance;
Is that useful? I dunno! It’s certainly not a thing we can do in CSS now, though, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past almost three decades, it’s that a lot of great new ideas come out of adding new layout capabilities.
So, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading and I strongly encourage you to go read the WebKit team’s post if you haven’t already (it has more detail and a lovely summary matrix near the end) and think about what this could do for you, or what it looks like it might fall short of making possible for you.
As I’ve said, this feels promising to me, as it enables what we thought was a third layout mode (masonry/waterfall) by enriching and extending the layout modes we already have (flex/grid). It also feels like this could eventually lead to a Grand Unified Layout Platform — a GULP, if you will — where we don’t even have to say whether a given layout’s display is flex or grid, but instead specify the exact behaviors we want using various item-* properties to get just the right ratio of flexible and grid-like qualities for a given situation.
…or, maybe, it’s already there. It almost feels like it is, but I haven’t thought about it in enough detail yet to know if there are things it’s missing, and if so, what those might be. All I can say is, my Web-Sense is tingling, so I’m definitely going to be digging more at this to see what might turn up. I’d love to hear from all y’all in the comments about what you think!
Have something to say to all that? You can add a comment to the post, or email Eric directly.
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