events/2026-03-12-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #048 was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2026-03-12.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2026-03-12-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #048

Mar 12, 2026

Participants

• Joe Crawford https://artlung.com/
• Jonas https://www.jonasolson.se
• {{capjamesg} https://jamesg.blog
• Thomas Vander Wal https://vanderwal.net
• Jeremy Cherfas https://jeremycherfas.net
• Eric M
• Emily N
• Brian https://btrem.com/

Joe's Background Today

• The Visibone.com website, circa 1999:
  • Visibone made physical products to support folks making websites at a time when physical media was more important, every city had a technical bookstore, etc.
  • https://www.visibone.com/
  • https://web.archive.org/web/19990208010755/http://visibone.com/
  • https://visibone.blogspot.com/2018/06/visibone-paper-is-going-off-air.html
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_colors
  • https://codepen.io/artlung/pen/MYjJjzK -
  • For Bob Stein disambiguation - https://visibone.blogspot.com
• Technical book stores

Physical Artifacts We Use When Making Websites

• Tufte books!
• CSS Reference book!
• Color wheel reference!
• Color reference book!

Color!

• James has Night shift mode permanently
• Does this website look good in night shift mode?
• Thomas has color apps he runs things through
• Keynote had a color picker
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/meta/name/theme-color
• https://una.im/contrast-color/ has a demo of contrast-color
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/Values/color_value/contrast-color
• https://www.iamcal.com/misc/colors/
• https://yeun.github.io/open-color/
• implementing contrasting color https://lab.artlung.com/random-cells/random-cells.js?1733191181
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Temporal

Temporal

• Temporal is moving forward in time https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Temporal
  • https://momentjs.com/
  • Firefox and Chrome have implemented it, Safari Technical preview has added some of it
  • Destined for ECMAScript standardization
  • Time serialization format ISO 6801
  • https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/199x/ ambiguous time urls
  • Time zones are incredibly compilcated!
  • https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2867:_DateTime

Date and Datetime Miscellany

• Blog posts and blog comments get a date and time
  • Eric Relative time at the top, actual time stamp
  • Use time tags! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/time
  • Time Zone - communicate the date AND the where the post was from
  • "I was posting from the future" - times should be accurate to the reader

• datetime published - display D / M / Y
• On This Day is a great lens of a website with a long history - Jeremy Cherfas
• James' On This Day: https://jamesg.blog/time-machine

• Handwrittten HTML with time indicators can be tricky because it is easy to add error to them

ins del with timestamps ([datetime] attribute) to strike out with datetime attribute

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/del
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/ins
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/input/datetime-local

• Updates as comments
• If you don't have a timestamp
• Set timestamps
• Creation date
• Last Modified

• Temporal coming to node in the future! might fix timezone issues in 11ty

• Anyone here?? (from YouTube comments) https://artlung.com/blog/2025/01/11/people-here-in-2025/

• https://jamesg.blog/search-pages?q=title:%222023%22&page=1

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/input/date

• We were surprised that datetime is not a global attribute - that is, it can't be put on any tag meaningfully

• In theory with the right combination of ins and del tags with dates, one could write a script or CSS has: queries to show a web page over time

what is your favorite global attribute

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes
• Joe likes [class] a lot, but ultimately [style] is favorite
• Brian's is (I didn't take note of it! oh no!)
• Eric's is [contenteditable] - THE READ WRITE WEB

Group Photo 2026-03-12