Today I'm releasing TinyWFL, my tiny web font loader which is about 95% smaller than other popular loaders.
When web fonts started to gain adoption around 2010, the problem people had was FOUT - the flash of unstyled text while you waited for the browser to download the font. I think most people would agree that this has since been solved very comprehensively by webfontloader from Google and Typekit, and that it's now the de-facto standard loader - but back in 2010 or 2011 FOUT was still an issue, which is why I wrote my own.
The new Christmas design for this site uses bezier curves on canvas elements to generate random snowdrifts behind the header. Drawing a bezier curve is pretty simple, so seems like a reasonable place to start my new blog. First you need a canvas and a context:
I am very proud to announce my finest work to date - the Tacky Christmas Music Interface 2.0!
The old TCMI played midi files, but most browsers seem to struggle with those these days, and even when it did work, modern soundfonts made the experience quite variable. To get around this, the new version of TCMI now uses HTML5 audio to play MP3 or OGG files (depending on browser support).
This also means that if you've got the relevant PPL/PRS license, you can now play non-tacky music to your visitors! Although I'm not quite sure what the ...