Notices by Chris Coyier (chriscoyier@front-end.social)

“I’d rather read the prompt”

Clayton Ramsey grades student assignments and gets papers that are just obviously ChatGPT output. I think any of us can spot it by now: awkward repetitive prose, heavy on bullet points with bold intro words, wordy, etc. There is nothing to be done about it. As an instructor, I am always saddened to read this. The ChatGPT rhetorical style is distinctive enough that I can catch it, but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an honor…

https://chriscoyier.net/2025/05/08/id-rather-read-the-prompt/

I didn't know this either, thanks @marcthiele

https://marcthiele.com/notes/i-didnt-know-this-typing-special-characters-on-macos

(Just hold down the `a` key, on macOS, to get a popup menu to help you get a character like `ä`.)

The West Just Burns Now

It really wasn't that long ago when the Western U.S. wasn't absolutely guaranteed to be on fire every summer and into the fall. Now, it's just what happens. August and September? That's "smoke season". What should be absolutely beautiful months to enjoy the outdoors are now when it rains ash and the sky is a deep apocalyptic orange in the middle of the day.

https://chriscoyier.net/2024/09/11/the-west-just-burns-now/

It's wild to me that just using Google Fonts (the hosted-by-Google way) immediately makes you in violation of GDPR.

https://termageddon.com/google-fonts-violates-gdpr/

You can always self-host though: https://gwfh.mranftl.com/fonts

Or it's a one-clicker on Cloudflare: https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/fonts/

Hate rectangles?

Divide sections with more interesting "shape dividers". https://www.svgbackgrounds.com/elements/svg-shape-dividers/

(By Matt Visiwig inspired by @walpolea)

Doesn't take much to squish it into whatever you need it to do. https://codepen.io/chriscoyier/pen/jOjzZQK

Nice remembrance of ahead-of-it's-time Yahoo! Pipes.

https://retool.com/pipes

(Presumably Retool published it as a little way to say *Remember that? That was cool. But like, we can do that stuff too, now, better.")

I remember stitching RSS feeds together in Pipes and loving it. I feel like Zapier is a bit more pipes-like these days though.

They got @geoff back at the helm at https://css-tricks.com/ he's been doing great cleaning the design up and getting content flowing, including big beefy guides. He's doing better than I ever did, so that's a win.

Practical SVG is Now Free to Read Online

Back in 2016 I wrote a book called Practical SVG. Recently, the publisher, A Book Apart, closed shop. Now you can Read Practical SVG on the web, here on this site, for free. I always like how Mat's book was online so now mine can join that cool club. I'll echo what I say on the site: Thanks to Jeff Eaton for…

https://chriscoyier.net/2024/07/22/practical-svg-is-now-free-to-read-online/

It’s really this thing that gets me.

Let’s say you’re on a big mission in the world. You think websites should be more accessible. Websites should work for anyone regardless of their disabilities. You also think the web right now is failing in this regard. There are far too many inaccessible websites existing and being created. You think that educating developers is great and that developers should make accessible websites, but that’s not doing enough.

https://chriscoyier.net/2024/07/13/its-really-this-thing-that-gets-me/

Interesting that Cloudflare offers this feature now. It's not 100% clear how it works, but happy to flip it on. It doesn't appear to do anything with robots.txt so it's probably more UA based.

Where I’m at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing: https://chriscoyier.net/2024/02/28/where-im-at-on-the-whole-css-tricks-thing/

God grant me the serenity to render HTML on the client because it’s better in that situation, render HTML on the server because it’s better in that situation, and the wisdom to know the difference.

0 KB Social Media Embeds: https://chriscoyier.net/2023/11/01/0-kb-social-media-embeds/

@matthiasott @pfefferle I'll have to try it again one of these days. My first attempt at it didn't go super well.

The "receive comments" thing is cool, I'd say that's my favorite feature.

What the frick is with the war on trans people? https://chriscoyier.net/2023/05/04/what-the-frick-is-with-the-war-on-trans-people/