Zell Liew, a front-end developer who writes tutorials on JavaScript, CSS, and typography, including async code, units, and vertical rhythm.
HN commenters link his posts on vertical rhythm and async/await in loops, mostly as references; one commenter uses the async piece to argue for blocking models.
Ah, I think you copied the list from https://zellwk.com/blog/why-vertical-rhythms/. It says these might be properties of “better”, largely without quantifying what they mean, as part of comparing something with simple rhythm (and quite ugly in its spacing, in my opinion) with something that’s deliberately terrible.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has treated “rhythm” in any way rigorously, and it’s mostly just a crock, something that sounds good on paper but is utterly without actual reason or value, rather like modular scales for typography.
I don’t respect that article. Its analogies are lousy, its examples of non-rhythm unnecessarily bad (straw-man arguments), its rhythm not great in any case (and lacking any attempt at anything like baseline alignment), and after the first instance it only really shows rhythm with an unrealistic superimposed grid which obviously makes rhythm look better than non-rhythm. I get the sense that the author has read a bit of various things, and then attempted to justify an opinion in any way they could, and ended up producing an incoherent and completely unsound argument.
There are certainly major places where consistent spacing and sizing is of value. But slavishly following it page-wide without something like a background pattern that you’re aiming to match (which is absolutely a legitimate use case, but is æsthetic rather than functional)… I’ve never come across any argument that seemed to hold any water, and I’d like to understand…
Chris built it. Geoff was the chief editor and had been with CSS Tricks for half its lifetime (i.e. seven years) when Chris sold it to Digital Ocean and left. Pretending he was just "an employee" is seriously underselling what this layoff means.
Yes, Chris leaving caused more damage to CSS Tricks than Geoff being laid off. But Geoff being laid off is the killing blow to what CSS Tricks used to be. I'm not the first person to say this: https://zellwk.com/blog/spirit-of-css-tricks/
> Is there some other "efficient" way to read a website that involves some non-linear sequence of jumps around the page?
Yeah, it's called skimming and scanning [1].
This is why things like information hierarchy [2] and vertical rhythm [3] are emphasized in modern design.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading#Skimming_and_scanning
[2] https://zevendesign.com/designers-guide-to-visual-hierarchy/
[3] https://zellwk.com/blog/why-vertical-rhythms/
the mental gymnastics.
Having fun using async/await in loops?
https://zellwk.com/blog/async-await-in-loops/
An actual blocking model is much easier to grok.
OP is likely referring to vertical rhythm in typography:
https://zellwk.com/blog/why-vertical-rhythms/