Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why Google invested in providing Google Fonts for free. Fascinating comment from former Google Fonts team member Raph Levien. In short: text rendered as PNGs hurt Google Search, fonts were a delay in the transition from Flash, Google Docs needed them to better compete with Office and anything that helps create better ads is easy to find funding for.

# 2:13 pm / google, typography

Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications (via) What a fascinating collection of ideas. Wildcard is a browser extension (currently using Tampermonkey and sadly not yet available to try out) which lets you add “spreadsheet-driven customization” to any web application. Watching the animated screenshots in the videos helps explain what this mean—essentially it’s a two-way scraping trick, where content on the page (e.g. Airbnb listings) are extracted into a spreadsheet-like table interface using JavaScript—but then interactions you make in that spreadsheet like filtering and sorting are reflected back on the original page. It even has the ability to serve editable cells by mapping them to form inputs on the page. Lots to think about here.

# 7:39 pm / greasemonkey, spreadsheets