GSK will keep its existing portfolios while entering areas like oncology, said company officials at its centenary celebrations

Words to tattoo on your knuckles:

Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn’t felt my own, to a degree. It’s felt like I’ve been writ­ing for an audi­ence, post­ing stuff for oth­ers rather than myself. That’s arse-backwards. A blog should be about per­sonal expres­sion. The moment you start think­ing, and writ­ing, to please oth­ers then it’s a bind; it feels less like a per­sonal exer­cise and more of a job.

A beautiful, thoughtful redesign from Mark Boulton (and a responsive one at that). Go go, read read.

Front-end developer Steffan Williams of Gridinator fame digs into some of the rendering inconsistencies across various browsers when dealing with percentage-based widths. Now, I don’t think this is a real problem for flexible, grid-based layouts or properly responsive designs. Some of these rounding issues won’t necessarily manifest themselves in your work, or at least not quite as noticeably.

I was, however, emphatically raising my fist in the air when I read this:

While I’m well aware that things don’t have to look the same in every browser, it just seems to strike me as odd that CSS3 features keep getting touted on the front of browser homepages, and yet something as fundamental as a percentage would be rendered incorrectly (or, rather, not as well as would be expected).

Emphasis mine. Much of the behavior Steffan notes was outlined by John Resig in 2008, nearly three years ago. There are some incredible inconsistencies at play here, and designers really shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of working around them.

In short, some broad consensus between the different rendering engines needs to be reached—and if it comes at the expense of pushing the Next Hot Bleeding-Edge Experimental Sexy CSS3 Feature™ to market, I’m all for it.

Since striking out on my own, much of my time’s been dedicated to, well, the book. But I’ve also been fortunate enough to collaborate a bit with Filament Group on one of their projects: namely, a large-scale engagement that requires a responsive approach.

Needless to say, I am having the time of my life.

We’re also learning a lot, too. A lot of discussions about approach and execution have come up, largely because processes for a lot of this stuff don’t exist yet. That will, with a bit of hard work and community discussion, change over time. Still, there has been a lot of brilliant stuff created so far.

Here’s just one example:

The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Check out the script, download it, and kick the tires a bit—feedback and tweaks are most welcome.

I realize that there are always going to be philosophical differences around responsive web design. But for me, the solutions-driven discussions are always going to be infinitely more interesting to me than the alternative.

I won’t lie to you: I might’ve pounded the table emphatically a few times while reading Mark Boulton’s latest entry:

We can now design effective adaptive layouts that respond to their environment. If these layouts are based on a system that defines its ratios from the content, then there is connectedness on two levels: connectedness to the device, and connectedness to the content.

Mark’s thinking about flexible, content-driven grids has me damned excited about his upcoming talk at AEA Boston, and you know I’ll be flinging fistfuls of lucre at my laptop screen whenever his new book’s available to preorder.

The web really feels fun again.

There are people you just need to say “yes” to.

I consider myself fortunate to have known and worked with Erin Kissane for years, and I’ve admired her writing for quite some time before that. Krista Stevens has been a friendly fixture throughout my career; she used to run an impossibly tight ship at Digital Web, where some of my first articles were published, before doing wonderful and incredible things at A List Apart. So yeah, when they asked me to work with them on their New Secret Project©, I basically signed up before they could finish telling me what it was all about.

And with that, I’m thrilled to announce that Contents, a new magazine focusing on content strategy, will be launching this fall.

Here’s Erin’s introduction:

The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens.

As a designer-person who benefitted immensely from Erin’s and Kristina’s respective books on the subject, this is all music to the ol’ ears. Because I think Contents is going to be a wonderful, oh-so-valuable resource for those of us looking to better understand content strategy (myself included), and I’m excited to contribute a little bit to making that happen.

In short: because of folks like Erin, Krista, and the oh-so-capable Erik Westra, I know Contents will be something special. You should check us out on Twitter, and maybe contribute an article or eight if you’re so inclined.

I’m doing a disservice to this lovely interview with Shaun Inman—one of my favorite designers and people—by quoting it, but, well:

How do you stay focused?

I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions…. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

“5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman”

This. Oh, so very this.

These thoughts aren’t especially well-formed, and/as I haven’t had my coffee yet.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed to hear Opera’s news: namely, that they’re abandoning their browser’s Presto engine, and adopting WebKit/Chromium instead.

Other folks far, far smarter than I have already weighed in. And don’t get me wrong: I’ve had my fair share of gripes with various bugs in Chromium (especially recently), but it’s a fantastic piece of software; as a friend said recently, ten-years-ago-me would’ve killed to have browsers as fine as we do now.

But right now, what I’m most worried about is the lack of diversity: four rendering engines is not exactly a large number, and going to three is a significant shift, if not an outright loss. Additionally, I worry we’re already facing a rather “well, it works with -webkit, so why worry about anything else?” mentality, which is something we’ll have to work harder to combat. Especially with an engine as fragmented as Webkit.

Of course, since the news is all of, like, minutes old, this is all speculation. Hell, it’s not even that: this is all just a pre-caffeine ramble, and not an especially well-formed one at that. I will say that Bruce’s take leaves me feeling hopeful. And I hope he’s right, and I’m wrong to be a bit disappointed. But right now, I know there’s one less (fantastic) rendering engine in active development, and that makes me a little sad.

Musician Megan Thee Stallion visits WIRED to answer her most searched for questions on Google. Where did Megan Thee Stallion get her name? What's her favorite anime? What is Megan Thee Stallion's typical workout routine? What does Megan Thee Stallion call her fans? Answers to these questions and many more await on the WIRED Autocomplete Interview. 'Megan Thee Stallion: In Her Words' is now streaming on Prime Video. Megan Thee Stallion's deluxe album 'Megan: Act II" is now available to stream. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Kevin Dynia Editor: Daniel Poler Talent: Megan Thee Stallion Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi Associate Producer: Brandon White; Paul Gulyas Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Talent Booker: Jenna Caldwell Camera Operator: Caleb Weiss Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino Production Assistant: Ryan Coppola Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen Additional Editor: Jason Malizia Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds