Dr Swati Mohan, the Indian-born NASA engineer, whose historic words, “touchdown confirmed”, announced to the world the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021

Chennai-based Agnikul Cosmos to test-fire Agnibaan rocket with 3D printed engine, aiming for suborbital flight trajectory control

Shakti and Shiva are comprised of stars with similar chemical compositions, formed 12-13 billion years ago, and each structure has a mass about 10 million times greater than our sun

This collaboration aims to establish accelerator programs that enhance India’s Aviation, Space, and Defence ecosystem

Many countries are watching Russia build a 1,200 MW fast breeder as a possible template for themselves

Gopi Thotakura was selected as one of the six crew members for the mission

“Vaccines are the vital pillar of global health, and the IVMA mission is to ensure that every individual, regardless of where they live, has access to life-saving immuniszations” - Krishna Ella, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman of Bharat Biotech

Pneubevax14   14 was found to be safe and induced robust and functional serotype specific immune responses to all 14 serotypes

These are among the rules brought out today by India’s space activities regulator, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorizsation Center (IN-SPACe). These rules are to govern private sector activities in ‘space’

Obesity has “exploded” around the world, and it’s not because people are lazy or weak-willed - Johann Hari, Author

The platform supports different types of biomolecules, including monoclonal antibodies, biosimilars, bispecifics, antibody-drug conjugates, and other recombinant proteins

“In addition to patient care, MSK has been running successful  educational programmes” - Dr Mrinal Gounder, Sarcoma oncologist, and Early drug development specialist at MSK

Nanotech event to focus on sustainability, climate change, healthcare applications

A team at IASST Guwahati has identified 4 different Ionic Liquids that can be effective in extracting silk proteins from raw fibres 

The technology has received a patent from the government

A focused venture fund will give a boost to new entrepreneurs and non-government entities, IN-SPACe chairperson Pawan Goenka said

“With our continued emphasis on expanding the space economy by 5 times in the next 10 years, a venture capital fund of 1,000 crore will be set up,” Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman says

“The Panel’s decision today paves the way for the critically important next stages in our work — the nomination and selection of authors who will actually write these two reports”

Potential of zinc oxide nanoparticles to combat diabetic nephropathy uncovered

‘Visual data suggests wind speeds in key regions of India are gradually declining, which could have significant implications for the wind energy sector’

Aerospace startup Space Kidz India to select one student from each of the 108 participating countries who will travel to India for hands-on training in building payloads, spacecraft prototypes

WMO study says 2023 figure is 151 per cent % of pre-industrial period

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J.B. Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals share price can rise to ₹2,100

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Nifty 50 November Futures contract can fall to 23,900

Bank Nifty November Futures can rise to 52,500 if the bounce sustains

Here are the intraday supports and resistances for widely traded stocks such as Reliance Industries, ITC, ONGC, Infosys, HDFC Bank, TCS, and SBI

HCL Technologies share price can rise to ₹1,935

Let’s talk about money!

Let’s talk about how hard it is to pay small amounts online to people whose work you like and who could really use a bit of income. Let’s talk about how Coil aims to change that.

Taking a subscription to a website is moderately easy, but the person you want to pay must have enabled them. Besides, do you want to purchase a full subscription in order to read one or two articles per month?

Sending a one-time donation is pretty easy as well, but, again, the site owner must have enabled them. And even then it just gives them ad-hoc amounts that they cannot depend on.

Then there’s Patreon and Kickstarter and similar systems, but Patreon is essentially a subscription service while Kickstarter is essentially a one-time donation service, except that both keep part of the money you donate.

And then there’s ads ... Do we want small content creators to remain dependent on ads and thus support the entire ad ecosystem? I, personally, would like to get rid of them.

The problem today is that all non-ad-based systems require you to make conscious decisions to support someone — and even if you’re serious about supporting them you may forget to send in a monthly donation or to renew your subscription. It sort-of works, but the user experience can be improved rather dramatically.

That’s where Coil and the Web Monetization Standard come in.

Web Monetization

The idea behind Coil is that you pay for what you consume easily and automatically. It’s not a subscription - you only pay for what you consume. It’s not a one-time donation, either - you always pay when you consume.

Payments occur automatically when you visit a website that is also subscribed to Coil, and the amount you pay to a single site owner depends on the time you spend on the site. Coil does not retain any of your money, either — everything goes to the people you support.

In this series of four articles we’ll take a closer look at the architecture of the current Coil implementation, how to work with it right now, the proposed standard, and what’s going to happen in the future.

Overview

So how does Coil work right now?

Both the payer and the payee need a Coil account to send and receive money. The payee has to add a <meta> tag with a Coil payment pointer to all pages they want to monetize. The payer has to install the Coil extension in their browsers. You can see this extension as a polyfill. In the future web monetization will, I hope, be supported natively in all browsers.

Once that’s done the process works pretty much automatically. The extension searches for the <meta> tag on any site the user visits. If it finds one it starts a payment stream from payer to payee that continues for as long as the payer stays on the site.

The payee can use the JavaScript API to interact with the monetization stream. For instance, they can show extra content to paying users, or keep track of how much a user paid so far. Unfortunately these functionalities require JavaScript, and the hiding of content is fairly easy to work around. Thus it is not yet suited for serious business purposes, especially in web development circles.

This is one example of how the current system is still a bit rough around the edges. You’ll find more examples in the subsequent articles. Until the time browsers support the standard natively and you can determine your visitors’ monetization status server-side these rough bits will continue to exist. For the moment we will have to work with the system we have.

This article series will discuss all topics we touched on in more detail.

Start now!

For too long we have accepted free content as our birthright, without considering the needs of the people who create it. This becomes even more curious for articles and documentation that are absolutely vital to our work as web developers.

Take a look at this list of currently-monetized web developer sites. Chances are you’ll find a few people whose work you used in the past. Don’t they deserve your direct support?

Free content is not a right, it’s an entitlement. The sooner we internalize this, and start paying independent voices, the better for the web.

The only alternative is that all articles and documentation that we depend on will written by employees of large companies. And employees, no matter how well-meaning, will reflect the priorities and point of view of their employer in the long run.

So start now.

In order to support them you should invest a bit of time once and US$5 per month permanently. I mean, that’s not too much to ask, is it?

Continue

I wrote this article and its sequels for Coil, and yes, I’m getting paid. Still, I believe in what they are doing, so I won’t just spread marketing drivel. Initially it was unclear to me exactly how Coil works. So I did some digging, and the remaining parts of this series give a detailed description of how Coil actually works in practice.

For now the other three articles will only be available on dev.to. I just published part 2, which gives a high-level overview of how Coil works right now. Part 3 will describe the meta tag and the JavaScript API, and in part 4 we’ll take a look at the future, which includes a formal W3C standard. Those parts will be published next week and the week after that.

I’m writing the position: sticky part of my book, and since I never worked with sticky before I’m not totally sure if what I’m saying is correct.

This is made worse by the fact that there are no very clear tutorials on sticky. That’s partly because it works pretty intuitively in most cases, and partly because the details can be complicated.

So here’s my draft 1 of position: sticky. There will be something wrong with it; please correct me where needed.

The inset properties are top, right, bottom and left. (I already introduced this terminology earlier in the chapter.)

Introduction

position: sticky is a mix of relative and fixed. A sticky box takes its normal position in the flow, as if it had position: relative, but if that position scrolls out of view the sticky box remains in a position defined by its inset properties, as if it has position: fixed. A sticky box never escapes its container, though. If the container start or end scrolls past the sticky box abandons its fixed position and sticks to the top or the bottom of its container.

It is typically used to make sure that headers remain in view no matter how the user scrolls. It is also useful for tables on narrow screens: you can keep headers or the leftmost table cells in view while the user scrolls.

Scroll box and container

A sticky box needs a scroll box: a box that is able to scroll. By default this is the browser window — or, more correctly, the layout viewport — but you can define another scroll box by setting overflow on the desired element. The sticky box takes the first ancestor that could scroll as its scroll box and calculates all its coordinates relative to it.

A sticky box needs at least one inset property. These properties contain vital instructions, and if the sticky box doesn’t receive them it doesn’t know what to do.

A sticky box may also have a container: a regular HTML element that contains the sticky box. The sticky box will never be positioned outside this container, which thus serves as a constraint.

The first example shows this set-up. The sticky <h2> is in a perfectly normal <div>, its container, and that container is in a <section> that is the scroll box because it has overflow: auto. The sticky box has an inset property to provide instructions. The relevant styles are:

section.scroll-container {
	border: 1px solid black;
	width: 300px;
	height: 300px;
	overflow: auto;
	padding: 1em;
}

div.container {
	border: 1px solid black;
	padding: 1em;
}

section.scroll-container h2 {
	position: sticky;
	top: 0;
}

The rules

Now let’s see exactly what’s going on.

A sticky box never escapes its containing box. If it cannot obey the rules that follow without escaping from its container, it instead remains at the edge. Scroll down until the container disappears to see this in action.

A sticky box starts in its natural position in the flow, as if it has position: relative. It thus participates in the default flow: if it becomes higher it pushes the paragraphs below it downwards, just like any other regular HTML element. Also, the space it takes in the normal flow is kept open, even if it is currently in fixed position. Scroll down a little bit to see this in action: an empty space is kept open for the header.

A sticky box compares two positions: its natural position in the flow and its fixed position according to its inset properties. It does so in the coordinate frame of its scroll box. That is, any given coordinate such as top: 20px, as well as its default coordinates, is resolved against the content box of the scroll box. (In other words, the scroll box’s padding also constrains the sticky box; it will never move up into that padding.)

A sticky box with top takes the higher value of its top and its natural position in the flow, and positions its top border at that value. Scroll down slowly to see this in action: the sticky box starts at its natural position (let’s call it 20px), which is higher than its defined top (0). Thus it rests at its position in the natural flow. Scrolling up a few pixels doesn’t change this, but once its natural position becomes less than 0, the sticky box switches to a fixed layout and stays at that position.

It does the same for bottom, but remember that a bottom is calculated relative to the scroll box’s bottom, and not its top. Thus, a larger bottom coordinate means the box is positioned more to the top. Now the sticky box compares its default bottom with the defined bottom and uses the higher value to position its bottom border, just as before.

With left, it uses the higher value of its natural position and to position its left border; with right, it does the same for its right border, bearing in mind once more that a higher right value positions the box more to the left.

If any of these steps would position the sticky box outside its containing box it takes the position that just barely keeps it within its containing box.

Details

The four inset properties act independently of one another. For instance the following box will calculate the position of its top and left edge independently. They can be relative or fixed, depending on how the user scrolls.

p.testbox {
	position: sticky;
	top: 0;
	left: 0;
}

Setting both a top and a bottom, or both a left and a right, gives the sticky box a bandwidth to move in. It will always attempt to obey all the rules described above. So the following box will vary between 0 from the top of the screen to 0 from the bottom, taking its default position in the flow between these two positions.

p.testbox {
	position: sticky;
	top: 0;
	bottom: 0;
}

No container

So far we put the sticky box in a container separate from the scroll box. But that’s not necessary. You can also make the scroll box itself the container if you wish. The sticky element is still positioned with respect to the scroll box (which is now also its container) and everything works fine.

Several containers

Or the sticky item can be several containers removed from its scroll box. That’s fine as well; the positions are still calculated relative to the scroll box, and the sticky box will never leave its innermost container.

Changing the scroll box

One feature that catches many people (including me) unaware is giving the container an overflow: auto or hidden. All of a sudden it seems the sticky header doesn’t work any more.

What’s going on here? An overflow value of auto, hidden, or scroll makes an element into a scroll box. So now the sticky box’s scroll box is no longer the outer element, but the inner one, since that is now the closest ancestor that is able to scroll.

The sticky box appears to be static, but it isn’t. The crux here is that the scroll box could scroll, thanks to its overflow value, but doesn’t actually do so because we didn’t give it a height, and therefore it stretches up to accomodate all of its contents.

Thus we have a non-scrolling scroll box, and that is the root cause of our problems.

As before, the sticky box calculates its position by comparing its natural position relative to its scroll box with the one given by its inset properties. Point is: the sticky box doesn’t scroll relative to its scroll box, so its position always remains the same. Where in earlier examples the position of the sticky element relative to the scroll box changed when we scrolled, it no longer does so, because the scroll box doesn’t scroll. Thus there is no reason for it to switch to fixed positioning, and it stays where it is relative to its scroll box.

The fact that the scroll box itself scrolls upward is irrelevant; this doesn’t influence the sticky box in the slightest.

One solution is to give the new scroll box a height that is too little for its contents. Now the scroll box generates a scrollbar and becomes a scrolling scroll box. When we scroll it the position of the sticky box relative to its scroll box changes once more, and it switches from fixed to relative or vice versa as required.

Minor items

Finally a few minor items:

• It is no longer necessary to use position: -webkit-sticky. All modern browsers support regular position: sticky. (But if you need to cater to a few older browsers, retaining the double syntax doesn’t hurt.)
• Chrome (Mac) does weird things to the borders of the sticky items in these examples. I don’t know what’s going on and am not going to investigate.

Actor Prakash Raj’s innovative incubator for theatre and arts offers a comprehensive production process, stipends for actors/techs, lodging, kitchen and tech support. It also plans to promote fine arts and film in the future.

Actor Prakash Raj says fans will soon get to see him perform live on stage

 After a memorable 2022, the industry suffered a slump in the first half of this year with only Daredevil Musthafa providing a consolation

At a time when libraries are losing their sheen owing to a lack of patronage, the century-old Ram Mohan Library in Vijaywada continues to attract book lovers to its vast collection of books and its illustrious history

Celebrating the spirit of togetherness, artist students have curated an exhibition titled, ‘Savouring Connections: How Food Brings Us Together’ at Karl and Meherbai Khandalavala Gallery, CSMVS museum

Telugu comedy actor Vennela Kishore to play the hero in director T.G. Keerthi Kumar’s spy action comedy ‘Chaari 111’

S.S. Rajamouli’s ‘RRR’ bagged six awards, followed by ‘Pushpa - The Rise’, ‘Uppena’ and ‘Konda Polam’ at the 69th National Film Awards. Allu Arjun won the award for best actor, while ‘RRR’ was declared the best popular film for providing wholesome entertainment

Written and directed by first-timer Clax, the Telugu dramedy ‘Bedurulanka 2012,’ starring Kartikeya Gummakonda and Neha Shetty, is an indie-spirited narrative that’s delightful in parts 

Actor Allu Arjun invited Instagram to the sets of his forthcoming Telugu film ‘Pushpa: The Rule’, directed by Sukumar

To commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of actor Dev Anand, the NFDC-NFAI and Film Heritage Foundation will facilitate the screening of restored 4k versions of ‘C.I.D’, ‘Guide’, ‘Jewel Thief’ and ‘Johny Mera Naam’ in theatres across 30 cities in India