I woke up this morning and checked out my YouTube feed as I always do. But today instead of the usual nonsense about Apple (going to fail), the coronavirus (we’re going to fail) or politics (democracy is going to fail), I came across a video about something called the Holy Albatross invented by Heydon Pickering. If you’ve read my documentation about Tyfy, you know I already admire Heydon and his work. But this new concept – the Holy Albatross – is a facinating approach to web page layout achieved by ‘hacking’ CSS to create logic rules.

I’m not going to try to explain it here. Heydon has done so well enough, and with more wit, in an article on his website and also in this video from beyond tellerrand.

In the video, he explains the idea behind and the execution of the Holy Albatross. Beyond that, however, Heydon introduces the concept of ‘algorithmic’ layout and introduces a video series he is working on to explore the idea.