Killed By Google – a “list of dead Google products, services, and devices.” < Of course, any company has the right to withdraw products. But it's a good idea not to base your products on someone else's free APIs/ hosting etc. If it's free they owe you nothing.
The Fabulous And Groovy Vadim And Vitaly Video Show – 1 hour YouTube video of Vadeem Makeev, Vitaly Friedman and me discussing CSS Nesting, AV1 codec, the new KV standard library and all the web news that’s fit for family viewing.
Google hit with €1.5bn fine from EU over advertising – “”Google has cemented its dominance in online search adverts and shielded itself from competitive pressure by imposing anti-competitive contractual restrictions on third-party websites.”
A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.
CSS Nesting Module (Editor’s Draft) – ” introduces the ability to nest one style rule inside another, with the selector of the child rule relative to the selector of the parent rule. This increases the modularity and maintainability of CSS stylesheets.”
C Is Not a Low-level Language – “Your computer is not a fast PDP-11 … implementations of C have had to become increasingly complex to maintain the illusion that C maps easily to the underlying hardware and gives fast code.”
A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.
Colour contrast bookmarklet – Ada Rose Cannon’s widget to analyse a URL’s colours and highlight areas with inadequate contrast. (85% of the million home pages analysed by WebAim had this error.)
Fighting Uphill – Eric Bailey’s thoughts on that WebAim report
MJML – “a markup language designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email .. MJML’s open-source engine generates high quality responsive HTML compliant with best practices.”
An exercise in progressive enhancement – Chen hui Jing on the “actual implementation of a site that works without Javascript, but is enhanced by Javascript when it is available”. (I’d love to see similar for all frameworks etc.)
Hipsters all look the same! Scientific FACT. – “Hipster whines at tech mag for using his pic to imply hipsters look the same, discovers pic was of an entirely different hipster”
refers to someone who may be charismatic and often bombastic, and is able to use his oratorical skills to appeal to the baser, more negative side of people’s feelings
It’s an apt word for the right-wingest of the Brexiteers who are marching to leave. The way they speak about the European negotiators is simply rude: “You must live in Narnia, Michel Barnier!” and “Get back in your bunker, Jean-Claude Juncker!”, both on the march to leave home page.
A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.
How A Screen Reader User Accesses The Web: A Smashing Video – I commissioned and hosted a webinar with Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user), showing how she uses big-name sites (and this one!) and how the HTML helps or hinders her.
Firefox CSS survey – Your chums at Firefox seek your input on the most time-consuming CSS bugs you’ve faced in the last 3 months (to help them make devtools better, not just to make fun of you)
Midi City 2000 – an interactive art experiment where midi songs become cities. Each row of buildings is an instrument in the song; each building is a note
Machine Ethics podcast – That nice Cennydd Bowles talking about collective action in the tech industry, the role of design fiction & ’provocatypes‘ in stimulating moral imagination
Here’s a talk I did at a lovely inclusive, anarchic, friendly conference last month called Monki Gras. It was great; a low ticket-price, proper food, craft beers and melted cheese snacks, a diverse group of speakers and a diverse audience. I made loads of new friends and heard loads of new perspectives.
A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.
The Legacy of Firefox OS a really interesting article by Ben Francis. Did you know that KaiOS, a fork of FFOS, is second biggest mobile OS in India, beating iOS?
Léonie Watson on HTML5 landmark regions – short video in which Léonie uses her screen reader on this very site, showing how HTML5 regions make her experience more accesssible
What the JAMstack means for marketing – “Here’s everything I learnt from doing content and SEO for a site that was built using the JAMstack, with a headless CMS and a static front end.”
Forget privacy: you’re terrible at targeting anyway – “let’s get rich on targeted ads and personalized recommendation algorithms. It’s what everyone else does! Or do they? The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible.”
Pornhub 2018 Year in Review – “In 2018, we transferred 4403 Petabytes of data, which equates to 147 Gigabytes per second. That’s more bandwidth than the entire internet consumed in 2002!”
A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.
When I was doing developer relations at Opera, I did everything I could to avoid having to go near the Opera TV part of the business – which was basically an app store of HTML5 websites for “Smart” TVs. This was for three reasons: the world of Smart TVs was a world of closed standards. Secondly, as Patrick Lauke wrote, the chips in the early Smart TVs were cheap and crappy which seriously crippled the web experience.
But the main reason was that I felt Smart TVs were a solution looking for problem.
TVs are big, beautiful screens and good speakers, sitting in a social space. No-one wants to surf Facebook on a screen that mum and dad are also watching, especially controlling it with arrows on a remote control unit.
A cheap device like a Chromecast allows people to control the content with a portable device they already have and know how to use – be it a laptop, tablet or phone, and see the movie/ photos on a big screen with family and friends. TVs are meant to be dumb; your phone is smart and a little USB gizmo connects the two.
So why did Opera have a B2B division developing Smart TV offerings? (And after the dismemberment of Opera, it continues as Vewd). The answer: because TV set manufacturers wanted Smart TV, so would throw money at us. But why did the set manufacturers want it?
A news report last week made it clear: it’s about collecting data off users, hitting the network a lot to phone that data back to HQ, then “monetizing” it, in some cases, advertising to viewers. That helps reduce the cost at sale of TVs. As the Verge puts it: Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive. From their interview with TV manufacturer Vizio’s CTO Bill Baxter:
So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.
This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.
…there are ways to monetize that TV and data is one, but not only the only one. It’s sort of like a business of singles and doubles, it’s not home runs, right? You make a little money here, a little money there. You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know.
I have a Smart TV (it’s difficult to find a new one that isn’t). I’ve never connected it to the web, for just this reason.