Apple Is Trying to Kill Web Technology – “The company has made it extremely difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms, and it hopes developers won’t bother”
Things We Can’t (Yet) Do In CSS – a very good article by @rachelandrew. As she says, many can’t be done on the web, but can with Prince, which you can get for free (for non-commercial use) to try it out.
free-for.dev – “This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.”
Focusing on focus – “focus was and is still quite complex to understand. But, at least now there’s a clear source of truth for it, and the browser vendors are working to make it interoperable”
What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs by @nolanlawson. “Here’s the best piece of accessibility advice for newbies: if something is a button, make it a <button>. If something is an input, make it an <input>.” Preach it, nephew!
Restricting Notification Permission Prompts in Firefox – “about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user”. No surprises here. People have much greater investment in apps they’ve downloaded than random sites.
OpenType shaping documents – “we are seeking comments and bugfixes on the Indic-script, Arabic-like, Hangul, Hebrew, Thai/Lao, Tibetan, Khmer, Myanmar, default, and USE documents”
Releasing Spleeter: Deezer Research source separation engine – separate an audio track into separate sources (e.g., split out vocals, bass, drums) using Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation, MIT-licensed. That’s what I’ll be mucking about with on my “Fun Friday”.
As the internet turns 50, we must protect it as a force for good – says Sir Uncle Timbo. “On October 29, 1969, the internet era began as UCLA Computer Science Professor Len Kleinrock sent the first message on ARPANET, a network of computers that would evolve to become the internet.”
Apply to speak at Front End North 2020 – Grass-roots Sheffield-based conference is looking for talk proposals. Semi-anonymised talk selection process, emphasis on responsible web development. Go on, submit a talk, especially if you’re a new speaker!
2019 Affordability Report from Alliance for Affordable Internet. “Across Africa, the average cost for just 1GB data is 7.12% of the average monthly salary. If the average US earner paid 7.12% of their income for access, 1GB data would cost USD $373 per month”
Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites – “Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin — it gives you insights on how people find and use your site, how to improve and monetize your content, with data from multiple Google tools.”
Skin-On Interfaces – Artificial Skin for Mobile Devices. “Human skin is the best interface for interaction. I propose this new paradigm in which interactive devices have their own artificial skin, thus enabling new forms of input gestures for end-users.”
The Orgasm Sound Library is an archive of hundreds of creative commons-licensed audio files of orgasm sounds. You can also upload your own.
Buttplug.io – “an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware, including sex toys, fucking machines, electrostim hardware, and more.”
Hello, you kawaii kumquat! Here’s this week’s lovely list ‘o’ links for your reading pleasure. It’s been a while because I’ve been gallivanting around Japan, Romania and the Netherlands, so this is a bumper edition.
Service workers at TPAC – “For the first time in a few years, we focused on potential new features and behaviours. Here’s a summary”
Mobile data prices fall across low and middle income countries – In 100 countries measured, the average cost for 1GB data as a % of average monthly income declined from 5.76% to 4.69% — a drop of 11.24%, bringing access within reach for millions more people.
Call for Participation in Ad Blocker Community Group – “The mission of this group is to improve web standards by conveying to Working Groups use cases from an ad blocker perspective (particularly ad blocker browser extensions)”
is-website-vulnerable command-line tool to find publicly known security vulnerabilities in a website’s frontend JavaScript libraries
There won’t be a reading list next week as I’m going off the grid to read books and record music in a 400 year old farmhouse in the countryside, far from WiFi and the bleeps and bloops of notifications. Until next time, hang loose and stay groovy.
Automatically compress images on Pull Requests – “Calibre’s new GitHub Action allows you to compress raster images with minimal setup automatically. Never ship unoptimised graphics again”
On “AI” replacing jobs and humans – “in order to get the damn autonomous cars to work we human beings will be excluded from even more public spaces: Some autonomous car experts are already asking for sidewalks to be basically cages with defined doors that open only when the traffic lights are green so the world becomes simple enough for cars to “understand”
You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements” – “You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them … for women, you’re as likely to get an interview matching 40% of the job requirements as matching 90%. Note also that, as we’ve seen in previous analysis, women in general have higher interview rates than men”
There won’t be a reading lost for a few weeks as I’m writing this from a train to London, commencing a 3 week jaunt around conferences in Japan and Europe. Until next time, hang loose and stay groovy.
I use the free version of the excellent Mailchimp for WP plugin to allow visitors to this site to sign up for my Magical Brucie Mail and get my Reading List delivered to their inboxes.
When I did my regular accessibility check-up (a FastPass with the splendid Accessibility Insights for Web Chromium plugin by Microsoft) I noticed that the Mailchimp signup form fails two WCAG guidelines:
label: Form elements must have labels (1) WCAG 1.3.1, WCAG 3.3.2
This is because the out-of-the-box default form doesn’t associate its email input with a label:
Luckily, the plugin allows you to customise the default form. So I’ve configured the plugin to associate the label and input by nesting the input inside the label. (This is more robust than using the IDref way because it’s not susceptible to Metadata partial copy-paste necrosis. (I also killed the placeholder attribute because I think it’s worthless on a single-input form.)
You can do this by choosing “Mailchimp for WP” in your WordPress dashboard’s sidebar, choosing “Form” and then over-riding the default with this:
New & Experimental CSS Tools in Firefox – 18 minute presentation at SFHTML by Victoria Wang. Some very cool work here that makes Firefox an indispensable tool for developing modern websites.
Google finds ‘indiscriminate iPhone attack lasting years’ “attackers were using 12 separate security flaws in order to compromise devices. Most were bugs within Safari … Simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant. Once on a person’s iPhone, the implant could access an enormous amount of data, including (though not limited to) contacts, images and GPS location data. It would relay this information back to an external server every 60 seconds”
Bit of a plug: I’m co-curating and MCing JSCamp – a one-day JavaScript conference in Bucharest, Romania on 24th of September. It’s the conference I want to attend – not full of frameworks and shinies, but full of funny, thought-provoking talks about making the Web better. The speaker line-up is cosmic, maaaan. Bucharest is a lovely city, based on Paris, accommodation and food is cheap and it’s and very easy to get to from anywhere in Europe. Come along, or tell your friends! Or both! (And no, I’m not on a percentage!)
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Midyear ADA Web & App Accessibility Lawsuit Report – “The rate of lawsuits filed in federal courts related to website and app accessibility has now hit a rate of one-an-hour, that’s 8 a day, 40 per week and set to be on pace for over 2,000 lawsuits again this year.”
Stop the Open Data Bus, We Want to Get Off “Anonymised” data: “re-identification of individuals in the Myki public transport dataset … We demonstrate the ease with which we were able to re-identify ourselves, our co-travellers, & complete strangers” (PDF)
Why bother with What Three Words? by Uncle Tezza. I take his point, but think he’s being overly harsh; I’ve found W3W to be useful when meeting someone in a large area, e.g. picking my daughter up at a festival etc. There are, however, free alternatives
The Planet Needs a New Internet – “the internet as a whole—including the energy used to power data centers, networks, and individual devices, as well as the energy used during the manufacturing of those devices—is responsible for about 7 percent of global electricity consumption”
By the End of This Century, the Global Population Will Start to Shrink – “The fertility rate is falling in every country on the planet… “The brain is the most important reproductive organ. Once a woman is socialized to have an education and a career, she is socialized to have a smaller family. There’s no going back.”
Bit of a plug: I’m co-curating and MCing JSCamp – a one-day JavaScript conference in Bucharest, Romania on 24th of September. It’s the conference I want to attend – not full of frameworks and shinies, but full of funny, thought-provoking talks about making the Web better. The speaker line-up is cosmic, maaaan. Bucharest is a lovely city, based on Paris, accommodation and food is cheap and it’s and very easy to get to from anywhere in Europe. Come along, or tell your friends! Or both! (And no, I’m not on a percentage!)
Want my reading lists sent straight to your inbox? Sign up and Mr Mailchimp will send it your way.
Google Sheets data feed example. With Eleventy. – Use Google Sheets as a data source for your site (so non-techy folk can update it, for example) using Eleventy, 2 clicks to deploy to Netlify by @philhawksworth
New E-Commerce Checkout Research – Why 68% of Users Abandon Their Cart – 2/3 of shopping carts are abandoned. The main reasons: deceptive practices (not showing total cost upfront / adding high “taxes” or delivery charges), stupidly requiring customer to set up an account) and bad UX (too complex to do).
The Web Can’t Survive a Monoculture – “Web developers are right to fear a monoculture, but they don’t seem to appreciate their agency in the solution. They have the power to protect the platform if only they take the call.”