Bruce Lawson's personal site

• Link O’The Week: Common accessibility issue: moving to a page section without shifting keyboard focus – and some good tips on testing
• Split – “the split that worries the most is this: The people who make the web vs. the people who are excluded from making the web” by Jeremy Keith
• Inline SVG… Cached – neat trick from Chris Coyier, building on work by Scott Jehl
• The Gender Spectrum Collection – “a stock photo library featuring images of trans and non-binary models that go beyond the clichés”.
• So you’ve ‘seen’ the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored
• Optimize your content for Google Discover
• Google AMP lowered our page speed, and there’s no choice but to use it – “AMP isn’t about speed. It’s about control. AMP is an open source project. That evokes images of open, honest, collaboration amongst equals. But that’s not what’s happening.”
• How to enable Dual SIM feature on Google Pixel 3 on Android Q Beta
• Digging Into The Display Property: The Two Values Of Display – Auntie Rachel explains that CSS is moving into two values for the display property: one defines how an element behaves in the page, the other ow its children behave
• Progressive web application as a share option in Android – “any Android application can share directly to your web app through the standard native sharing dialog”
• Native image lazy-loading for the web! – Chrome-only, so far, but it’s a progressive enhancement so use it already!
• How to Work With the Raw HTML for Emails You Receive – I’ve had the misfortune to edit some HTML emails lately, and wanted to know how they work. Here’s a short video that shows how to get and manipulate the source of any HTML mail you receive, to experiment
• YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant -“Proposals to change recommendations and curb conspiracies were sacrificed for engagement, staff say.”
• Tailored design thinking and process for at scale engagements
• Student jailed for blackmailing porn users worldwide – he booked ad space on legal porn sites. when user clicked through, unpatched systems were infected with ransomware. He shifted more than £4M through crypto-currency platforms.
• Clowns, Jokers, and Echo Chambers by Shane Hudson
• Is your pregnancy app sharing your intimate data with your boss? – “As apps to help moms monitor their health proliferate, employers and insurers pay to keep tabs on the vast and valuable data”
• China’s hi-tech war on its Muslim minority – “Smartphones and the internet gave the Uighurs a sense of their own identity – but now the Chinese state is using technology to strip them of it”. An awful story.

• Planning for Responsive Images with some magical CSS Grid
• What’s new on iOS 12.2 for Progressive Web Apps by Maximiliano Firtman
• Bit, a distributed virtual component repository for projects built in a modular way (open source)
• Standardizing WASI: A system interface to run WebAssembly outside the web by Lin Clark
• HTTP State Tokens – draft spec by Mike West (Google) on a mechanism for”better cookies”
• HTML email reborn, as Google brings AMP to your inbox -“With AMP embeds, email can now contain rich interactivity, not just text and pictures”. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.
• Grindr ‘up for sale on security grounds’ – “US authorities expressed concern that [Kunlun Group] the firm’s ownership of the US-based firm is a national security risk”. Kunlun is the leading partner in the consortium that own Opera browsers.
• Idiosyncracies of the HTML parser – a fabulously geeky book by Simon Pieters
• aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.com – a useful URL lengthener

• HTML, CSS, and the Path to Accessible Web Design by Jennifer Riggins, quoting me.
• All you need to know about hyphenation in CSS by Mr Richard Rutter
• Sophisticated Partitioning with CSS Grid by Rob Weychert
• 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.
• Square leverages Weebly acquisition to bridge offline and online commerce – Square “wants to play a part in all transactions — this is how it makes its money, whether a sale takes place online or offline.”
• 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.”
• And because of the EU fine, Google to offer Android users browser choice by PPK
• Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing
• An exclusive look at an original iPhone prototype

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.

• rebuilding of the original NeXT web browser – “Ready to browse the World Wide Web using WorldWideWeb?”. See how your site would look on the first-ever web browser
• 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.”
• Designing An Aspect Ratio Unit For CSS by Auntie Rachel on Smashing Mag.
• Making Sense of Chrome Lite Pages by Tim Kadlec
• The Web We Broke – Ethan Marcotte on WebAim top million homepages accessibility report
• Over 75% Of Global Magento Websites At High Risk Due To A Simple Oversight
• DuckDuckGo CEO testifies: Privacy legislation isn’t ‘anti-advertising’ (via my much-less-handsome-than-me cousin @simonmigliano)
• 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.”
• The World Wide Web turns 30: our favorite memories from A to Z
• Brit prisoners to be kept on the straight and narrow with JavaScript and CSS – coding training to prepare prisoners for work after release. “The opportunity for a short, C#, shock has sadly been missed.”

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.

• An accessibility analysis of the top 1,000,000 home pages – “97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG 2 failures”
• 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
• The web just got an official password-free login standard (featuring the pullitzer-winning fact “there are many, many web pages” </snark>)
• Using CSS Grid the right way – “Use names. Use frs. Don’t use a grid system. Wait, what? “
• 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.)
• Interesting Custom Element Data Begins – what sorts of custom elements are out there in the wild? asks Brian “Extensible” Kardell
• Semantics to Screen Readers – how do screen readers and other assistive programs actually access your content? What information do they use?
• TypeScript introduction – “an in-depth series covering almost everything from pure basics to some complexities”
• Frontend Workshop from HTML/CSS/JS to TypeScript/React/Redux – “In this two-day workshop you’ll learn the basics of frontend development while building a working web app”, by Microsoft, open license
• Spammers are abusing Twitter cards to lend legitimacy to fraudulent adverts by Uncle Tezza, @edent
• Revolut insiders reveal the human cost of a fintech unicorn’s wild rise – just because it’s all start-uppy and disruptive, it doesn’t mean it’s not vile and exploitative
• Talking of which … Amazon Warehouse Workers Game
• 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”

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)
• The Dark Side of the Grid (Part 1) – part 1 of 3 in a series of articles about CSS Grid layout and accessibility
• CSS Scroll Snap — How It Really Works
• Building a modern carousel with CSS scroll snap, smooth scrolling, and pinch-zoom – by my nephew who doesn’t have a local area network
• 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
• Google partially backtracks on Chrome changes that would break ad blockers
• Google admits error over hidden microphone – Google forgot to disclose that that Nest Guard (a home alarm product available since 2017) contained a microphone.
• Smart feature phones to generate $28 bn revenues in 3 years: Report – “The global smart feature phone demand grew 252 per cent year-on-year in 2018 – albeit from a low base, contributing roughly 16 per cent of the total feature phone volumes”
• A New Tool Protects Videos From Deepfakes and Tampering – finally, a use-case for blockchain! (That’s not for libertarians, conspiracy theorists or drug dealers)
• WinRAR versions released in the last 19 years impacted by severe security flaw that can be abused to hijack users’ systems just by tricking a WinRAR user into opening a malicious archive. “Over 500 million WinRAR users at risk”

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.

• Link o’ the Week: Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS – “The calamity of complexity that the current industry direction on JavaScript is unleashing upon designers is of human choice and design.”
• 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?
• WebExtensions v3 considered harmful by Daniel Glazman (ex-co chair, CSS WG)
• 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
• HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points – “what I will never do is help you build a world that someone like me would have never been able to enter.” By Rachel Andrew
• Financial Inclusion Technology – “How technology can affect Financial Inclusion in the developing world” by Nir Benita (and old Wix colleague)
• How to publish your PWA onto the Google Play Store
• Design patterns for mental health – “a pattern library for digital mental-health services”
• 10 Year Challenge: How Popular Websites Have Changed
• 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.”
• Net neutrality activist ‘throttles’ street traffic outside FCC building – then cycled slowly up and down the remaining lane with a sign offering drivers “priority access” to his “fast lane” for $5/month.
• Crypto Exchange Says It Can’t Repay $190 Million to Clients After Founder Dies With Only Password
• 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.

• Big Win for Web Accessibility in Domino’s Pizza Case – “the district court can order compliance with WCAG 2.0 as an equitable remedy if, after discovery, the website and app fail to satisfy the ADA.”
• IDB-Keyval – “a super-simple-small promise-based keyval store implemented with IndexedDB”. Basically, async localstorage, by Jank Architect
• Cross-Cultural Design and the Role of UX by Jenny Shen
• Which Smartphone Features Really Matter to Consumers? – TL;DR: storage, battery life, processor speed, duh.
• Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years – AFAICT, “protected tweets” (whatever they are) rather than DMs. Android app only, not web, iOS.
• The Big Hangup: Why the Future Is Not Just Your Phone – “The once-revolutionary smartphone is losing its power to amaze—and maybe its singular hold on our lives”

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.