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If you don’t know the name Igalia, you’ve still certainly used their code. Igalia is “an open source consultancy specialized in the development of innovative projects and solutions”, which tells you very little, but they’ve been involved in adding many features to the open-source browsers (which is now all browsers) such as MathML and CSS Grid.

One of their new initiatives is very exciting, called Open Prioritisation (I refuse to mis-spell it with a “z”). The successful campaign to support Yoav Weiss adding the <picture> element and friends to Blink and WebKit showed that web developers would contribute towards crowdfunding new browser features, so Igalia are running an experiment to get the diverse interests and needs of the web develoment community to prioritise which new features should be added to the web platform.

They’ve identified some possible new features that are “shovel-ready”—that is, they’re fully specified and ready to be worked on, and the Powers That Be who decide what gets upstreamed and shipped are supportive of their inclusion. Igalia says,

Igalia is offering 6 possible items which we could do to improve the commons with open community support, as well as what that would cost. All you need to do is pledge to the ‘pledged collective’ stating that if we ran such a campaign you’re likely to contribute some dollars. If one of these reaches its goal in pledges, we will announce that and begin the second stage. The second stage is about actually running the funding campaign as a collective investment.

I think this is a brilliant idea and will be pledging some of my pounds (if they are worth anything after Brexit). Can I humbly suggest that you consider doing so, too? If you can’t, don’t fret (these are uncertain times) but please spread the word. Or if your employer has some sort of Corporate Social Responsibility program, perhaps you might ask them to contribute? After all, the web is a common resource and could use some nurturing by the businesses it enables.

If you’d like to know more, Uncle Brian Kardell explains in a short video. Or (shameless plug!) you can hear Brian discuss it with Vadim Makeev and me in the fifth episode of our podcast, The F-Word (transcript available, naturally). All the information on the potential features, some FAQs and no photos of Brian are to be found on Igalia’s Open Prioritization page.

Read More

• Open Prioritization and Advocacy – Brian on the experiment and what he personally has decided to pledge
• The F-Word: Brian Kardell on Open Prioritization experiment, Igalia, MathML and the Web commons

• The F-word Episode 5 – Wow, a sonic double whammy! Not only did Taylor Swift release Folklore, but Episode 5 of @fword_dev is just out. Vadim and I invited the George Clooney of web standards, Brian Kardell, to tell us about the Open Prioritization experiment, Igalia, MathML and the Web commons.
• ARIA Grid As an Anti-Pattern – Uncle Aadrdian points out more more bad advice in the ARIA Authoring Practices note. Is there a good, trustworthy alternative to ARIA Authoring Practices guide that devs can copy/ paste from?
• Grids Part 1: To grid or not to grid – “When do you use a grid vs. a table, and why?” by Sarah Higley
• Web Accessibility Checklist – I updated my massive Web Accessibility checklist to include turning off smooth scroll if use prefers reduced motion and to warn against some bits of the ARIA authoring practices, and to trust Uncle Adrian instead
• Inclusively Hiding & Styling Checkboxes and Radio Buttons by Sara Soueidan
• One web component to rule them all? – by Scott Jehl
• All the Ways to Make a Web Component – June 2020 Update – “Compare coding style, bundle size and performance of 33 different ways to make a Web Component.”
• The rise and fall of Adobe Flash – “Before Flash Player sunsets this December, we talk its legacy with those who built it.”
• Ask an expert: Why is CSS . . . the way it is? – Have you ever rolled your eyes and muttered “Just what were the @csswg smoking?”. Web Methuselah Chris Lilley tells you how some of the weirdness got there.
• Google: Mobile-first Indexing – “we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first … our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages … If you have a responsive site…you shouldn’t have to change anything.”
• Review of Mozilla’s new Wireguard-based $5/mo VPN service – Mozilla’s VPN is available now for Windows, Android, and iOS.
• Microsoft Announces that it will drop official support of PHP on Windows – “the bottom line is there will likely be very little change for Windows users.”
• Just Too Efficient – Tim Bray
• The Whimsical Club – Websites that spark joy. A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

Yesterday I asked “What’s the most up-to-date info on aria-live regions (and

) support in AT?” for some client work I’m doing. As usual, Twitter was responsive and helpful.

Heydon replied

Should be fine, support is good for live regions. Not sure about output, though … Oh, you’re adding the p _with_ the other XHR content? That will have mixed results in my experience.

Brennan said

I’ve seen some failed announcements with live-regions on VoiceOver, especially with iframes. (Announcement of the title seems to kill any pending live content).output has surprisingly good support but (IIRC) is not live by default on at least one browser (IE, I think).

Some more resources people pointed me to:

• ARIA live regions explainer doc on MDN
• On Demand Live Regions A tiny module for making screen readers announce text on demand, without a visual change to the interface, by Heydon Pickering
• output: HTML’s native live region element – Use role="status" to bridge some gaps in browser/ AT support of <output>
• Accessibility Support Will your code work with assistive technologies?

My chum and co-author Remington Sharp tweeted

We need a universally recognised icon/image/logo for "works offline".

Like the PWA or HTML5 logo. We need to be able to signal to visitors that our URLs are always available.

To the consumer, the terms Progressive Web App or Service Worker are meaningless. So I applied my legendary branding, PR and design skills to come up with something that will really resonate with a web user: the fact that this app works online, offline – anywhere.

So the new logo is a riff on the HTML5 logo, because this is purely web technologies. It has the shield, a wifi symbol on one side and a crossed out wifi symbol on the other, and a happy smile below to show that it’s happy both on and offline. Above it is the acronym “wank” which, of course, stands for “Works anywhere—no kidding!”

Take it to use on your sites. I give the fruits of my labour and creativity free, as a gift to humanity.

• Me me me corner: The F-word episode 4 in which Vadim Makeev and I discuss Apple’s game of monopoly, form slappers, where’s Houdini, browser bugs and Web compat, chicken-killin’ Mike Taylor, and I make another Great Joke.
• Thought Leadership o’the Week: Platform Adjacency Theory by Alex Russell. There’s a lot to get my head around in this article, so I don’t know what I think yet. But I’ll probably end up agreeing with him, because he’s always bloody right about everything (except fashion).
• July’s CSS News – Wooo! Flexbox Gaps, Aspect Ratio Unit, Native Masonry Support, Subgrid in Chrome, prefers-reduced-data, :marker. Auntie Rachel has all the latest CSS news!
• Quick Tips for High Contrast Mode by Sarah Higley
• When Sass and New CSS Features Collide by the splendid Ana Tudor
• Tabler Icons – A set of over 550 free MIT-licensed high-quality SVG icons for you to use in your web projects.
• Accessibility for Product Managers by @petervangrieken
• India bans TikTok, dozens of other Chinese apps – Also UC Browser and UC News, CM Browser and the QQ apps.
• A/B Street – “Ever been stuck in traffic on a bus, wondering why is there legal street parking instead of a dedicated bus lane? A/B Street is a game exploring how small changes to a city affect the movement of drivers, cyclists, transit users, and pedestrians.”
• CRAPCHA: Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement – Wonderful and useless.

I’ve been working on a client project and one of the tasks was remediating some data tables. As I began researching the subject, it became obvious that most of the practical, tested advice comes from my old mates Steve Faulkner and Adrian Roselli.

I’ve collated them here so they’re in one place when I need to do this again, and in case you’re doing similar. But all the glory belongs with them. Buy them a beer when you next see them.

• Short note on what CSS display properties do to table semantics TL;DR – changing the display property hides the semantics from the accessibility tree in some browsers and therefore from assistive tech.
• Functions to Add ARIA to Tables and Lists – Adrian shows how to restore table semantics with ARIA
• Short note on improving usability of scrollable regions – if your tables horizontally scroll, make sure that keyboard users can access the scrollers
• Fixed Table Headers – If you have scrolling tables, you might want ‘sticky’ headers that don’t scroll. Uncle Adrian shows you how.
• Tables, Tequila and Beer – Uncle Steve shows that simple tables don’t need the scope attribute to identify a th as a row or column header.
• Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At by Uncle Richard Rutter
• Table Design Patterns On The Web – Bonus link! Cousin Jing shows some different design patterns for responsive, accessible tables.

• News o’the Week: Antitrust: European Commission opens investigations into Apple’s App Store rules – “The investigations concern in particular the mandatory use of Apple’s own proprietary in-app purchase system and restrictions on the ability of developers to inform iPhone and iPad users of alternative cheaper purchasing possibilities outside of apps.”
• Related: Apple Threatens to Move Basecamp’s New Email App to Trash – “Scrutiny of Apple’s App Store policies heats up as the company heads into its annual software conference.”
• Igalia Chat – Brian Kardell sits down with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Langridge to chat about rendering engine diversity, history and the health of the web browser ecosystem.
• Flow: A New Browser Engine by Sam Sneddon
• Safari 14 Beta Release Notes
• Make your PWA feel more like an app – some nice little tips for making it more ‘native’.
• CSS custom properties and the cascade by Jeremy Keith
• CSS Custom Properties Fail Without Fallback – Matthias Ott looks at what you can do about the issue Jeremy raises
• Hybrid positioning with CSS variables and max() by Lea Verou
• Warning—Apple Suddenly Catches TikTok Secretly Spying On Millions Of iPhone Users – Tiktok on iOS caught stealing the contents of users’ clipboard every 2-3 keystrokes. “Now Apple’s welcome iOS 14 security and privacy changes have caught them red-handed still doing something they shouldn’t. Something they said was fixed.”
• Meaningful connectivity – Alliance for Affordable Internet pushes for its new standard: “We have meaningful connectivity when we can use the internet every day using an appropriate device with enough data and a fast connection.”
• Google blew a ten-year lead – “something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software. Docs and Sheets haven’t changed in a decade. Google Drive remains impossible to navigate. Sharing is complicated.”
• SVGuitar – library to create beautiful SVG guitar chord charts directly in the browser
• Machine learning-generated Peanuts comics and an interesting rumination on what Art is: “In some ways, the model represents the disembodied essence of the Peanuts aesthetic, but do I have Charles Shulz soul? For many obvious reasons, I do not – this model knows nothing of the motivations, desires and intentions behind Charles Shulz and his works.”

• Link o’the Week 1: A user’s guide to CSS variables by Lea Verou
• Link o’the Week 2: Global and Component Style Settings with CSS Variables – “Or how I use CSS variables to create more manageable project styles and more portable patterns” by Sara Souiedan
• Optimizing keyboard navigation using tabindex and ARIA also by Sara Souiedan
• Flow browser passes the Acid tests – “Our goal for Flow is to render websites correctly the first time that anyone tries them. Most of the Acid3 subtests are going to make a real difference.”
• Introducing Alpine.js: A Tiny JavaScript Framework – “involves no build steps and provides all of the tools you need to build a basic user interface”. I haven’t used it yet but hear good things about it.
• CSS :is() and :where() are coming to browsers
• The Surprising Things That CSS Can Animate
• IBM quits facial-recognition market over police racial-profiling concerns – Every tech company should put out their statement on their tech’s use for “mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms.
• Covid-19 makes it clearer than ever: access to the internet should be a universal right says Sir Uncle Timbo.
• PHP Marks 25 Years – “This week the web is celebrating 25 years since Rasmus Lerdorf released version 1.0 of his “Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools).” PHP is now used by 78.9% of all the websites whose server-side programming language W3Techs can detect.” – I ❤️ PHP.
• Me! Me! Me! corner: Beginners’ Guide To Writing Good HTML – my 5500 word article for beginners on writing good semantic HTML, using a Cheeky Girls fan site to walk through the thought process.
• Setting up Prince on AWS Lambda and API Gateway by Moi.
• Setting up Prince on EC2 with PHP – also me.

• The F-word, Episode 3 Episode 3 in which Vadim Makeev and I talk about Web site resilience, HTML nesting rules, masonry layout, Web We Want.
• Web Engine Diversity and Ecosystem Health – a very interesting and thought-provoking piece by Brian Kardell
• People, Power and Technology: The 2020 Digital Attitudes Report
• Remediating sites – “you need to make alterations to a web page that already exists, and where you can’t change the HTML, so your job is to write some bits of JavaScript to poke at the page”. Practical advice on developing & testing this with Greasemonkey from @sil
• Disclosure widgets – details and summary, ARIA widgets for IE11, accordions and accessibility by Adrian Roselli
• The Valuable 500 – “The global movement putting disability on the business leadership agenda. We need 500 national and multinational, private sector corporations to be the tipping-point for change and to unlock the business, social and economic value of people living with disabilities across the world. Because the potential of 1.3 billion should not be ignored.”
• Embedded YouTube and Google Maps – are they accessible? TL;DR: not fully.
• Modern Touch-Friendly Design by Addy Osmani
• The Fastest Google Fonts by Hazza Roberts
• Stack Overflow’s 2020 Developer Survey surveyed 65,000 people. Some interesting nuggets: 46.5% of developers said “HTML/ CSS” is their “most dreaded” language; jQuery is still king, but is slowly losing ground to React.js and Angular year over year.
• Military And Intelligence Personnel Can Be Tracked With The Untappd Beer App
• Find wheelchair accessible places with Google Maps – “People can now turn on an “Accessible Places” feature to have wheelchair accessibility information more prominently displayed in Google Map”
• Microsoft: we were wrong about open source – pigs fly, hell freezes over.
• Science confirms it: Websites really do all look the same
• Building a physical <blink> tag! – Quarantine finally causes Terence Eden to lose the plot.
• Developer who wrote vanilla HTML+CSS in Notepad declared a witch

• Does masonry belong in the CSS Grid specification? – The Firefox team have experimented with extending the CSS Grid spec to allow Masonry layout. It’s behind a flag in FF Nightly. The @csswg are looking for feedback.
• Responsive masonry layout with CSS grid + vanilla JavaScript (resize viewport!) by the fab Ana Tudor
• Proper VoiceOver support coming soon to Firefox on MacOS – yay.
• Hammer and Nails – “Do you download source and build tools and run the compiler every time you run an app on your desktop? No? Then why is it fine to make web users do it?”. An intemperate rant by flame-haired FOSS Adonis (or is it “Anubis”?), Stuart Langridge.
• Second-guessing the modern web – article looking at whether React-style development which pushes tons of JS to the client to parse and execute is the best thing ever. TL;DR: no.
• The Web We Want Survey Results – What developers want from devtools, browsers and general standards
• 10 Best Free Static Site Generator Tools – another nifty article by Stuart
• The best totally free web fonts & typefaces
• Styling in the Shadow DOM With CSS Shadow Parts
• Bye, Amazon – Inventor of XML, Tim Bray, quits as a VP at Amazon Web Services “in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19”.
• Web Sites as ‘Public Accommodation’ under a Pandemic – “If you dodged an accessibility lawsuit because you have physical locations, what does it mean when those physical locations close? What about when the number of locations or the operating hours are reduced?”
• Payments and Authentication: Driving toward a Whole Greater than Parts – W3C
• generic-components -“A collection of generic web components with a focus on Accessibility, Easy to use, Easy to style