Link o’the week: Get Static – “If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static…health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering”
Apple’s attack on service workers – “I very much hope that Safari devs will be reasonable and not go ahead with the drastic hobbling of service workers that they’re planning”
Making Sure Content Lives On… – Uncle @briankardell came up with an interesting service which will tell the wayback machine to take a snapshot of a newly-published article using RSS or an HTTP Post. Any WordPress plugin gurus want to add this to the ‘publish’ process?
Link o’the Week: Open Peeps is a library of illustrated people – mix and match expressions, clothes, etc. Free for personal/commercial use, by Pablo Stanley.
Stop using Material Design text fields! – “I recently started working on a project built with Google’s Material Design UI library, and noticed quite a few usability and accessibility issues.”
Proposal o’the week: Focus Traversal API – “a proposed feature that would allow an author to better understand and manipulate the Focus system within a web page. This includes support for computing the next and previous Focus targets for any given element, moving the focus forward or backward programatically from an element without knowing the next focus target, and other focus related features.”
Using the HTML title attribute – Updated March 2020 Uncle Stevo says “If you want to hide content from mobile and tablet users as well as assistive tech users and keyboard only users, use the title attribute”. Basically, it’s only useful for labeling iframes.
roughViz – JavaScript library for creating sketchy/hand-drawn styled charts in the browser.
Do Not Touch Your Face – “Using your webcam, you train a machine learning algorithm (specifically Tensorflow.js) to recognize you touching your face and not touching your face. Once it’s trained, it watches and alerts you when you touch your face.”
Anorak Corner: The History of the URL – “all that matters is adoption. If you can get people to use it, however slipshod it might be, they will help you craft it into what they need. The corollary is, of course, no one is using it, it doesn’t matter how technically sound it might be.”
MDN Browser Compatibility Survey – “We know from past surveys that browser compatibility is a very common pain point, and we would like to get a better understanding of these pain points. This survey will take you approximately 10 minutes”
Here’s a newly-recorded version of one of the favourite songs I wrote (crappy cassette 4-track demo previously posted). I was obsessed with TS Eliot’s poem Marina, a monologue inspired by Shakespeare’s Pericles. So I ripped that off, nicked a line or two from The Waste Land, pinched a bit of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and, while the literary store detective was looking the other way, ran off with a bit of Dylan Thomas too. The Shakespeare reading is by my friend Richard Crowest. Bass guitar and production is by Shez.
Aquamarine –
I’m a ship becalmed after stormy seas.
You’ve been silver and green;
I love you best now for your clarity.
You sing to me in sharpened keys.
You bring me emeralds and harmonies.
I will be here for you if you’ll be here for me
Sometimes, the tide turns
and everything is monochrome.
Aquamarine –
Your wet hair dries in the warm sea breeze.
Lie still and dream
Of the mountains – there you feel free.
Sail across still memories
Under sleep where all the waters meet.
I will be here for you if you’ll be here for me
Dry stones and white bones
and everything is monochrome.
Aquamarine –
This music crept upon the water to me
I’m a machine
Powered by your electricity.
You sail across still memories
You bring me emeralds and energy.
I will be here for you if you’ll be here for me
From the horizon
The world can turn monochrome.
What seas, what shores,
what great rocks?
Seize what’s yours;
What grey rocks?
What islands? What waters lap at the bow?
The sea’s daughter, you ebb and you flow;
The sea’s daughter, emerald green;
The sea’s daughter, Aquamarine.
Semantic HTML with Bruce Lawson – I bravely went on the @JSJabber podcast to tell them to use less JavaScript and more good old fashioned HTML. None of them punched me.
Howdy-do, Prince 13.2! Support custom list markers for PDF/UA; Support rendering intents for color conversion; Fixed issue affecting Indic texts and Baekmuk Batang font; Fixed bug affecting the JavaScript Array slice method, and lots more.
Google users in UK to lose EU data protection – “Google is planning to move its British users’ accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead, sources said. The shift, prompted by Britain’s exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection”
[css-device-adapt] Remove @viewport – CSS Working Group proposes to deprecate this spec. (it shipped in Opera Presto and IE Trident, but those have joined the choir invisible)
The Great Google Revolt – “Some of its employees tried to stop their company from doing work they saw as unethical. It blew up in their faces.” Long read.
Scroll To Text Fragment is coming soon (to Chromium browsers), even though its syntax is even uglier than me. So you can link to any text in a page, even though there’s no ID to add to the URL. Hope they fix its accessibility before it gets released, though.
Squarespace, Wix, & Weebly: Accessibility Review – “For accessibility, avoid Weebly. Both Squarespace and Wix are capable of creating accessible sites, but the user has to be looking to do so—it isn’t gonna happen by default. Wix seems to be taking accessibility a bit more seriously than Squarespace, so I’m inclined to recommend Wix as the better option”. Disclosure: I do occasional consultancy for Wix on accessibility and standards.
Toward Responsive Elements – Uncle Brian writes about the work going on in @csswg to give us Element queries that can actually be implemented, are compatible with CSS’s architecture today and are “webby”.
Tech Startups Are Flooding Kenya With Apps Offering High-Interest Loans – “App-based lending has become synonymous in Kenya with predatory practices .. Last summer newspapers reported that a 25-year-old man from a tea farming village north of Nairobi had hanged himself after defaulting on a $30 loan from an unspecified app.”
2020 State of Malware Report (PDF) “the average number of threats detected on a Mac is not only on the rise, but has surpassed Windows—by a great deal.”
A new song. It’s inspired by numbers stations, “a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers”. This got me thinking about clandestine communication and betrayal.
I heard chatter on the network.
But I couldn’t crack your code.
I was waiting defenceless
for your bombshells to explode.
If you’re here, there is a reason.
Your ciphers are all known.
To everything there is a season.
Now you’re here, your cover’s blown.
I don’t recall why we are enemies.
I don’t understand what we are fighting for.
I forgot my ideology,
half way across the bridge
in this cold, cold war.
You walked down to the checkpoint.
I saw graffiti on the wall.
You presented your false papers,
and the wall began to fall.
Here’s another old song that my band The Lucies used to gig, mixed last Wednesday. I’ve no idea what it’s about—I was in a “special state of mind” when I wrote it. “Yakamoz” is a Turkish word which is used when the moonlight shines on the sea, ocean etc.
Candyfloss moon
there is only half an hour til daybreak
You leave me too soon
Stay a while and I’ll watch your heart break
Through all the tears and the rage
This is our golden age
Through the silver rain
I see you wax and wane
Candyfloss moon
I’ve been torn apart and reassembled
Here in this room
I can see the stars that you resemble
Turn off your mind
turn down your radio
I hear angels singing all the time
Shut down your shadow
slow down your heartbeat
Why do your eyes shine?
Yakamoz moon
I see you glow on tranquil seas
Your flowers are in bloom
lilies, fuchsia, rosemary
Link o’the Week: Old CSS, new CSS – fun article about the very early days of CSS and web development. You young’uns don’t know you’re born.
Code snippet o’the Week: Building an accessible autocomplete control – An excellent explanation of how to build an accessible autocomplete that works without JavaScript. My go-to code when I need one of these.
Click-Away Pound Survey – “In 2016, the survey found that more than 4 million people abandoned a retail website because of the [accessibility] barriers they found, taking with them an estimated spend of £11.75 billion. In 2019, that lost business, the ‘Click-Away Pound’, has grown to £17.1 billion.”
Hydration – Jeremy Keith on why Server-Side Rendering “has a whiff of progressive enhancement to it but none of the user benefits.”
The State of JavaScript 2019 – in which 40% of “full-stack developers” describe themselves as “CSS Experts”. Hmmm.
Inclusive Design for the Immersive Web – proposal for a W3C Community Group to come up with guidelines to ensure accessible XR (virtual reality and augmented reality)
Prince 13.1 adds support for CSS variables in @page rules and margin boxes; changes the @page rules to inherit from the document root element; extends -prince-pdf-tag-type to support the Artifact and Table values; fixes Thai line-breaking support.
Mastercard chief says breaking up global payments system is ‘stupid’ – Concerns about data integrity help explain why Mastercard pulled out of Libra”. “every time you talked to the main proponents of Libra, I said ‘Would you put that in writing?’ They wouldn’t. .. “when you don’t understand how money gets made, it gets made in ways you don’t like”.
A very old song that I wrote when I was about 17, inspired by melodic pop-punk of Buzzcocks and The Undertones. Shez and I gigged it in a school band, then I forgot it. When Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks died, I remembered it, so recorded it. My old chum Shez played bass when we were in a school band, and mixed it yesterday, 37 years later!
She just loves to be loved.
She just needs to feel needed
And you know she will tear you in half in the end.
She just likes to feel liked
And it doesn’t really matter who by
And you know she will break your heart, my friend.
Don’t ask her does she love you?
You’ll get a vague reply.
So what, she said she needs you?
Would she look you in the eye?
And when she upsets you
Don’t let her see you cry.
She feeds on your emotions
She’s gonna bleed you dry.
You thought that you’d got her to keep.
She says the novelty wore off after a week.
And you know she just loves to be loved.
She’ll love you for ten days
and then she won’t remember your face
And you know she just loves to be loved.
And now that you are just her ex,
and you see she’s moved on to her next.
And you know she just loves to be loved.