Bruce Lawson's personal site

• Responsive Images! <img srcset> coming to Chromium. And “Stay tuned for the <picture> element”. After 2 and a half years, this makes me happy.
• App-pocalypse Now by Jeff Attwood. “Nothing terrifies me more than an app with no moral conscience in the desperate pursuit of revenue that has full access to everything on my phone”
• How to shrinkwrap and center elements horizontally
• Screen Reader User Survey #5 Results 97% of Screen Reader users who replied have JavaScriptenabled; 82% use a Screen Readeron mobile, using headings is primary navigation method
• Related: Why screen reader detection on the web is a bad thing
• doesn’t work in lynx doesn’t mean it’s not accessible: “we cannot be held to not using features of HTML because they don’t work in Lynx” says Steve Faulkner
• Show me the money: How Opera started thinking about the bottom line – and what that did to its software – interview with Opera’s CEO and CTO (Håkon Wium Lie) on switch Presto to Blink, Coast, & video compression in all Opera browsers
• Why the NetInfo API is a potential footgun for developers by Rich Tibbett

Welcome to the first in an occasional series called “Monday meh”, in which I briefly fulminate about something that made me a bit grumpy.

Occasionally, web pundits complain about Android fragmentation. “Fragmentation” is Punditese for “oh dear me, I hate diversity because it makes my job so hard”.

If there were only iPhones, the job of web developers would be much easier. But, of course, most people in the world would then have no access to the Web. Call me “Captain Priority of Constituencies” if you want, but denying most of the world access to the Web in order to make a few people’s lives easier is what computer scientists term “getting it wrong” and “missing the point”.

It’s like being a bartender and complaining that your job would be so much easier if no customers ever bothered you while you’re polishing glasses and reading your Mixology books.

Disagree? Please meh my meh.

(Last Updated on 27 February 2014)

Bridging the gap between native and web

• Installable web apps by PPK: “The mobile browser “bookmark�� function should become “install�� and place an icon on the home screen. This icon starts up the web page or web app; likely from local memory.” Good article, though I disagree with the idea that the web app is a local copy – that’s re-inventing Widgets. It should be the live, instantly-updatable web site, “offlinerificated” with Service Workers.
• Meanwhile, Google’s Paul Kinlan disagrees: Add to Home Screen Is Not What the Web Needs. Is It?
• Manifest for bookmarking web applications draft spec
• A Review of apps that use network information – research by @marcosc on whether such API on Web is needed (or possible)
• The state of standalone apps on iOS – “we examined 360 web applications that claim to be capable of running “standalone” in iOS (i.e., the web application asserts that it’s usable outside the context of iOS’s default browser). We put those claims to the test by manually checking if the apps could, in fact, be used as standalone.”
• Service Worker + Push API – “outlines an API which integrates with the Service Worker to enable delivery of push messages to applications which do not have visible tabs”
• Media playback restrictions in Blink – “Blink and WebKit have a setting for requiring a “user gesture�� to play or pause an audio or video element … this gets in the way of reasonable use cases like games or playlists, and developers are not impressed … as an experiment we’ve removed the restrictions in Opera beta for Android. However, I’ve also found a workaround for current browsers.”

Standards

• Web Components in 2014 – “here’s the “plans and expectations” summary for the Web Components spec umbrella.”
• “Battle for baseline�� post by Roman Komarov about flexboxes and baseline aligning
• Bad Forms – a website cataloguing bad form design
• GOV.UK social sharing buttons: the first 10 weeks – “our users aren’t exactly demonstrating an overwhelming case for us retaining social sharing buttons � at least on desktops”
• 4 HTTP Security headers you should always be using
• WhatFont – “easily get font information about the text you are hovering on” via a bookmarklet or extension
• Web Audio API – Boris Smus’ book online, free.
• Coding Accessibility: An interview with Steve Faulkner – “what user experience designers should know about how code supports accessibility” (contains beefcake photo, too)
• Wikipedia vs. the Small Screen – Just 1% of edits are made with mobile. “Will people continue to create articles and edit its nine million existing ones on the small screen of a smartphone or tablet?”

Misc

• The Efficiency of Drug Patents and Other Silly Things Economists Say – on the use of vitamin C as a cancer treatment “One potential hurdle is that pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to fund trials of intravenous vitamin C because there is no ability to patent natural products.”