Bruce Lawson's personal site

Bah, five hours sleep. Bah overpriced breakfast (but nearest cheap, authentic diner is 5 miles away). Bah suburbia and freeways. Bah inescapable hum of air conditioning. Bah permatanned men named Chet and Dwight with immobile foreheads synergising over 7 am power breakfasts. Bah emails inviting me to meet Vladimir, director of sales, at booth 666 to discuss FelchCloud CDN, ‘our revolutionary cloud-based cloudycloudcloud, taking cloudycloudclouds to The Next Level(tm)’. Bah $4 bottles of water with a little tag printed “hydrate” without even a ‘please’. Bah shiny-toothed shiny-haired empty-souled TV news anchors talking about a lost dog in downtown Santa Nowhere. Bah ‘this life contains chemicals known by the state of california to cause sadness’. Bah “Democracy Boulevard”. Bah the George Bush Memorial Euthanasia Centre. Bah low-cholesterol omelettes made with egg whites. Bah 6 am joggers with bluetooth mobile phone earpieces. Bah.

• TOP OF THE POPS THIS WEEK: Facebook and the media: united, they attack the web – a jolly good piece on Facebook Instant by Baldur Bjarnason
• Media Session spec “enables web developers to obtain different levels of platform media focus and implicit access to platform media keys such as hardware keys found on keyboards, headsets, remote controls, and software keys found in notification areas and on lock screens of mobile devices.” It’s being prototyped by Opera, and we intend to send a Blink ‘intend to implement’ soon.
• Fixing the scrollTop bug
• text-rendering: optimizeLegibility is Decadent and Depraved by Matttttt Marquis, world expert on depraved decadence
• ARIA Examples – Some practical ARIA examples to enhance your application accessibility by Heydon Pickering, webmaster of all the haystacks in Bury St Somerset O’Groats
• Art-Directing SVG Images With The viewBox Attribute: How-To, Notes, Tips and Why We Need A viewBox Property in CSS by Sara Soueiadan, the world’s favourite Lebanese SVG blogger.
• What one may find in robots.txt – snooping around files disallowed in robots.txt by the Israeli government and others.
• Adults’ media use and attitudes (PDF) – UK communications regulator (OFCOM) report “on adults’ media use and attitudes … with a particular focus on online use and attitudes”. Chapter 1 compares 2014 against the first report in 2005.
• A Qualitative Study of Internet Non-Use in Great Britain and Sweden (PDF) (2012)
• Web Components vs Extract Widget patent – “Google Polymer and Mozilla X-Tags, are reusing the concepts of the patent” allegedly.
• In Defence Of WordPress – “I think there’s far too little appreciation for everything WordPress does.”
• Let’s Keep Helping Molly Holzschlag – funding drive for medication and living expenses for Molly who’s recovering after 2 rounds of chemo.
• The best dinosaur

• GOLD: Sex, Houdini and the Extensible Web – how the principles of the Extensible Web Manifesto speed up iteration of web standards, and how Project Houdini is bringing those principles to CSS (Disclosure: I commissioned and edited this.)
• Trainspotting: Firefox 38 – Yay for our chums at Firefox for the release of FF38 with <img srcset> and <picture> support. CUDDLES.
• An Introduction to Responsive Images ”” DrupalJam – a 30 min video of ME!! introducing Responsive Images
• The state of web components – a useful round-up of the blockers at the moment, by Mozilla’s Wilson Page
• Chat Wars – Microsoft vs. AOL – fascinating archaeological essay by one of the MSN Messenger Service programmers about the war of the protocols
• An Introduction To Graphical Effects in CSS by Sara Soueidan
• Mozilla adds -webkit prefix emulation to select sites in Firefox – I stand by my 2012 opinion of vendor prefixes.
• schema.org 2.0 for all you taxonomisin’ microdata/ RDFa/ JSON-LD-lovin’ ontologists out there
• Eric Meyer on the past, present and future of CSS
• Read and learn with Opera: Access free books and math materials from Worldreader and Microsoft Math on Opera Mini – Opera’s worked with worldreader to bring 15,000 books free to phones, even 10 year old feature phones. As a literature graduate, I approve!
• Nantucket: an accidental limerick detector – Natural Language Processing & tweaking Python algorithms to find accidental limericks in text
• Holograms used to berate people illegally parking in disabled bays – “A non-profit group in Russia is attempting to use hologram technology to teach people who wrongfully park in disabled bays a lesson by projecting an image of a disabled person explaining their difficulties”.
• Oh! Selector ♪ a ukulele homage to selectors by W3C’s @ourmaninjapan (with new rough’n’tough beard)
• Incognitube – The least watched Youtube videos

• Notes On Client-Rendered Accessibility by Marcy Sutton
• I wish I could pay for things on my mobile bill by Stuart Langridge; another post we’ve talked for years in the pub about
• CSS Form Styling Module – “A Collection of Interesting Ideas”. An attempt to begin identify the UI primitives that form inputs are made up of, and then provide styling hooks. Because it is, of course, vital that forms be in corporate goldenrod and peachpuff.
• Are Social Sharing Buttons on Mobile Sites a Waste of Space? – “Mobile users actually are 11.5 times more likely to tap an advertisement than they are to tap on a social sharing button.”
• I spent most of today making a Single Page App. Jeremy Keith on a revolutionary new way to make Single Page Apps that I’ve dubbed “Adangular”.
• It’s not what you think – a good post by @Cennydd on working on multi-million user products. Matches my experience at Opera.
• Anorak corner: first draft of Media Queries spec, 22 October 2000

• The Future of the Open Web by Peter “Blakey” Gasston. Peter writes “the single most important [new initiative] is the Service Worker API”. (I agree. See my Fronteers talk What the web needs next.)
• Chrome improves Add To Home Screen. Sorta by Sil.
• The problems with the device-adaptation spec by PPK.
• Enabling Pointer Events in Firefox (desktop) Nightly – huzzah!
• Opera for Android has automatic text-wrap by default, so no more horizontal scrolling if you zoom in. And a better Turbo mode for speeding up sites and saving data.
• Smartphone shipments to the Middle East and Africa saw unprecedented year-on-year growth of 83% in 2014 “Spurred by the increased availability of cheaper models and dual-SIM devices”.
• JSON-LD’s Big Day at Google.
• Dealing with SMS Spam from @PaddyPower by Terence Eden.
• Facepalm of the week: £1,215 raised to send “emergency homeopathic support” to Nepal.