Bruce Lawson's personal site

• Modern CSS Layout, power and responsibility – Rachel Andrew makes the important point that if CSS Grid Layout loses subgrid, visual tools will produce flat HTML structures so everything is a direct child of the grid, thereby damaging HTML semantic quality (especially important as Grid Layout is the most natural, designer-friendly way to lay out pages)
• Mozilla’s Firefox extensions are changing to be “largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera”, perhaps including some Opera extras like sidebar API. Although they’d “like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers”, Mozilla will use their own .xpi format and require (unspecfiied) “small changes” to Blink extensions rather than using the vendor-neutral .nex format Opera proposed and uses, because apparently they’re “skeptical of the benefits of standard packaging“.
• Mobile Browsing Around The World by Peteypoo Gasston
• Responsive Images Pt. 2 with Yoav Weiss – Yoav puts on a funny voice and draws really fast in this five-minute video
• Where to Put Your Search Role – by Adrian Roselli. TL;DR, not on a <form> element, as that overrides its native semantics
• Making radio buttons and checkboxes easier to use by UK Government Digital Services
• User Agent Intervention – a discussion document by Dmitri “Web Components” Glazkov on what to when “user experience gets so bad that the User Agent is compelled to intervene”
• Using requestIdleCallback, a “new performance API for scheduling work when the user is idle”, says Paul “Idol” Lewis
• Houdini / CSS Face to Face meeting notes (day 1)
• What Open Data can do for Africa’s growing population
• Opera’s “Web on Wheels�� brings free Wi-Fi to 20 Indian cities – to celebrate our 20th birthday, we’re taking a car around 20 cities for 10 months, bringing free, unlimited WiFi
• EU’s new VAT rules forcing thousands out of business article on VATMOSS – mad EU sales tax changes on digital sales
• WordSafety.com checks your product name against swear words & unwanted associations in 19 languages – caveat emptor, though; it didn’t flag up “Boobie Nob” and “TwinkSpank” for me
• Stems: new open file format for music with separate tracks for drums, vocals, bass, harmony, and also the full stereo song for fallback in non-Stem software
• The Slow Web by Cole Henley, is a well-written musing on the rather badly-written article by Hossein Derakhshan. Paul Robert Lloyd wrote and interesting follow-up, too.

(Last Updated on 1 September 2015)

• Opera is twenty years old
• Stop pushing redux – in which PPK argues against me and Jank Architect arguing against him.
• Optimizing Performance – some excellent advice on Google Web Fundamentals by some heavy-hitters
• Understanding critical CSS
• Laying Out A Flexible Future For Web Design With Flexbox
• CSS element() function – “this function renders any part of a website as a live image.”
• CSS dropcaps and initial letters – wrapping text around the *ink* of a drop cap, rather than its box (editors draft)
• Big List of Naughty Strings “which have a high probability of causing issues when used as user-input data”. For QA purposes, of course.
• The End of the Internet Dream – I thought at first this was another dull medium-hosted “the web was better before the hoi polloi came along” getoffmylawnist lament, but the more I read the more I agreed

[From my notebook, earlier this year, on the 15.45 train from London to Birmingham.]

On a packed, hot train
I scrounged space to rest my notepad
To write notes from my London meeting.
Phones chirruped;
Laptops clacked.

And opposite me,
Oblivious in bliss in silence
A woman and her baby
Smiled together
Their gaze unbroken throughout
Enraptured in their wonder and love.

• On PPK’s moratorium on new browser features by me ‘n’ my homies
• If we stand still, we go backwards – Jank Architect’s take on the moratorium
• SLICE: the web – Paul “The new Cilla” Kinlan on the positive aspects of the web as a platform for users and developers
• Fast-forwarding the Web Platform another take on PPK’s article, by Nicolas Bevacqua
• Mobile Web Isn’t Broken, Yet and another, by Mariano Viola
• Ramblings on New Browser Features, Interoperability, Craft, and the Future of the Web – Aaron Gustafson of Microsoft weighs in too
• Considering the Users of Internet Standards IETF draft by Mark Nottingham (him off the W3C Tag) “mandates end users as the highest priority constituency for Internet standards.”
• Say no to 10 years for file sharing – @OpenRightsGroup petition
• BLCK4777 by p01 – Winning 1kb intro released at Assembly 2015. Turn on speakers and wait for a few seconds. Made by Opera’s Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri
• This App Is Cashing In On Giving The World Free Data – “Mobile data costs up to 10% of a person’s average wage in Brazil, Eagle says, and more than a third of someone’s income in Africa, while in the U.S. it’s more like 1% to 2%”
• The picture element is happening say Your Friends In Redmond
• Opera 31 released: CSS multi-column layout, scrollingElement, ES6 computed property names, Web Audio API++, and more. For consumers, it starts up to 70% faster – great for those on slower/ older hardware
• Modern CSS Layout, power and responsibility by Rachel Andrew
• Pointer Events now in Firefox Nightly – so Opera, Chrome, Microsoft, Firefox. Who’s missing, I wonder?
• Google+: I’ve concluded that it’s time for a “pivot�� – “can now focus on doing what it’s already doing quite well”. Note *quite* well. Oof. I never used G+; the way it tied to YouTube was like 2 dogs stuck after sex – neither could move properly and it was very undignified
• Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook has deeper analysis, but no dogsex similes
• Non-blocking Asynchronous JSON.parse Using The Fetch API
• Behavior of <iframe> in vertical writing mode – interesting question now the web is finally getting better support for non-latin scripts
• Tying ecosystems through browsers by David Baron of Mozilla
• Hackers manipulate self-aiming rifle into shooting different targets – your occasional reminder that Internet of Things security is lamentably poor yet vital because, unlike web sites, things can kill you
• How your phone’s battery life can be used to invade your privacy
• Building a smart meeting room w/ LoRa and Physical Web
• Mozilla FlyWeb – “Instead of phones interacting only with the cloud, they can discover and interact with electronics around them that are running empty web clients, such as TV’s, projectors, game consoles, etc. The electronics come to life when connected to phones. The key here is that either the phones serve web apps to these electronics, or the electronics serve web apps to the phones.” (More: Fly Web – A Unified Strategy for the Web on Smart Devices)
• Android Fragmentation Visualized (AKA “Android Strength & Diversity Visualised”) – “We have seen 24,093 distinct devices download our app in the past few months.”
• Making and Breaking the Web With CSS Gradients by Mike “Chicken Legend” Taylr (Mozilla)
• The adblocking revolution is months away (with iOS 9) � with trouble for advertisers, publishers and Google
• Is polyfilling future web APIs a good idea? and Brian Kardell’s reply (TL;DR – “prollyfills are better”)
• Advanced CSS filters
• Position an element relatively to another element from anywhere in the DOM – Web Platform Incubator group: CSS feature request. (As requested by Matt “GRRARRRRGGGHH” Wilcox, 7 years ago.)
• Confidence of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists hits two-year low – “Silicon Valley’s venture capital community is starting to get a little bummed out”. My heart bleeds for them, it really does. I’m going to start a kickstarter to send them some flowers. Who’s with me?
• Sorry Soylent dudes: After the revolution the clueless tech elite will be doomed “Technology is revolutionary, it has changed our lives for the better, but the boosting and veneration of the giant babies of Silicon Valley, both the ones that live there and the ones spawned by its ideology, is a net negative for humanity.”

The Birmingham Mail has published a totally scientific list of Midlands Twitter users who “have the ability to influence the UK more than most in the region”.

Apparently, I’m a respectable number 101 which means I’m more influential than

• Black Sabbath (#191)
• a Personal Beauty Shopper at Selfridges (#188)
• Sutton Park Donkey Sanctuary (#164)
• Birmingham city council (#120)
• James Morris, Conservative MP for Halesowen & Rowley Regis (#115) – ha!
• Solihull police (#112)

I was pipped to the number 100 post by Drayton Manor theme park. Now we know why they were so damn anxious to build their Thomas The Tank attraction, Thomas Land.

I’m now crowd-funding “William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch Land” to be built in my back garden, and am recruiting mugwumps. I must beat Drayton bloody Manor.