Reading List
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs) – “if you are writing in a user-centred way, FAQs are at best pointless and redundant. At worst, they are confusing… and still pointless.” (I like FAQs – they show what orgs pathetically *wish* people would ask but never do.)
- Spain’s internet law reforms will harm access to knowledge – a big raspberry to Spain’s law that allows newspaper editors to levy a fee on anyone linking to their pages.
- Flexbox adventures – cogent explanation of flex-shrink, flex-grow and flex-basis. It still makes my head hurt, though.
- Normalizing Cross-browser Flexbox Bugs by “Flexy” Phil Walton, who also wrote A list of cross-browser flexbox issues and their workarounds.
- Advanced Cross-Browser Flexbox by Christopher “Wookie” Mills
- Blink Scheduler landed except ChromeOS & Android webview. (WTF is a “Blink Scheduler”?)
- Accessible and Responsive HTML5 Video Player by Laura Kalbag
- W3C Proposed Recommendation: longdesc The longdesc squabble returns, like a nasty poo that won’t flush away: “It’s sad that people are spending time on features like this when there are far bigger accessibility problems with the web platform…Sadly it has for authors become easier to deliver beautiful websites if they simply create an endless pile of <div>s than if they actually use semantic markup”.
- Somewhat related: Ok, W3C and WHATWG, don’t die, but”¦ – a rant against the complexity of many CSS specs. As someone who writes web pages as well as sees how specifications are made, I’ve sympathy with “Does your solution involve setting several properties on the container, and on the element, and on the elements contained in the element to make them display properly? Your solution is bad”. But I don’t know how to do it better. Or if it can be done better without breaking backwards compatibility with a repeat of the Year Zero “XHTML2” debacle.
- Nokia 215: Microsoft’s cheapest ‘Internet-ready’ phone launched at $29 – that’s Indian Rs 1,850. Single or dual SIM, preloaded with Twitter, Facebook, Messenger and Opera Mini.
- Related: $30 smartphones are here””and they’re getting better every day – “I went to India with a budget of $200””the upfront cost for a new iPhone on a two-year contract in the United States””to see how many phones I could buy”. Also interesting glimpse at the economics of cheap phones.
- A Teenager’s View on Social Media – Written by an actual teen – Facebook is “dead to us”, Twitter is pointless, Yik Yak is up and coming, Instagram and Snapchat are cool, “Tumblr is a place to follow/be followed by a bunch of random strangers, yet not have your identity be attached to it.”
- The Slow Death of ”˜Do Not Track’. (It always felt like Security Theatre to me.)
- The Moonpig Bug: How 3,000,000 Customers’ Details Were Exposed – video explanation for non-security wonks by Tom Scott
- Reporting on cyberattacks: the media’s urgent problem by Dave Lee, technology reporter for the BBC.
- Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer What’s running on Mr Kim’s wonderful juche internet?
- Scroll slow have fun – Glurk.
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