Bruce Lawson's personal site

A mostly-weekly dump of links to interesting things I’ve read and shared on Twitter. Supported by those nice folks at Wix Engineering who shower me with high-denomination banknotes to reward me for reading this stuff.

• Link o’The Week: Effective Standards Work, Part 1: The Lay Of The Land by Alex Russell – “The first of a two-part series I’ve been formulating for more than four years, based on a dozen years of experience evolving the web”
• Draft spec o’the week: Spatial Navigation – Editor’s Draft – a general model for navigating the focus using the arrow keys that works on the render tree rather than the DOM tree. Wave goodbye to tabbing weirdly through pages because source order doesn’t match visual order misery!
• W3C HTML5 Editors’ meeting minutes in which we discussed how WHATWG and W3C can work together
• Zero hour for Internet censorship – petition MEPs, because if this goes through, working in Open Source is going to get much harder, says GitHub. Or call call your MEP for free, courtesy of Mozilla.
• Introduction to Firefox Accessibility Inspector – new in Firefox 61
• Optimizing CSS: ID Selectors And Other Myths TL;DR: “you shouldn’t worry about selector performance…always do your own tests. Don’t just believe what someone wrote on the internet a few years ago”
• Introducing the GOV.UK Design System – “All the components and patterns have been rigorously tested with the most commonly-used assistive technologies and built to meet level AA of the WCAG 2.0 accessibility standards.”
• Europa by Reason – One of the synths in Reason 10 (the software I use for music composition) has been ported to web tech, inc Web Midi input if you’re on Chromium. Tres cool.
• Component Styling API
• human redux ebook that’s readable online for free, if Redux is your thang
• Google’s long arm extends into feature phones – Google invests $20m in KaiOS (erstwhile FirefoxOS) which has “15% market share” in India. (More)
• What 7 Creepy Patents Reveal About Facebook – Reading your relationships; Classifying your personality; Predicting your future; Identifying your camera; Listening to your environment (inc TV shows and ads); Tracking your routine; Inferring your habits. Yay.
• Swann home security camera sends video to wrong user – IOT Security chuckles ahoy!
• “Goodbye for now Apple hardware, may we meet again in happier times.” – “and how to get your Macbook keyboard problems fixed, for free”
• The Current State of Web Design

WOOOOH!! It’s my 200^th reading list! A mostly-weekly dump of links to interesting things I’ve read and shared on Twitter. Supported by those nice folks at Wix Engineering who shower me with high-denomination banknotes to reward me for reading this stuff.

• Thinkpiece o’the week: I dunno – Brad laments the flame wars that happen if you say you find technology X “hard”. I can 100% relate; I find Git atrociously unintuitve, and hate watching billions of things I don’t understand get installed by npm etc. It’s why we’re working hard with Stylable to make the user experience good for CSS + HTML devs. (JSX helps a lot).
• Spec o’the Week: WCAG 2.1 is a W3C Recommendation – updates guidance for mobile users & touchscreen users, low-vision users and ppl with cognitive disabilities. Yay.
• Overscripted Web: a Mozilla Data Analysis Challenge – “Help us explore the unseen JavaScript and what this means for the Web .. The Web gets more complex by the minute, keeping it safe and open can only happen if we work together.”
• The Cult of the Complex – Zeldman writes, “Let us never forget how lucky we are, nor, in chasing the ever-shinier, lose sight of the people and purpose we serve.”
• React Application Manager: create and run React (and other) applications – no command line or build setup required. “RAM is aimed at abstracting away the terminal and npm aspects for beginners.”
• Web Components Club – “A journal about learning web components”
• Intent to Implement: CSS shadow parts – a better way to style web components from outside, without the problems of the previously-tried /deep/ and >>> selectory things (Monica’s excellent ::part and ::theme, an ::explainer).
• Apple jams Facebook’s web-tracking tools
• Designing Web Content for watchOS – TL;DR: Use semantic HTML!. Reader mode looks for <article> element, use itemprop atttributes; use Open Graph image and title; no video, Service Worker or webfont support; use HTML5 input types and labels; use <figure> etc. WatchOS will adapt responsive designs automatically – there’s a new metatag to override this adaptation. (Source video)
• Apple: Information for website operators about distrusting Symantec certificate authorities – “Starting this summer, Apple products will partially distrust Symantec Certificate Authorities (CAs). Apple products will completely distrust Symantec CAs at a later date, as early as Fall 2018.”
• The Value of Attending Conferences – “The magic of a conference is its people. And that’s speakers, attendees and organisers alike”. That’s certainly the case for me.
• How startups die from their addiction to paid marketing

(Last Updated on 17 June 2018)

• WAI-ARIA – An introduction to Accessible Rich Internet Applications – all you need to know, in preeeeeety slides by Patrick Lauke
• keyframes.app “gives you a visual timeline to help you create, view, and run animations without having to go back and forth between your browser and editor. And it gives you the CSS when you’re done.”
• The Front-End Tooling Survey 2018 – Results – 5,097 front-end developers “give an insight into the current trends in front-end tooling, as well as showing how usage is changing over time”
• Critters – a Webpack plugin to inline your critical CSS and lazy-load the rest
• Let’s make the grimy architecture of the web visible again – “Beneath The Shorteners, The Web!”
• Moving to HTTPS on WordPress by Chris Coyier. (I’m currently heading North on this great adventure.)
• Careers at Mozilla – those nice people at Mozilla are hiring.