Bruce Lawson's personal site

A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.

• Big Win for Web Accessibility in Domino’s Pizza Case – “the district court can order compliance with WCAG 2.0 as an equitable remedy if, after discovery, the website and app fail to satisfy the ADA.”
• IDB-Keyval – “a super-simple-small promise-based keyval store implemented with IndexedDB”. Basically, async localstorage, by Jank Architect
• Cross-Cultural Design and the Role of UX by Jenny Shen
• Which Smartphone Features Really Matter to Consumers? – TL;DR: storage, battery life, processor speed, duh.
• Twitter warns that private tweets were public for years – AFAICT, “protected tweets” (whatever they are) rather than DMs. Android app only, not web, iOS.
• The Big Hangup: Why the Future Is Not Just Your Phone – “The once-revolutionary smartphone is losing its power to amaze””and maybe its singular hold on our lives”

When I was doing developer relations at Opera, I did everything I could to avoid having to go near the Opera TV part of the business – which was basically an app store of HTML5 websites for “Smart” TVs. This was for three reasons: the world of Smart TVs was a world of closed standards. Secondly, as Patrick Lauke wrote, the chips in the early Smart TVs were cheap and crappy which seriously crippled the web experience.

But the main reason was that I felt Smart TVs were a solution looking for problem.

TVs are big, beautiful screens and good speakers, sitting in a social space. No-one wants to surf Facebook on a screen that mum and dad are also watching, especially controlling it with arrows on a remote control unit.

A cheap device like a Chromecast allows people to control the content with a portable device they already have and know how to use – be it a laptop, tablet or phone, and see the movie/ photos on a big screen with family and friends. TVs are meant to be dumb; your phone is smart and a little USB gizmo connects the two.

So why did Opera have a B2B division developing Smart TV offerings? (And after the dismemberment of Opera, it continues as Vewd). The answer: because TV set manufacturers wanted Smart TV, so would throw money at us. But why did the set manufacturers want it?

A news report last week made it clear: it’s about collecting data off users, hitting the network a lot to phone that data back to HQ, then “monetizing” it, in some cases, advertising to viewers. That helps reduce the cost at sale of TVs. As the Verge puts it: Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive. From their interview with TV manufacturer Vizio’s CTO Bill Baxter:

So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.

This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.

…there are ways to monetize that TV and data is one, but not only the only one. It’s sort of like a business of singles and doubles, it’s not home runs, right? You make a little money here, a little money there. You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know.

I have a Smart TV (it’s difficult to find a new one that isn’t). I’ve never connected it to the web, for just this reason.

• CSS doesn’t suck by Andy Bell
• A declarative router for service workers – Jank Architect seeks your views.
• Title Texts Suck – title attributes, not <title> elements, which rock harder than Motorhead playing a gig at Stonehenge, on an asteroid.
• Harold Crick and the Web Platform – Brian Kardell meditates on MathML
• VS Code: Now creating pull requests
• Best Internet Browsers of 2019 – “After 80 hours of researching and testing, we found Mozilla Firefox is the best overall internet browser because of how fast pages load, how quickly it navigates to websites and, most importantly, how secure this browser is”
• W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group – Alice Boxhall (Google), Theresa O’Connor (Apple) and my ex-Opera colleague Sangwhan Moon (Odd Concepts) join Sir Uncle Timbo’s Enforcement Posse. Thanks and best wishes to Travis Leithead (Microsoft) and Alex Russell (Google) on their retirement.
• Taking the smarts out of smart TVs would make them more expensive – Data collection in Smart TV’s is now offsetting the cost of the hardware to the point that a non-Smart TV would cost more than a Smart one
• The internet, but not as we know it: life online in China, Cuba, India and Russia a fancy-dan Guardian interactive piece
• Dimensions.Guide – “Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive reference database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of the everyday objects and spaces that make up our world”. This is weirdly fascinating and pleasing.

A (usually) weekly round-up of interesting links I’ve tweeted. Sponsored by Smashing Magazine who slip banknotes into my lacy red manties so I can spend time reading stuff.

• Build a PWA in Just 10 Minutes doesn’t go deep, but a good intro
• How To Learn CSS – Auntie Rachel’s primer on fundamental CSS concepts. “There are some fundamental things which will make CSS much easier for you to use. This article aims to guide you along your path”
• Using DevTools to understand modern layout techniques by Chen Hui Jing
• Conic-gradient Patterns with css-doodle and CSS conic-gradient()
• Why I’m Running for W3C TAG – Alice Boxhall is running for election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group. Now Opera is no more, I have no vote or sway, but she has my full and enthusiastic moral support.
• Development Environment Machine Setup Screencast by Simon Owen. “Over the years I’ve noticed time and time again people having various issues with the set up and maintenance of their development environments. I try to keep the videos fairly short and to the point, so you can get through them quickly and learn and profit.”
• Firefox with ads on New Tab Page – doesn’t seem to send info to 3rd parties, but to turn it off, uncheck ‘snippets’ in preferences.
• A Recap of Frontend Development in 2018 “Predictions for 2019: CSS-in-JS may become the default styling method instead of plain CSS.” Meh.
• Design in Tech Report 2018 by John Maeda
• Lists: 2019 Design Conferences (inc. UX, UI etc) and London Design conferences
• The Chinese takeover of Indian app ecosystem – “The message is clear for the Chinese ”” if you want growth, conquer India”. At least some people listened to me! (Joking aside, there’s a lot in this article, especially about India2/ Bharat customers coning online)
• 2018: A Smashing Year In Review – by my colleagues and me. “We’re not just the publishers of an online magazine or conference organizers, we are people who work in the web industry”