Reading List 242
- Apple Is Trying to Kill Web Technology – “The company has made it extremely difficult to use web-based technology on its platforms, and it hopes developers won’t bother”
- Things We Can’t (Yet) Do In CSS – a very good article by @rachelandrew. As she says, many can’t be done on the web, but can with Prince, which you can get for free (for non-commercial use) to try it out.
- free-for.dev – “This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.”
- Breaking Chains with Pipelines in Modern JavaScript – a look at overcoming the limitations of iteration methods in JS and lodash, and a new simple and small iteration library (AAL-licensed)
- Focusing on focus – “focus was and is still quite complex to understand. But, at least now there’s a clear source of truth for it, and the browser vendors are working to make it interoperable”
- What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs by @nolanlawson. “Here’s the best piece of accessibility advice for newbies: if something is a button, make it a <button>. If something is an input, make it an <input>.” Preach it, nephew!
- Restricting Notification Permission Prompts in Firefox – “about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user”. No surprises here. People have much greater investment in apps they’ve downloaded than random sites.
- The Evolution of Material Design’s Text Fields How user research reshaped the design of Google’s open-source text fields
- Nipple reconstruction tattooist ‘keeps getting Facebook ban’ – because the sight of a post-mastectomy reconstructed nipple could seriously undermine the job of enabling fascists and facilitating genocide.
- Alexa’s Struggle With African Accents
- OpenType shaping documents – “we are seeking comments and bugfixes on the Indic-script, Arabic-like, Hangul, Hebrew, Thai/Lao, Tibetan, Khmer, Myanmar, default, and USE documents”
- Opera presents the State of Mobile Web report 2019 for Africa – good to see Opera going back to its roots after its infatuation with high-ARPU “western” markets
- The average web page (Sept 2019) and the average web page (October 2008) – So glad someone archived the ’08 Opera MAMA study!
- Releasing Spleeter: Deezer Research source separation engine – separate an audio track into separate sources (e.g., split out vocals, bass, drums) using Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation, MIT-licensed. That’s what I’ll be mucking about with on my “Fun Friday”.
- Digital tools for democratic participation by mySociety; predominantly UK-focused.
- Freedom on the Net 2019: The Crisis of Social Media (Freedom House report). “What was once a liberating technology has become a conduit for surveillance and electoral manipulation.”
- Ex-Twitter employees accused of spying for Saudi Arabia but .. but .. Saudi are our Wonderful Friends And Partners.
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