Bruce Lawson's personal site : 2020 : January

Archive for January, 2020

Reading List 248

Friday 31 January 2020

Understanding the “Initial��, “Inherit�� and “Unset�� CSS Keywords
Why use a form element when submitting fields with JavaScript? asks Chris Ferdinandi. And then answers it, too!
India is now a larger smartphone market than the US – “India overtook the US to become the second-largest market, with 158 million phones shipping to the country in 2019.��
4 CSS layouts without using media queries with explanation for the Flexbox-challenged people like me
Masonry layout – Interesting (and very well thought-out) proposal to extend CSS Grid to allow ‘masonry’ layout, and discussion of whether masonry is conceptually an extension of Flexbox or a new display type
How to find CFPs for developer conferences by @philnash
Norway’s Opera acquires Estonian startup PocoSys to expand its fintech operations – Hmmm.
ICE Uses Open Source to Violate Human Rights – “Every open source dependency listed here (updated nightly) is used in Palantir’s software and supports ICE in its systematic human rights violations.”
There are already Chinese components in your pocket � so why fret about 5G gear? – “This is literally the whole point of standards”
Want to help someone? Shut up and listen! – fascinating and funny 17 min talk by Ernesto Sirolli, an aid worker, on listening to people and enabling their entrepreneurial spirit.
What font should you use on the cover of your pulp novel? – a cracking thread by @pulpLibrarian

Hello, you divine diplodocus! Here’s the best of my reading from the last 2 weeks. Last week I was sunning myself in Marbella, Spain, at Forum for the Future, as a guest of the Joomla community. (I’m on their Open Source Matters Advisory Board.)

Anyhow, here we go!

Link o’the Week: Roles and relationships absolutely golden post by @codingchaos on the ARIA needed for those gnarly composite widgets (and very timely for a project I’m starting soon)
Opera: Phantom of the Turnaround � 70% Downside – If this report about Opera’s “pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India, deploying deceptive ��bait and switch’ tactics to lure in borrowers and charging egregious interest rates ranging from ~365-876%” is true, it would make me very sad
New browser on the block: Flow – Mr PPK interviews Piers Wombwell about a new rendering engine, Flow.
HTML attributes to improve your users’ two factor authentication experience by Phil Nash
My Priority of Methods for Labeling a Control – excellent post with actionable information
Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string – farewell, browser sniffing!
Snowpack – “With Snowpack you can build modern web apps (using React, Vue, etc.) without a bundler (like Webpack, Parcel, Rollup). No more waiting for your bundler to rebuild your site every time you hit save. Instead, every change is reflected in the browser instantly.”
A list of everything that *could* go in the <head> of your document (there’s a LOT)
W3C Advisory Committee Elects Technical Architecture Group – Once again, we have a good @w3ctag with people I trust to steward standards the right way.
Letters to Young People Who Inspire Us, by Madeleine Albright, Michelle Bachelet, Tim Berners-Lee and More – Sir Uncle Timbo’s letter to the girls at the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre in Lagos, Nigeria.
Reverberations – “how come a church organ doesn’t sound like a chip tune, which is also built up from simple waveforms? Well, actually it will, if you remove the church. And if you connect a Commodore 64 to a loudspeaker in a large hall, it will sound like an organ.”
city roads “This website renders every single road within a city” using OpenStreetMap and WebGL

Reading List 246

Friday 10 January 2020

Happy Nude Year, you perfectly pouting porcupine!

The Guardian view on the gig economy: stop making burnout a lifestyle – “”Uncertain work is becoming the norm, with the result that unemployment statistics look better than the way Britons feel .. We ought to work and have careers that enable us to focus on our relationships and have soul-enriching pastimes. It cannot be socially good to consider leisure time as a lost commercial opportunity.”
Why You Should Choose HTML5 article Over section, by l’il old me, helped by the resplendent @LeonieWatson
Progressive Web Apps in 2020 by Maximiliano Firtman
The $70B opportunity in India’s emerging social commerce sector – “Over 90% of the small and medium businesses we surveyed sell directly through WhatsApp in India �� more than 4× the number who sell on Flipkart and Amazon.��
Guiding Development of Contribution and Community Strategies in Open Source Software Requirements Engineering – PhD thesis by Johan Linåker
Understanding Async Await by Sarah “Drazzo” Drasner
TikTok boom: US Army bans squaddies from using platform on government-issued phones – As the first globally successful Chinese social property, TikTok has attracted scrutiny. Army spokesperson Lt Col Robin Ochoa described the app as “a cyber threat”.
Putting devs before users: how frameworks destroyed web performance – “So creatives, stop being so focused on your CV or personal convenience. Stop putting your own interests above those of your users, and wasting hundreds of kilobytes on stuff no one cares about. You are likely not Facebook or Google, and you shouldn’t be designing or building things as if you are.”
HTML is a living language – 11 minute podcast by Chris Ferdinandi
China’s success at AI has relied on good data – But cheap labour has also played an important part: “a data supply chain using cheap labour at Chinese data factories no one has ever heard of.”
Rhasspy “(pronounced RAH-SPEE) is an open source, fully offline voice assistant toolkit for many languages that works well with Home Assistant, Hass.io, and Node-RED .. intended for advanced users that want to have a voice interface to Home Assistant, but value privacy and freedom above all else.”
Which emoji scissors close? – important research here