Bruce Lawson's personal site

• The F-word Episode 5 – Wow, a sonic double whammy! Not only did Taylor Swift release Folklore, but Episode 5 of @fword_dev is just out. Vadim and I invited the George Clooney of web standards, Brian Kardell, to tell us about the Open Prioritization experiment, Igalia, MathML and the Web commons.
• ARIA Grid As an Anti-Pattern – Uncle Aadrdian points out more more bad advice in the ARIA Authoring Practices note. Is there a good, trustworthy alternative to ARIA Authoring Practices guide that devs can copy/ paste from?
• Grids Part 1: To grid or not to grid – “When do you use a grid vs. a table, and why?” by Sarah Higley
• Web Accessibility Checklist – I updated my massive Web Accessibility checklist to include turning off smooth scroll if use prefers reduced motion and to warn against some bits of the ARIA authoring practices, and to trust Uncle Adrian instead
• Inclusively Hiding & Styling Checkboxes and Radio Buttons by Sara Soueidan
• One web component to rule them all? – by Scott Jehl
• All the Ways to Make a Web Component – June 2020 Update – “Compare coding style, bundle size and performance of 33 different ways to make a Web Component.”
• The rise and fall of Adobe Flash – “Before Flash Player sunsets this December, we talk its legacy with those who built it.”
• Ask an expert: Why is CSS . . . the way it is? – Have you ever rolled your eyes and muttered “Just what were the @csswg smoking?��. Web Methuselah Chris Lilley tells you how some of the weirdness got there.
• Google: Mobile-first Indexing – “we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first �� our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages �� If you have a responsive site��you shouldn’t have to change anything.”
• Review of Mozilla’s new Wireguard-based $5/mo VPN service – Mozilla’s VPN is available now for Windows, Android, and iOS.
• Microsoft Announces that it will drop official support of PHP on Windows – “the bottom line is there will likely be very little change for Windows users.”
• Just Too Efficient – Tim Bray
• The Whimsical Club – Websites that spark joy. A curated list of sites with an extra bit of fun.

Yesterday I asked “What’s the most up-to-date info on aria-live regions (and

) support in AT?” for some client work I’m doing. As usual, Twitter was responsive and helpful.

Heydon replied

Should be fine, support is good for live regions. Not sure about output, though … Oh, you’re adding the p _with_ the other XHR content? That will have mixed results in my experience.

Brennan said

I’ve seen some failed announcements with live-regions on VoiceOver, especially with iframes. (Announcement of the title seems to kill any pending live content).output has surprisingly good support but (IIRC) is not live by default on at least one browser (IE, I think).

Some more resources people pointed me to:

• ARIA live regions explainer doc on MDN
• On Demand Live Regions A tiny module for making screen readers announce text on demand, without a visual change to the interface, by Heydon Pickering
• output: HTML’s native live region element – Use role="status" to bridge some gaps in browser/ AT support of <output>
• Accessibility Support Will your code work with assistive technologies?

My chum and co-author Remington Sharp tweeted

We need a universally recognised icon/image/logo for "works offline".

Like the PWA or HTML5 logo. We need to be able to signal to visitors that our URLs are always available.

To the consumer, the terms Progressive Web App or Service Worker are meaningless. So I applied my legendary branding, PR and design skills to come up with something that will really resonate with a web user: the fact that this app works online, offline – anywhere.

So the new logo is a riff on the HTML5 logo, because this is purely web technologies. It has the shield, a wifi symbol on one side and a crossed out wifi symbol on the other, and a happy smile below to show that it’s happy both on and offline. Above it is the acronym “wank” which, of course, stands for “Works anywhere��no kidding!”

Take it to use on your sites. I give the fruits of my labour and creativity free, as a gift to humanity.

(Last Updated on 20 July 2020)

• Me me me corner: The F-word episode 4 in which Vadim Makeev and I discuss Apple’s game of monopoly, form slappers, where’s Houdini, browser bugs and Web compat, chicken-killin’ Mike Taylor, and I make another Great Joke.
• Thought Leadership o’the Week: Platform Adjacency Theory by Alex Russell. There’s a lot to get my head around in this article, so I don’t know what I think yet. But I’ll probably end up agreeing with him, because he’s always bloody right about everything (except fashion).
• July’s CSS News – Wooo! Flexbox Gaps, Aspect Ratio Unit, Native Masonry Support, Subgrid in Chrome, prefers-reduced-data, :marker. Auntie Rachel has all the latest CSS news!
• Quick Tips for High Contrast Mode by Sarah Higley
• When Sass and New CSS Features Collide by the splendid Ana Tudor
• Tabler Icons – A set of over 550 free MIT-licensed high-quality SVG icons for you to use in your web projects.
• Accessibility for Product Managers by @petervangrieken
• India bans TikTok, dozens of other Chinese apps – Also UC Browser and UC News, CM Browser and the QQ apps.
• A/B Street – “Ever been stuck in traffic on a bus, wondering why is there legal street parking instead of a dedicated bus lane? A/B Street is a game exploring how small changes to a city affect the movement of drivers, cyclists, transit users, and pedestrians.”
• CRAPCHA: Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement – Wonderful and useless.