Bruce Lawson's personal site

The Reading List is supported by Vivaldi browser, who give me a reasonable salary yet don’t beat me around the head when I read interesting stuff when I should be bolting the networking stack onto browser engines. We just released a brand new Vivaldi for desktops with new UI, UX and sexy features – give it a spin, and see how we’re fighting for a better web.

• Aria-activedescendant is not focus – by Sarah Higley
• Sustainable Futures: Funding the Web Ecosystem – this State of the Browser talk by Stephanie Stimac keeps running through my brain (with transcript)
• Privacy, PWAs, Protecting People … and Pianos – In this second episode of the For a Better Web podcast, Bruce chats with John Ozbay, founder of Cryptee, a privacy-preserving photo and notes Progressive Web App from Estonia
• Choosing a Masonry Syntax in CSS – What makes something a ‘grid’, and what’s at stake? asks Miriam Suzanne
• Zorin OS – a Linux desktop, based on Ubuntu, with a UI designed for Windows/ Mac users. I installed it on an old Dell machine running Windows 10 that cost me £85 from eBay, and my mum was up and running with Libre Office and Zoom in one hour.
• Where web components shine – and where they don’t. By Dave Rupert
• Reference Target for Cross-Root ARIA – Reference Target is a feature to enable using IDREF attributes such as for and aria-labelledby to refer to elements inside a component’s shadow DOM, while maintaining encapsulation of the internal details of the shadow DOM. The main goal of this feature is to enable ARIA to work across shadow root boundaries
• The Elephant in the Room in Google’s Antitrust Trials – “it’s time to face the elephant in the room, and require Google to spin off YouTube into an independent entity positioned to be a market counterweight. This would be a win-win-win-win: for advertisers, publishers, competitors, and consumers. And it would kick one leg out from under the stool that props up Google’s internet monopoly, which has done too much market damage in too many ways for way too long.”
• Chromium’s influence on Chromium alternatives – “I don’t think most people realize how Firefox and Safari depend on Google for more than “just” revenue from default search engine deals and prototyping new web platform features.”
• Apple will let everyone set new default phone and messaging apps with iOS 18.2 – not just geo-fenced to EU, which is relief to non-EU devs and testers. Let’s have all the EU improvements go global!
• It’s time for a fairer, more competitive app ecosystem – my old chums at open Web Advocacy have co-signed a letter to MEPs asking them to hold Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta (Facebook) and Bytedance (TikTok) accountable under DMA
• Bad News: We’ve Lost Control of Our Social Media Feeds. Good News: Courts Are Noticing. – “Our legal system is starting to recognize this shift and hold tech giants responsible for the effects of their algorithms — a significant, and even possibly transformative, development that over the next few years could finally force social media platforms to be answerable for the societal consequences of their choices.” (Julia Angwin, seemingly free to read)
• The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data – “Babel Street’s LocateX platform also allows customers to track individual mobile users by their Mobile Advertising ID or MAID, a unique, alphanumeric identifier built into all Android and Apple mobile devices … [This] allowed its investigator to find information about visitors to high-risk targets such as mosques, synagogues, courtrooms and abortion clinics… then tracked one likely juror’s phone to their home address over several days.”
• U.S. Finally Restricts Sale Of Location Data To Foreign Adversaries, But We’re Still Too Corrupt To Pass A Basic Internet-Era Privacy Law – “The U.S. needs comprehensive internet-era privacy laws that hold companies and executives accountable for lax security and privacy standards”
• Digital Divinity: Ancient traditions meet modern technology – fabulous article including Muslim 3D, a video game designed to fight Islamophobia; building robot elephants for Hindu temples; the world’s first 3D-printed temple .. and more! Boomshanka
• git-blame-someone-else – “This changes not only who authored the commit but the listed committer as well”

The Reading List is supported by Vivaldi browser, who give me a reasonable salary yet don’t beat me around the head when I read interesting stuff when I should be bolting the networking stack onto browser engines. Studies show that using Vivaldi can increase your gorgeousness by up to 78.6 IGUs (ISO Gorgeousness Units).

• OpenFreeMap lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free. You can either self-host or use our public instance. Everything is open-source, including the full production setup
• Create a semantic breakout button to make an entire element clickable – by Andy Bell and his whippet
• mobile developer numbers have decreased again – Stack Overflow survey: “the number of mobile developers steadily decreasing YoY… companies are less and less interested in native mobile development, mainly because developing a responsive web page or a progressive web app is much easier and cheaper than a native app”
• Progress of Blink for iOS – slides from a lightning talk at BlinkOn by Gyuyoung Kim of Igalia
• Hackers Found Millions of Kias Could Be Tracked, Controlled With Just a Plate Number – “Kia updated its web portal after the hackers informed them of the security issue, which was similar to a past vulnerability with Lexus and Toyota vehicles”
• CSS min() All The Things – “a useful tool for responsive layouts that adapt to the viewport’s size”
• Interop 2025 must drop secret vetos – help persuade browser engine devs make next year’s Interop process more transparent by giving a thumbsup on the handful of bugs listed in the article
• Web Components Are Not the Future — They’re the Present – “The people actually shipping software are tired of framework churn. They’re tired of shit they wrote last month being outdated already. They want stability. They want to know that the stuff they build today will work tomorrow. As history has proven, no framework can promise that” by Cory LaViska
• Web components are okay – “As a framework author, if you want to freeze your thinking in 2011 and code as if nothing new was added to the web platform since then, you absolutely can! And you can still write a great framework! This is the beauty of the web” by Nolan (no relation) Lawson
• Web Components are not Framework Components — and That’s Okay – “The bottom line is, web components reduce the number of use cases where we need to reach for a framework, but complex large applications will likely still benefit from one” by Lea Verou
• Streaming Television Industry Conducting Vast Surveillance of Viewers, Targeting Them with Manipulative AI-driven Ad Tactics, Says New Report – “Leading streaming video programming networks, CTV device companies and “smart” TV manufacturers, allied with many of the country’s most powerful data brokers, are creating extensive digital dossiers on viewers based on a person’s identity information, viewing choices, purchasing patterns, and thousands of online and offline behaviors.”
• Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge
• Overriding Gatekeeper Protections in MacOS 15 Sequoia Will Require Clicking Through Panels in System Settings – Blimey. Even Gruber thinks Apple’s gatekeeper nannying “for your comfort and security” has gone too far
• Android 15 could add built-in support for app archiving – Imagine if, instead of an elaborate “app archiving” subsystem to reclaim space taken up by seldom-used single-platform apps, you could just tap a homescreen icon which called a web page full-screen when you needed it. Imagine if that were possible across all Operating Systems, built with free, open standards instead of proprietary flim-flam.
• How North Korea Infiltrated the Crypto Industry – as if Crypto were not dirty enough already, it looks like the vile North Korean government might be making huge money from it.
• Mosaic Netscape 0.9 was released 30 years ago today (Oct 13 1994)
• Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours By P. Syme – A recreation of the original 1821 color guidebook that Charles Darwin consulted during his voyages