Reading List 348
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. If you prefer to keep browsing human, without planet-burning plagiarism-fulled Generative AI inserting itself between you and the Web, Vivaldi has you covered.
- Link o’the Month: The App Store Was Always Authoritarian – “Apple is loaning its monopoly on iOS software to yet another authoritarian regime without a fight, painting a stark contrast: when profits are on the line, Cupertino will gaslight democratic regulators and defy pro-user laws with all the $1600/hr lawyers Harvard can graduate” says Big Al, absolutely correctly and with fancier words and less swearing than I would use to make the same points.
- A beginner-friendly guide to view transitions in CSS
- What’s new in view transitions (2025 update)
- Microsoft Breaks Localhost with Windows 11 October Update, Users Forced to Revert – It’s a good job Windows 10 is still supported. Oh.
- DOJ shelves ADA rulemaking on digital accessibility – “In a surprising regulatory rollback, the Department of Justice has withdrawn two key rulemaking efforts under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including long-awaited rules on digital accessibility.” – ha! That’ll show the Wokes!
- What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail? – asks Cryptee CEO, John Ozbay (who’s literally the Designer-est person I know). Are designers falling out of love with Apple, as developers are?
- Interop Feature Ranking – my old chum (and newly-mortal enemy, since he joined Firefox) Jank Architect, asks you to rank the web platform proposals you care about, giving us data we can use when reviewing which proposals should be taken on for 2026.
- Incremental Font Transfer – IFT is a new standard to incrementally transfer a font from server to client, so reduced perceived latency, especially useful for large fonts like Chinese, Japanese, Korean etc
- Open Social – a nice explanation, with pictures, of how the new open social protocols work and why they’re more ‘webby’
- How tech powers immigration enforcement – “These technologies are in part aiding President Trump’s mass deportation plans, among the administration’s expansion of social media surveillance and data analytics.”
- The Coyier CSS Starter and Andy Bell’s Northern opinion on it.
- Pluralistic: Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU – “The idea that Apple is so committed to its users’ privacy that it will exit a major market rather than expose users to surveillance risks is an obvious lie – just ask China.”
- CSS Environment Variabubbles – first public working draft
- A threat model for accessibility on the web by the Mighty Alice Boxhall
- Accessible open-source data visualisation web components from the Visa design team
- A guide to creating accessible PDFs using free tools
- a11y-tools extension – that nice Ian Lloyd made an extension out of his bookmarklets
- The Antitrust Case Against AI Overviews
- Evaluating the Impact of AI on the Labor Market: Current State of Affairs – “our metrics indicate that the broader labor market has not experienced a discernible disruption since ChatGPT’s release 33 months ago, undercutting fears that AI automation is currently eroding the demand for cognitive labor across the economy”
- Google’s dev registration plan ‘will end the F-Droid project’ – “Open source Android app store cannot exist if Google’s plans go ahead, says F-Droid board member”
- Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein Completes Massive Migration to Open Source Email Systems – German state achieves digital sovereignty by ditching Microsoft for open source solutions. (They also published their Open Innovation and Open Source Strategy[PDF]in English.)
- The Children Who Power Silicon Valley’s AI Dreams – “Congolese children mine cobalt for $2/day while 95% of Africa’s AI researchers can’t afford the GPUs their data trains… This is digital colonialism, measured in gigabytes and GPU hours.”
- Inside the Microsoft Excel Championships – “You could hear a pin drop in the room, but on the YouTube live stream, it’s getting wild.”
- Two Slice – “A font that’s only 2px tall, and somewhat readable!”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)