Bruce Lawson’s personal site

• Developing a Report on Competition in the Mobile App Ecosystem – The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration is preparing a Report on Competition in the Mobile App Ecosystem, following Biden’s Executive Order to address the problem of “dominant tech platforms undermining competition and reducing innovation”. Includes PWAs and #AppleBrowserBan in scope.
• Questions and Answers: Digital Markets Act: Ensuring fair and open digital markets
• Trust – “many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries” by Jeremy keith
• Why I don’t miss React: a story about using the platform by Jack Franklin. Would Facebook ever end React? It was unthinkable that Nokia, Blackberry, MooTools, Internet Explorer would ever disappear. But they did.
• New to the web platform in April – Discover some of the interesting features that landed in stable and beta web browsers during April 2022. By Rachel Andrew
• Celebrating Firefox: How we got to 100 – Aww. I’m pretty sure I started with the preview release. Good times.
• Bundle Buddy – “Visualizing what code is in your web bundle, and how it got there” for all your “we had great DX writing this, why is it so slow and such a network hog and why are our customers using our competitors’ fast apps instead?” needs
• Well Color Us Surprised—This SC Can Be a Tricky Customer – by Ian Lloyd, who doesn’t know how to spell “colour”.
• Global PC shipments pass 340 million in 2021 and 2022 is set to be even stronger – death of desktop exaggerated?
• Changing the face of the web: W3C Web Fonts Working Group and MPEG recognized with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award – yes, really; W3C got an Emmy.
• Hack on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs leads to $3m simian oblivion – My non-fungible Thoughts and Proof of Prayers to those who have suffered this terrible loss.

USA readers: you have just over 2 weeks to tell the US regulator your thoughts on the Apple Browser Ban, whether you’re in favour of Apple allowing real browser choice on iOS by setting Safari free, or against it. You’re welcome to use Bringing Competition to Walled Gardens, our response to a similar investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority for inspiration/ cutting and pasting. Make your voice heard!

• OMG let it be true: The leaked “final” version of the Digital Markets Act: A summary in ten points – “Article 5 point (e) has been expanded to capture instances where the gatekeeper requires business users to offer or interoperate with a web browser engine. This is most likely meant to address Apple’s policy of requiring all browsers running on iOS to utilize Apple’s WebKit browser engine”
• Learn PWA – A course that breaks down every aspect of modern progressive web app development
• Building a split-button component – foundational overview of how to build an accessible split-button component, by Adam Argyle
• CSS Parent Selector “In this article, I will explain the problem that :has solves, how it works, where and how we can use it with some use-cases and examples, and most importantly how we can use it today.”
• Mobile data costs fall but as demand for internet services surges, progress remains too slow – “almost one billion people live in countries where basic internet access remains unaffordable. And even in countries where 1GB is priced at less than 2% of average monthly income, income inequality means that basic internet access will still be out of reach for many lower-earners.”
• The Front-End Developer’s Guide to the Terminal by Josh W Comeau
• Designing for Children – “An evolving guide that aims to refine a new standard for both design and business to direct the development towards products and services that have ethics and children’s best interests at their core.”
• Brief Note on Buttons, Enter, and Space by everyone’s favourite Adrian.
• Download icons, logos, and vector SVGs from any site SVG Gobbler is a browser extension that finds the vector content on the page you’re viewing and gives you the option to download, optimize, copy, view the code, or export it as an image.
• Your iOS app may still be covertly tracking you, despite what Apple says – “Apple’s landmark App Tracking Transparency may not be as tough as some people think”
• Automating the accessibility tests of your source code with GitHub Actions
• Accessible Description Exposure – how and where the accessible description is exposed by assorted screen readers, by Adrian Roselli
• Cognitive Accessibility Guidance – supplemental guidance from W3C
• Staybl is a browser for Parkinson’s patients, with “customizable tremor compensation tremor compensation, high-contrast design, a particularly legible font, and general ease of use.”
• Warp – a new terminal written in Rust – looks very promising, with lots of useful features. Beta is free to download on Mac (other platforms coming)
• This is a map of America’s broadband problem – A county-by-county look at the broadband gap
• Beanstalk cryptocurrency loses $182m of reserves in flash ‘attack’ – ‘Code is law’ cryptotwats lose $182m in a manoeuvre perfectly legal according to its own code, then go sobbing to the FBI. My Decentralised thoughts and Proof of Prayers are with them in this difficult time.

• A Proposal For Type Syntax in JavaScript – “a set of syntax for types that engines would entirely ignore, but which tools like TypeScript, Flow, and others could use. This allows us to keep the things you love about TypeScript – its type-checking and editing experience – while removing the need for a build step in development.”
• Justice Department Issues Web Accessibility Guidance Under the Americans with Disabilities Act 18 March 2022: for businesses that are open to the public (Title III): “…the ADA’s requirements apply to all the goods, services, privileges, or activities offered by public accommodations, including those offered on the web”
• An anthology of insights, for a more inclusive internet – from Google’s Next Billion Users initiative
• Intent to Prototype: @scope – Scoped Styles! You can optionally provide a lower boundary so styles don’t cascade to all children
• Shifting left, or: making accessibility easier by doing it earlier – A useful slidedeck by that nice Mr @hdv about making accessibility better, and cheaper
• A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions an excellent article by @walterstephanie
• Apple would be forced to allow sideloading and third-party app stores under new EU law – EU: “We believe that the owner of a smartphone should have the freedom to choose how to use it, This freedom includes being able to opt for alternative sources of apps”. It’ll be interesting to see what this means for the #applebrowserban.
• Galaxy A12 is the most shipped smartphone in 2021 – The £140 Android device topped the list of 10 most shipped smartphones last year overtaking Apple
• Carousels: No one likes you – “I would like to suggest an easy alternative to adding a carousel to your page. Are you ready? Think about the content on your page”
• UA gotta be kidding – Brian Kardell on the history and lies of the humble UA string
• The Infinite Exploitation Of Cryptocurrency – “code is law”, so an attacker took $600 million of cryptocurrency from the browser-based play-to-earn blockchain game Axie Infinity, in complete accordance with the contracts involved, because Sky Mavis (the developers) had allowed them to.
• Bitcoin Failed in El Salvador. The President Says the Answer Is More Bitcoin – “plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining—and powered by a volcano”

• Interop 2022 is a really exciting collaboration between Igalia, Bocoup, Webkit, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome to enhance interoperability between browsers. Yay! I want to snog all of them.
• A Complete Guide to CSS Cascade Layers by Miriam Suzanne (who wrote the spec, so she should know. Vadim and I interviewed her on the F-word episode 11.)
• Hello, CSS Cascade Layers by Ahmad Shadeed
• Are we live? – “If you have an interface where content is dynamically updated, and when the content is updated it does not receive focus, then you likely are going to need a live region.” Scott O’Hara does a deep dive into the fun quirks of live regions in real Assistive Tech.
• Say Hello to selectmenu, a Fully Style-able select Element – Can’t wait to see this in browsers, given that 93.6% of React select components are literally vast lumps of carcinogenic walrus turds, forged in Mordor by Margaret Thatcher and Hitler.
• What makes writing more readable? “An examination of translating text to make it as accessible as possible.” I found this fascinating, especially as each paragraph of the article has a translation next to it
• Version 100 in Chrome and Firefox “Chrome and Firefox will reach version 100 in a couple of months. This has the potential to cause breakage on sites that rely on identifying the browser version to perform business logic. This post covers the timeline of events, the strategies that Chrome and Firefox are taking to mitigate the impact, and how you can help.”
• PWA Haven – Really neat collection of utility apps, all implemented as PWAs and using powerful Project Fugu. “The goal is to have PWA’s replace as many simple native apps as possible” by ThaUnknown_
• I’ve Built a Public World Atlas with 2,500 Datasets to Explore Inspired by Encarta, built in Python, accessible at worldatlas.org

• Safari 15.4 Beta Release Notes
• Push Notifications, WebXR, and better PWA support coming to iOS – “iOS 15.4 beta has finally added icon support in the manifest, Web Push, AR, and VR experiments” says @firt
• Browsing with assistive technology videos – EXCELLENT short videos (<5 mins) that show you how people using screen readers, keyboard-only, screen magnifiers etc use the web. And narrated ASMR-style by “Mr Mellifluous” Pattypoo Lauke
• Going Dutch – The continuing saga of Apple’s conflict with the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) — the Dutch equivalent of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. By John Gruber, so expect some reality distortion field.
• Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – “The Bavarian state court in Munich, Germany, on 20 January 2022, decided that using Google fonts in your site breaches the GDPR” (the linked version. Self-hosting doesn’t breach GDPR, and is better for performance by eliminating another DNS lookup)
• Behavioral ad industry gets hard reform deadline after IAB’s TCF found to breach Europe’s GDPR – “the regulatory sanction prohibits behavioral advertisers from using the IAB’s so-called “Transparency and Consent Framework” (TCF) to bypass user consent by claiming legitimate interest as a legal base to track and profile web users.” I don’t know what IAB TCF is, but I bet it smells like bums.
• Announcing PWA Studio, the VS Code extension for building Progressive Web Apps! “The PWA Studio VSCode extension brings everything you need to build high quality PWAs right to your VSCode!”
• No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari – Uncle Eric sets the record straight: “The addition of :focus-visible to WebKit was lead by the community, done by Igalia, and contributed to WebKit without any involvement from Apple except in the sense of their reviewing patches and accepting the contributions.”
• Talking of Igalia, Wolvic is an open source browser “that opens a portal to the Web and all it has to offer, including immersive games, videos, and environments built for XR” from your chums at Mozilla and Igalia
• How to document accessibility as a UX designer – “Focus on the output, not the implementation.”
• Apple’s cloud gaming restrictions may be biggest news in CMA interim report
• Dozens of U.S. states say Apple stifles competition; back ‘Fortnite’ maker
• The Costs of Exclusion: West Africa Regional Report (PDF) – The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) has qualitative evidence of the economic impact that digital technology has on women’s lives — and the economy at-large — in Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria.
• Facebook: Daily active users fall for first time in 18-year history – Biz 101: if your business is connecting everyone on the planet, then facilitating genocide, you’re going to lose users.

• eyeo wins landmark copyright court decision; protects digital rights and sets important legal precedent for who ‘owns’ HTML – Media org Axel Springer (German gutter press, not the science publisher) lost its court case against Eyeo (Adblock Plus). They were sad at its sites’ ads being blocked, and claimed that the HTML of their sites is copyright, so blocking or changing any of it is copyright infringement. Herr Judge said “Keine Chance, du kolossaler Schweinehund. Verpiss dich.”
• Defensive CSS – “a collection of snippets that can help you in writing CSS that is protected. In other words, you will have fewer issues in the future” by Ahmad Shadeed
• Add a Service Worker to Your Site by Chris Ferdinandi
• A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components by Vitaly Friedman
• Which accessibility settings do the Dutch really use on their phone? – Survey of 1 million people: “43% use one or more accessibility settings on their phone. 14% uses 2 or more accessibility settings”
• Chromium has started experimental implementation of <selectmenu> – it’s like select but you can style all the constituent parts, instead of twatting about with billions of divs and wiring up keyboard and ARIA yourself (or hoping a framework will)
• Boolean attributes in HTML and ARIA: what’s the difference? asks Hidde de Vries. And then, as a bonus, tells you the answer.
• A New Container Query Polyfill That Just Works by Coy Chrisier
• Full accessibility tree in Chrome DevTools
• Accessibility monitoring of public sector websites and mobile apps 2020-2021 – gov.uk
• Emojis and Accessibility: The Dos and Don’ts of Including Emojis in Texts and Emails – “A friend sent me a text the other day … I never got to the part where I was supposed to give them a call. The emojis got in the way.”
• RFC 3339 vs ISO 8601 – a handy venn diagram and table
• CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them? – “If a single role is as expensive as thousands of workers, it is surely the prime candidate for robot-induced redundancy.”
• Web3 is going just great

• Responsive Layouts, Fewer Media Queries
• Accessible Toggles by @MicheBarks
• taba11y – Chromium extension calculates the tab order of all elements and displays it visually
• Consultation on modified commitments in respect of Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox’ browser changes “CMA is inviting observations and evidence on modified commitments offered by Google in relation to the CMA’s investigation into Google’s proposals to remove third party cookies and other functionalities from its Chrome browser.” Deadline: 5pm, 17 Dec.
• The UI fund – Announcing the UI fund from Chrome, designed to provide grants for people who work on design tools, CSS, and HTML.
• Exploiting CSP in Webkit to Break Authentication & Authorization – “there was a vulnerability that we reported to Safari that Apple didn’t consider severe enough to fix quickly… after waiting for almost a year, we decided to explore the potential of vulnerability by targeting bug bounty programs”. And, of course, because of the Apple browser ban, all iOS browsers were vulnerable/
• Improving The Performance Of Wix Websites (Case Study) – my chum @DanShappir, the Panjandrum of Performance at @WixEng, on improving the speed of millions of sites hosted at Wix.
• Windows 11 blocks Edge browser competitors from opening links
• :has pseudo class prototyping status – your friends a Eeyo (Adblock Plus) are funding your friends at Igalia to implement the long wished-for :has pseudoclass (aka ‘parent selector’). Implementor Byungwoo Lee discusses problems of it, prototyping progress, current status and steps forward at BlinkOn 15 (captioned YouTube video, 25 mins)
• ‘Buy the Constitution’ Aftermath: Everyone Very Mad, Confused, Losing Lots of Money, Fighting, Crying, Etc – “ConstitutionDAO tried to buy the Constitution. Now it has a $40 million mess on its hands and entire refunds are being wiped out by high fees. Once cryptobro is quoted as saying “We have educated an entire cohort of people about the possibilities of web3”. Indeed.
• Thinking of uses for BlockChains – sagacious Uncle Tel does some thoughts
• Why are hyperlinks blue? and should they be underlined still?

• Google’s special Android for India revealed – Partnership with Jio brings 5.45 in touchscreen, 2GB RAM & 32GB storage, in-built translation into 10 Indian languages & read aloud, voice activation. 6,500 rupees (£64, $87) or instalment plan. Gamechanger? (Marketing site)
• Photoshop’s journey to the web – Next time someone says “web isn’t powerful enough for my app”, show them Photoshop in the browser, or the Clipchamp video editor PWA
• SQLime is an online SQLite playground for debugging and sharing SQL snippets. Kinda like JSFiddle, but for SQL instead of JavaScript.
• The ADA lawsuit settlement involving an accessibility overlay: using an accessibility overlay is NOT a valid substitute for a real and valid accessibility strategy.
• Less Absolute Positioning With Modern CSS – an interesting article by Ahmad Shadeed
• Making data visualizations more accessible – “Researchers find blind and sighted readers have sharply different takes on what content is most useful to include in a chart caption.”
• Let’s Talk about Native HTML Tabs – Spicy Sections! I approve both name and concept.
• Line length revisited: following the research – Longer line lengths on screens no longer considered harmful
• Enhancing the Manifest – Aaron Gustafson on some ideas for making PWAs almost as groovy as he is with some proposed additions to the Manifest
• Accessible Writing with Ashley Bischoff – 1 hr video on writing accessible content
• The State Of Web Scraping in 2021 – a look at some utilities available for scraping data out of HTML for processing in a structured way
• AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-led Initiatives: as Bobo Berjon writes, a clear and dispassionate overview of the damage wreaked by AMP and the reason why it’s become very difficult to treat Google-led initiatives with anything other than intense suspicion.
• Apple, Its Control Over the iPhone, and The Internet – “There is no open web on the iPhone, either — only the “iPhone web.””
• Lena – a very thought-provoking short story in the form of a “wikipedia” article about the earliest executable image of a human brain.

• Link o’ the week: The Future of CSS: Cascade Layers is a jolly useful guide by @bramus that’s helped me understand the syntax and subtleties
• Apple to face EU antitrust charge over NFC chip – Only Apple Pay can use it because (checks notes) “privacy and security, absolutely not monopolistic behaviour. Who, us? Ha ha! Never!”
• New study reveals iPhones aren’t as private as you think – “Android phones collect more data by volume, but iPhones collect more types of data, a study finds”
• Make your PWAs Look and Launch Beautifully a presentation a by Önder Ceylan at PWA summit on the new developments on cross-platform icons, splash screens etc.
• Making the whole web better, one canvas at a time – Uncle Brian on OffscreenCanvas
• In Quest of Search – “On why I think adding a new HTML sectioning element for search is a good idea” by Sara Soueidan
• Datasette Desktop – “Datasette was originally designed as a tool for data journalists, to help report on data-driven stories, crunch through large datasets and publish the results…Datasette can be used to power dynamic-static websites: sites that run on serverless hosting while providing dynamic data-backed functionality.”
• Google found guilty of restricting Android forks in South Korea, fined $177 million
• Me Me Me! corner: The F-Word Episode 13 – Does the iOS browser ban harm or help the web? Now with added Stuart Langridge!

• Link o’ the Week: iOS Engine Choice In Depth – Big Al doing his forensics on Apple’s disingenuousness.
• Australian watchdog considers regulating Apple and Google to boost app store competition = ” both companies faced very little competition in app distributions on their respective mobile platforms. The competition watchdog suggested the companies were stifling competition with their control over what apps could do on their platforms.”
• Russia slaps Apple with warning over abusing dominant market position – “it was cheaper to buy goods on a seller’s website… Apple gets a commission from 15% to 30% for each payment in the App Store, yet users are blocked from being informed about the possibility of purchases outside of it”
• After Apple rejections, FlickType gives up on popular iPhone keyboard for the blind – “Apple has thrown us obstacle after obstacle for years while we try to provide an app to improve people’s lives, and we can no longer endure their abuse.”
• Postcodes.io – Postcode & Geolocation API for the UK. Free, Open Source and based solely on Open Data
• A guide to designing accessible, WCAG-compliant focus indicators by Sara Soueidan
• Good stablecoins, a protocol for money, and digital wallets: the formula to fix our broken payment system. Hurrah! Facebook’s ZuckCoin is about to launch. And apparently, anyone who doesn’t love the idea of Facebook knowing all about your “money in the MetaVerse” (really!) is “profoundly unAmerican”.
• End of the line for Uber – Cory Doctorow on Uber’s probable demise. The saddest thing about Uber (and Airbnb) is they *could* have been good ideas if they actually were about real people’s spare capacity meeting some genuine excess demand. But (perhaps inevitably) they turned into hideous Silicon Valley monsters.
• Goodbye, Michael Jones, the man who gave the power of maps in our hands – Obituary of Michael Jones, the man behind Google Earth, and his mission to democratize maps.