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Safari 17.4 Beta Release Notes

Amidst all the kerfuffle over Apple’s push to drop PWAs (a.k.a., Home Screen Apps), two PWA features I worked on quietly landed in Safari for desktop: shortcuts & categories.

  • Added support for the shortcuts manifest member on macOS. Shortcuts are available in the File menu and the Dock context menu. Users can set up custom keyboard shortcuts for them in System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. (106137954)

  • Added support for the categories manifest member on macOS. When creating a Launchpad folder containing web apps, the folder is automatically named accordingly. (116480550)

🎉

Acessibilidade: O verdadeiro diferencial dos livros digitais

It’s nice to see folks in the digital book space beginning to embrace the potential of their medium:

Para abraçar verdadeiramente o potencial do digital, é essencial adotar uma mentalidade ‘digital first’. Isso significa que o conteúdo digital não deve ser uma simples transposição do impresso, mas sim algo que aproveita ao máximo as funcionalidades únicas do meio digital.

The UX of HTML

Somehow my students are allergic to semantics and shit. And they’re not alone. If you look at 99% of all websites in the wild, everybody who worked on them seems to be allergic to semantics and shit. On most websites heading levels are just random numbers, loosely based on font-size. Form fields have no labels. Links and buttons are divs. It’s really pretty bad. So it’s not just my students, the whole industry doesn’t understand semantics and shit.

I feel this… deeply. And I 100% agree with where Vasilis is coming from here. I do take a bit of umbrage with the idea that heading levels don’t matter—they really do—but his point about getting folks excited about the stuff they get for free by paying attention to their markup is something I’ve been pushing for years as well.

If you’re interested in a related deep dive into HTML’s lack of dependencies, check out this piece I wrote for Smashing Magazine. If you’d like to dive deeper into forms, I have this talk you might like.