I’m not generally a fan of session timeouts, but if you have to do it, Léonie Watson has outlined a pretty good route to go. My only nit might be using a role of “alert” or “alertdialog” instead of “group”, but that’s because it would trigger an audible chime and get read by assistive tech. But that’s pretty minor.
Pay particular attention to the keyboard focus stuff too.
A clear and concise overview of browsers’ accessibility trees, using the video element as an example. Yet another reason to love Steve Faulkner.
Great post from Jeremy on Web components. I couldn’t agree more:
I was looking forward to getting really stuck into Web Components and figuring out ways of creating powerful little extensions that I could start using now. But if Web Components turn out to be an all-or-nothing technology—a “platform”, if you will—then I will not only not be using them, I’ll be actively arguing against their use.
Pagination is pretty arbitrary. Could it be better? Probably.
For example, take your average photo site that displays the content in a reverse chronological order: that is, newest to oldest. Let’s say your friend has posted 2000 photos to this site. The site shows the viewer 10 things per page. With our prolific user, this gives us 200 pages.
Going to the middle of this content takes us to page 100. What does this mean, beyond we’re at the middle? Not much.
I hadn’t really thought about it with respect to gaming, but this has definitely been an interesting trend:
More and more so, the programming we once watched on TV is migrating to our tablets and phones. Cable providers have apps that let customers access live television, and even the contents of their DVRs, on their personal devices. Comcast et al realize they must let you access that content where your eyeballs are, or you’ll find other content. Ditto Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony. Game consoles cannot be married to the TV.
I am not a WhatsApp user, but I have long been impressed with the way they embrace operating systems others ignore. I think it has been a key to their success and speaks to the “accessibility” (in the broader sense) of their service.
I am completely baffled by the design decisions they made in their Web client, as is Andre Alves Garzia.
This is Microsoft’s Jacob Rossi on how “Project Spartan” came to be and what is going on inside the browser that comes after Internet Explorer.
On that elated feeling of removing legacy code:
[S]wathes of IE legacy were deleted from the new engine. Gone were document modes. Removed was the subsystem responsible for emulating IE8 layout quirks. VBScript eliminated. Remnants like attachEvent, X-UA-Compatible, currentStyle were all purged from the new engine. The codebase looks little like Trident anymore (far more diverged already than even Blink is from WebKit).
On a faster dev cycle for the new browser:
[W]e’ll treat Windows 10 as a service—keeping users up to date and delivering features when they are ready (“auto-update”), not waiting for the next major release. This means the new rendering engine will always be truly evergreen.
On opening up the process:
Another welcomed change that we’ve been rolling out over the past year is a promise for increased openness about our web platform plans and roadmap. Over the last year, you’ve hopefully experienced some of this through our open standards roadmap15 (one of my personal side projects), our Reddit AMA16, regular dialog through @IEDevChat17, and sharing preview builds18 very early in our development process. You’ll see more of this over the next year.
Promising stuff all around. I am still wondering if we’ll eventually see the new browser appear on other operating systems (even if it’s just the browser chrome and not the rendering engine—like Chrome on iOS). Time will tell.
In his continuing exploration of font loading optimization, Zach Leatherman proposes loading a Roman (i.e. normal weight, non-italic) font first and letting the browser synthesize (i.e. fake) the bold, italic, etc. variants to reduce the load time and reflow of the document and let users start reading as soon as possible. Then he lazy loads the additional font weights and styles so the browser can swap out the synthesized glyphs for the actual ones.
Super clever stuff Zach!
Another awesome post from Adrian Roselli on the perils of pushing for a one-browser (a.k.a. WebKit) world:
Everyone who calls for WebKit in Internet Explorer is exactly the same kind of developer who would have coded to Internet Explorer 15 years ago (and probably happily displayed the best viewed in badge).
If you are that developer, then it will all be your fault when it happens again. When WebKit is no longer the hot engine. When Chrome loses its dominance. When Apple’s market share falls to match the developing world. You will be to blame.
Do you think that won’t happen? Just look to Android browser fragmentation, or WebKit failing to support a standard that Firefox and IE have nailed, or Chrome introducing its own proprietary features (can’t find the link; it’s coming), or failing to use best practices as it tries to carry the next big thing forward, or the complete lack of developer relations from Apple. We’ve had over half a decade of warning signs.
It’s happening again, and every petulant, lazy developer who calls for a WebKit-only world is responsible.
And here we have yet another new browser. Vivaldi is inspired by the Opera of old and is pretty feature-rich according to the article. I’ll give it a shot.
Vivaldi runs Blink under the hood (like Opera and Chrome), which lends credence to my theory that soon browsers will compete on chrome, rather than standards implementations.