Dispatches From The Internets

Cool to see more efficient range-based media queries are beginning to roll out.

The big change in the Media Queries Level 4 specification is that we have new operators that compare values rather than combining them:

• < evaluates if a value is less than another value
• > evaluates if a value is greater than another value
• = evaluates if a value is equal to another value
• <= evaluates if a value is less than or equal to another value
• >= evaluates if a value is greater than or equal to another value

🤞🏻 we get them in Safari soon!

A good overview of “roles” in the accessibility context, including both why and how to use them. It includes lots of e-commerce examples too.

[E]nsuring all components are marked up with the proper “Roles” is not only key to identifying the purpose of site components to users using assistive technologies, but also is an important step toward making an accessibility-compliant e-commerce site.

I got really excited about aural style sheets back in the day, only to have my hopes dashed when I discovered no one supported them. Then came ReadSpeaker (and its ilk), which started to move in that direction, but the solutions are far from perfect.

I even tinkered a bit with the Speech Synthesis API to achieve something akin to a functional listening experience for this blog. Would love to go back to doing it in CSS though. I hope this happens!

Curious to know what’s going on with Progressive Web Apps in 2022? The 2022 edition of the Web Almanac is out, with an excellent chapter on PWAs by Diego Gonzalez and Beth Pan.

Early on in my journey as a web designer, Molly Holzschlag taught me the importance of controlling everything you can, up until the point that you realize you must relinquish control. In this piece, Jeremy Keith explores the tension around control and, ultimately, echoes Molly’s perspective:

The web is filled with uncertainties—browsers, devices, networks. You can’t possibly account for all of the possible variations. On the web, you have to relinquish some control.

I love this piece from Tomas Pustelnik. It walks through all the work you need to do to build a fake button using a div when you could have just used a button.

It’s kinda the inverse of a piece I wrote for Smashing a few years back: Developing Dependency Awareness.