Dispatches From The Internets

The folks at Bing have put together their own mobile-friendliness test. Like the Google one, it’s a good litmus test for how you’re doing, but neither is a replacement for testing on a real device.

If you’ve ever struggled to convince someone why they should be making their site or web product accessible, Alice Bartlett has your back.

Karl nails it (as per usual):

[A]dd-on accessibility is a sham. … They fail to provide anything beyond a marginal benefit for the end user and are, at best, a band-aid over a gaping wound. … [Companies] would be better off spending their money educating their design and development staff on accessibility than wasting their money on snake oil solutions made by amateurs.

Based on the slides, this looks like it was an excellent talk from Eric Eggert. I wish I’d seen it delivered in person.

If you struggle with regular expressions, you should check out this tool. It reminds me a lot of RegEx Buddy, a Windows program that was an immense help in trying to wrap my head around writing regular expressions.

An excellent overview of how to make SVGs more accessible, from the incredible Léonie Watson.

There’s some really interesting performance-related lessons to be learned from Google’s AMP project. This chronicles a few.

I’m gonna give the preconnect & prefetch stuff a whirl on this site to see if it helps speed things up at all. I gave the preconnect & prefetch stuff a whirl on this site, and it sped things up substantially.

This is a fantastic investigation of framework performance on mobile by Google’s Paul Lewis. In short: frameworks make things more convenient for developers, but pass the inconvenience on to end users. For more, see Who Should Pay? and Who Should Pay 2: The Hosting.

Tons of great stuff in this release. Notably: the picture element, the srcset (with w descriptors) & sizes attributes, CSS initial and unset keywords, a[download], :read-write & :read-only, :in-range & :out-of-range, more ES2015 goodies, and a ton more. Hooray for evergreen!