The fine folks at 18F just posted a beautiful write-up of the talk on progressive enhancement that I delivered as part of the 18F Design Speaker Series. I thoroughly enjoyed talking to the folks that came. They presented some interesting challenges and asked pressing questions—exactly the kind of engagement I love.
Dispatches From The Internets
My trip to 18F
Designing Web Code in a Native App
Jeff Burtoft and I collaborated on a little post about the benefits of hosted apps and the pros and cons of integrating the web with the OS.
Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.
Web Design 101: 100% Tappable
I see this one all the time: something that looks like a button, but only a portion of it is tappable.
Windows 10 virtual machines now available
Need a Windows 10 (virtual) box for testing Microsoft Edge? They’re now available no the Microsoft Edge Dev site.
Inside Selectors: Discover :matches(), :not() and :nth-child()
More selectors from Selectors Level 4 have landed in WebKit. This is a handy overview of some of them.
What happens when you get sued for your inaccessible website
The bottom line: “Ultimately, you are going to end up fixing your website”, so “[b]eing proactive is far better than being reactive and that’s never more true than when you’re dealing with a legal threat.”
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
An excellent overview of where web advertising is and what lines it has crossed. This bit is particularly relevant:
This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But it’s completely reasonable for today’s web readers to be so fed up that they disable all ads, or even all Javascript. Web developers and standards bodies couldn’t be more out of touch with this issue, racing ahead to give browsers and Javascript even more capabilities without adequately addressing the fundamental problems that will drive many people to disable huge chunks of their browser’s functionality.
Use the words normal people use
’Nuff said.
Opening Standards
This is exciting news:
For the first time, all of W3C’s active Working Groups now operate in public.
Open Source Style Guide
A fantastic overview of best practices for running an open source project on Github from the folks at 18F. Covers everything to naming your project to writing READMEs to reporting issues.