brucelawson

brucelawson, 1 month ago to random

I'm at an EU workshop for Apple to discuss and justify its DMA compliance plans. They've been forced into 3 huge u-turns by EU (killing PWAs, removing Epic Games' developer licenses, sideloading) so I'm interested to see their demeanour. Will it be humility, or the usual 'fuck you, we're Apple'? There are people from EU companies that Apple blithely planned to bankrupt by sneakily removing PWAs here. And regulators have human feelings too; no-one like "fuck you". I'll be here all day (try the baguettes!)

brucelawson, 3 months ago to random

I'm having a conversation with a designer about icons. Making a screenreader read "camera" or "microphone" when an icon is shown is trivial with aria-label. But screenreader users are massively outnumbered by sighted users who might be confused by the meaning of a tiny image/ icon. The mighty Paul Annett explains more:

brucelawson, 20 days ago to random

Why do marketing people get so obsessed about time someone spends on a page (with the assumption that longer=better because 'engagement')? Good IA should mean users find what they want quickly; good UX means quick ordering. Good copywriting means quick comprehension, doesn't it?

brucelawson, 3 months ago to random

On SVGs & performance: is there a perf reason to inline an SVG image (so the XML code is visible in your HTML source) rather than pulling in an external resource e.g. <img src="zonk.svg">? It feels a bit like inlining images with base64, which doesn't therefore take advantage of the browser cache.

brucelawson, 8 months ago to random

Not all heroes wear capes.

brucelawson, 1 month ago to random

My modest proposal: Failing water companies should go bankrupt, their investors lose everything, their boards and C-suites be fired, and the gov should buy them for £1 and run them as national utilities. Ditto the railways and privatised energy orgs that price-gouged us last 2 winters. Then every statue of Thatcher & her ideological allies should be melted down and turned into commemorative medals to celebrate the day we free ourselves of the stupidity that saw the nations' utilities and housing stock sold to profiteering wideboys.

brucelawson, 1 month ago to random

Enjoy these two concentric circles

brucelawson, 3 months ago to random

I don't want Chromium to win. Now its monopoly is removed, Apple can now actually invest in Safari so it's no longer "the new IE6". Since regulators started looking, Apple has really put work into it. Let's hope this continues. WebKit runs on Mac, Linux, Android and Windows (there used to be Safari/ Win). If anyone has money, marketing clout and brand loyalty to make a brilliant cross-platform Safari to compete against Chrome. If anyone can, it's Apple.

brucelawson, 6 months ago to random

Do I know anyone who uses Formstack and knows how to cajole it to produce autocomplete attribute, eg <input type="text" autocomplete="family-name"> for WCAG 2.2 3.3.7 fun? https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/redundant-entry

brucelawson, 8 months ago to random

Who's got the best advice on a11y of <dialog> element? I might get a message from server and need to say to user "data has changed, refresh the page". If I just invoke a <dialog> is that enough? Does it need to be anywhere specific in the DOM?

brucelawson, 10 months ago to random

Of employers who forced staff back to the office, 42% said "attrition" was higher than normal, 21% said the move had actually lost them some of their "key" staff. 29% were now "struggling" to recruit altogether. Ha ha ha. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/29/wfh_rto_survey/

brucelawson, 7 months ago to random

I fucking hate trendy coffee shops. I hate room with exposed bricks & utility ducts, and artfully distressed wooden tables, packed with content creators sipping their flat white soy twattacinos, with a daft picture doodled in it by a wanker, and eating avocado on sourdough served in a plant pot, or a repurposed bird bath.

brucelawson, 1 month ago to random

Making myself happy by stripping out loads of JS and replacing it with declarative markup and modern CSS, which will work in modern (evergreen) browsers, and Safari too.

brucelawson, 24 days ago to random

More proof that Maths is bullshit: factorial of n is " the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n", yet factorial of zero = 1?!? Piss off, Pythagoras

brucelawson, 2 months ago to random

I really like the new HTML switch control in Safari 17.4, and its carefully thought-out backwards-compatible markup <input type=checkbox switch checked> so in other browsers, it's a checkbox. https://webkit.org/blog/15054/an-html-switch-control/

brucelawson, 11 months ago to random

Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta https://blog.tomayac.com/2023/06/07/web-apps-on-macos-sonoma-14-beta/ - some tech notes by @tomayac

brucelawson, 10 months ago to random

Can I use robots.txt to tell Open AI and its mates that my content isn't for scraping?

brucelawson, 8 months ago to random

So far today, I've had a fight with Microsoft Teams (which forgets which camera I use, and gets tangled up with an ancient account I don't use) and something called Dynamic 365, which just won't let me in. Unfamiliarity with the world of Microsoft, or are these terrible products?

brucelawson, 2 months ago to random

It’s Official, Apple Kills Web Apps in the EU https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/its-official-apple-kills-web-apps-in-the-eu/ If you ship a Web App in the EU and will be impacted by this, please fill in our survey. It is critical that we gather as much evidence as possible to prevent Apple from breaking Web Apps in the EU.

brucelawson, 3 months ago to random

Listening to some vocals I recorded yesterday, and noticing loads of out-of-tune bits that completely escaped my attention yesterday. (I find it very hard to hit notes accurately at the lower end of my vocal range.)

brucelawson, 8 months ago to random

Bagged myself a 2ndhand CD of best of Ladytron. Mesmerising stuff. (These days, a used CD is cheaper than the mp3 download of an album, and I get to choose my own compression/ format.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPZoaGqLGpQ&list=PLPzD8o8WyVxgFCt0BpsXd0Op0BFHjOtzs

brucelawson, 2 months ago to random

Chuckling at @siblingpastry's song Socket full of Moses. A sort of "My Way" for a certain demographic. https://soundcloud.com/brothercake/socket-full-of-moses

brucelawson, 5 months ago to random

Sunrise on another boring day of sitting under this tedious tree while putting some finishing touches on an old song of mine. Maybe a bit of reading, a stroll and a cold beer. Sigh.

brucelawson, 7 months ago to random

I made a responsive hamburger menu using HTML popover (eg, normal horizontal nav becomes a hamburger button on narrow screens), and feel a little grubby about it, but I don't know why.
https://brucelawson.co.uk/tests/hamburger-popover.html

brucelawson, 3 months ago to random

I've just tracked down the source of the moaning, howling sound that unnerved me last night; wind coming through trickle vents in my new double-glazed windows. Which is a relief; Lawson Towers is 130 years old and I worried the ghost had come back.