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!)
A vital Q from a developer in the room who, as a kid, made a free open-source app that was downloaded millions of times. Under Apple's new proposal that apps distributed through an alt app store pay them a Core technology Fee of 50c per first install, he would have owed Apple 5 million Euros for his free app. Is that fair? (Dozens of hands raised.)
We asked Apple why their compliance report is only 12 pages (Microsoft was 421pp, Google's was 221pp). They replied that it's very clear and everyone understands what they're doing to comply with DMA.
I'm sure PWA owners, devs and users in the EU are enormously grateful for Apple's clarity over the last few weeks on what they're doing to comply with the DMA.
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 Yes! Some years back I gave a talk called, "Why You Should Do Support" advocating for every person in tech to take the occasional support shift. A key part was a call I did circa 1990 with someone who had gotten their first Mac and was struggling to figure out how to plug in the monitor. I had her describe the ports she could find, and one was "dinner plate" or "place setting". It blew my mind; it was a place setting!
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@craiggrannell Literally been explaining this to clients since the mid-/late ’90s. I’ve long-since stripped all traces of Google Analytics out of my own sites, and only install it on clients sites when they explicitly request it. Few ever do.
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 I try to avoid inlining SVG until I actually need it for styling. Unfortunately, “inlining to HTML” sometimes means bloating your JS bundle if the markup is client-side generated. But you can have both: external SVG sprite with all icons and inline <use> that’s stylable. See https://pepelsbey.dev/articles/svg-sprites/#external-svg
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.
Here's how it will go. Water Co will got tits-up. Holding company walks away with no debt. Buys back company-in-admin for 1p, debts written off. The bills of all water users increase to cover bad debt.
@brucelawson And for some additional context: there was a time in the 1990’s, and extending into the 2000’s, when neo-liberal fever gripped Singapore.
A lot of previously-nationalised companies were privatised, and where companies were already technically privatised, their primary industries were liberalised. Telecommunications, public transit, national TV, print media - you name it, they privatised and/or liberalised it.
A while ago I was interviewing for a job. I think I got past 3 interviews and they refused to talk money. When it was time for the last interview I told them that either they told me how much they were offering beforehand or I wouldn't be attending.
They ghosted me after that so I didn't bother going.
The HR manager called later that day screaming and calling me (I quote) "fucking unprofessional".
@brucelawson Here in California, job postings must contain a salary range BY LAW. Companies and recruiters who post jobs from out of state for remote work in California must include a salary range also.
Pointing this out to said companies and recruiters is a great way to weed out those companies as they'll ghost you.
Same with telling Tata (TCS), Wipro, or other Indian recruiting firms that their contract rate isn't close to market for the role.
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@jan "Before the Blink fork" is, I think, underselling the relatively amusing timing of it all. As I recall Opera put out a blog post saying "We're switching to WebKit, via Chromium" mere weeks before we were planning to announce the Blink fork. The blog post even went out of its way to specify that WebKit was picked for compatibility, because it was so ubiquitous.
Meanwhile on the Chrome side we're all looking at each other going "Uh.... Who's gonna tell them?"
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?
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/
In my social circle only older employees (men > 60) rejoyce at going back to 100% on-site. The rest demands between 4-5 home office days per week and is prepared to leave the company if their employers should be stupid enough to force them back onsite full time. Meanwhile nobody I know willingly applies for jobs that demand 100% on-site because they are as old-fashioned as VHS tape in the IT sector. #Employers need to grow up and let go of the past.
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.
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.
@cdevroe@brucelawson and a wide variety of bugs affecting the resizing of the visual viewport and scrolling of the page in reaction to onscreen keyboard appearance on iOS.
All of this is because of underfunding for over a decade caused by a lack of competition... OWA will try to fix the competition aspect, which will lead to funding, which will lead to a reliable platform for building apps.
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@mensrea 🤔hmm.. Do you know how i can contact Big Maths? Maybe they'd be willing to fund work on MathML in the browsers, since Big Browsers don't?
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/