Category: Web
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Three Things to Instantly Improve the Quality of Your Front-End Code
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which exists as a yearly reminder that about 1 billion people in the world have some form of disability, and that among other things, digital products and services should be usable and accessible to all regardless of ability. In this post I’ll list three simple things you can do…
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Detecting Windows High Contrast Mode for New and Old Browsers
There was a good post by Scott O’Hara last Thursday on how to detect Windows High Contrast mode in JavaScript and CSS. The most straight forward way to do this is to use their media queries in CSS (forced-colors: active and prefers-color-scheme: dark, respectively). While the media query for forced-colors works well with all modern…
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Accessibility and Progressive Enhancement
Thinking with a progressive enhancement mindset, that is starting with the most basic HTML features and enhancing with more advanced stuff, is in my opinion the best way to go about building inclusive, accessible websites. Jeremy Keith wrote about some accessibility feedback he got and how his originally robust code made the solution an easy…
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Trying out webmention support on my blog
This post is a test. I like the idea of owning my content, instead of leaving it inside corporate silos like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Webmentions are a cool W3C recommendation for mentioning/replying to another page on the Internet from your own site. I see it as a standardised way to do what bloggers used…
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The Paciello Group on accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders
I’ve always thought the prompts on booking sites that tell you there are only 2 rooms left were annoying, but hadn’t considered them an accessibility issue until now. Good read, and there’s a second part coming too. The web is awash with all manner of so-called dark patterns, designed to convert visitors and part them…
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Page Size and Plugins
After switching to a very minimal blog design, I realised what a huge impact (relatively speaking) libraries like jQuery and plugins like Jetpack can have on the weight of a page.
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Express Review: Going Offline by Jeremy Keith
Jeremy nails it again with this beginner-friendly introduction to Service Workers and Progressive Web Apps. The foreword to the book says “you’ll gain a solid understanding of how to put this new technology to work for you right away” and I’d say that is very accurate. One of the important things the book emphasizes is…
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Moving from CSS Frameworks to CSS Grid
I’ve been playing around with various CSS frameworks for the past eight years. All these frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap and Blueprint have really only served one purpose for me: to disguise the fact that until now, layout in CSS has been a hack.
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Thoughts on the Contrast Swap Technique for Improving Performance
In her post three days ago on CSS Tricks, Una Kravets described a clever technique she discovered for significantly reducing image sizes on the web with little loss of quality. Essentially the idea is this: Reduce the contrast of the image in Photoshop Re-apply contrast using CSS filter() With this process, Kravets managed to get…
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John Gruber on Annoying Sharing Bars
Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber has some true words to say about those pesky floating sharing bars (or “dickbars” like he calls them) used by Medium and others. A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these…