This is a wonderful, wonderful look back at the state of hypertext in the run-up to the creation of the World Wide Web.
My jaw may have dropped when I saw the GML markup.
Now I’m going to read part two.
The best ARIA role is the one you don’t need to use.
Kate has been hand-making Christmas cards for seventeen years.
2013’s Gizmo Stardust remains my favourite.
Here’s a really nice addition to my Service Worker script—opportunistically add non-critical CSS, JavaScript, and fonts to a cache as you go.
Two sides of a debate on progressive enhancement…
Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko wrote Progressive enhancement — JS sites that work:
If your content website breaks down from JavaScript issue — it is broken.
Joe Hoyle disagrees:
Unlike Rarst, I don’t value progressive enhancement very highly and don’t agree it’s a fundamental principle of the web that should be universally employed. Quite frankly, I don’t care about not supporting JavaScript, and neither does virtually anyone else. It’s not that it doesn’t have any value, or utility - but in a world where we don’t have unlimited resources and time, one has to prioritise what we’ll support and not support.
Caspar acknowledges this:
I don’t have any problem buying into pragmatism as the main and often pressing reason for not investing into a no-JS fallback. The idealistic nature of a design directive like progressive enhancement is very clear to me, and so are typical restrictions in client projects (budgets, deadlines, processes of decision making).
But concludes that by itself that’s not enough reason to ditch such a fundamental technique for building a universal, accessible web:
Ain’t nobody got time for progressive enhancement always, maybe. But entirely ditching principle as a compass for resilient decision making won’t do.
See also: Mike Little’s thoughts on progressive enhancement and accessibility.
This is already starting to land in browsers, which makes me very happy—the ability to specify how you want fonts to load/swap without needing a clever bit of JavaScript.