Simplified JavaScript Jargon
An A-Z of JavaScript jargon (although some of the “explanations” could do with de-jargonifying themselves).
Link archive: December 13th, 2015
Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace—Stephen Wolfram Blog
A detailed history of Babbage and Lovelace through the lens of Wolfram’s work today:
Ada seems to have understood with some clarity the traditional view of programming: that we engineer programs to do things we know how to do. But she also notes that in actually putting “the truths and the formulae of analysis” into a form amenable to the engine, “the nature of many subjects in that science are necessarily thrown into new lights, and more profoundly investigated.” In other words—as I often point out—actually programming something inevitably lets one do more exploration of it.
If this piques your interest, I highly recommend the Babbage biography The Cogwheel Brain by Doron Swade.
HIKE - Introduction to accessibility concepts for the Web
It really isn’t hard to get the basics of accessibility right on the web …and yet those basics are often neglected.
Here’s a handy shortlist to run through, HIKE:
- H stands for headings and semantic markup.
- I stands for images and labels.
- K stands for keyboard navigation.
- E asks for you to ACT with a little extra love for custom components and more.
(ACT = ARIA, Colour Contrast, Text Size)
Smaller, Faster Websites - - Bocoup
The transcript of a great talk by Wilto, focusing on responsive images, inlining critical CSS, and webfont loading.
When we present users with a slow website, a loading spinner, laggy webfonts—or tell them outright that they‘re not using a website the right way—we’re breaking the fourth wall. We’ve gone so far as to invent an arbitary line between “webapp” and “website” so we could justify these decisions to ourselves: “well, but, this is a web app. It… it has… JSON. The people that can’t use the thing I built? They don’t get a say.”
We, as an industry, have nearly decided that we’re doing a great job as long as we don’t count the cases where we’re doing a terrible job.
Peaceful Reflection
Paul takes a look back at a time in his life one decade ago. This is a great piece of personal writing.