Link archive: January 19th, 2017

Trump: A Resister’s Guide | Harper’s Magazine - Part 11

You, the software engineers and leaders of technology companies, face an enormous responsibility. You know better than anyone how best to protect the millions who have entrusted you with their data, and your knowledge gives you real power as civic actors. If you want to transform the world for the better, here is your moment. Inquire about how a platform will be used. Encrypt as much as you can. Oppose the type of data analysis that predicts people’s orientation, religion, and political preferences if they did not willingly offer that information.

Improving accessibility in Co-op wills – Digital blogs

Some interesting insights from usability and accessibility testing at the Co-op.

We used ‘nesting’ to reduce the amount of information on the page when the user first reaches it. When the user chooses an option, we ask for any other details at that point rather than having all the questions on the page at once.

bastianallgeier/letter: Letter is a simple, highly customizable tool to create letters in your browser.

A nice little use of print (and screen) styles from Bastian—compose letters in a web browser.

Instead of messing around in Word, Pages or even Indesign, you can write your letters in the browser, export them as HTML or PDF (via Apple Preview).

Understanding the Critical Rendering Path

A nice and clear description of how browsers parse and render web pages.

Certified Malice – text/plain

Following from that great post about the “zone of death” in browsers, Eric Law looks at security and trust in a world where certificates are free and easily available …even to the bad guys.

Let them paste passwords - NCSC Site

Ever been on one of those websites that doesn’t allow you to paste into the password field? Frustrating, isn’t it? (Especially if you use a password manager.)

It turns out that nobody knows how this ever started. It’s like a cargo cult without any cargo.

Making input type=date complicated – Samsung Internet Developers – Medium

PPK has posted some excellent thinking on calendar widgets to Ev’s blog.

Arrival – Mozilla Open Design

Mozilla’s audacious rebranding in the open that I linked to a while back has come to fruition.

I like it. But even if I didn’t, congratulations to everyone involved in getting agreement across an organisation of this size—never an easy task.

Memory of Mankind: All of Human Knowledge Buried in a Salt Mine - The Atlantic

Like cuneiform crossed with the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.

He will laser-print a microscopic font onto 1-mm-thick ceramic sheets, encased in wafer-thin layers of glass. One 20 cm piece of this microfilm can store 5 million characters; whole libraries of information—readable with a 10x-magnifying lens—could be slotted next to each other and hardly take up any space.