Link archive: November 7th, 2019
Information mesh
Timelines of people, interfaces, technologies and more:
30 years of facts about the World Wide Web.
Blot – A blogging platform with no interface
This looks like a nice way to get a blog up and running:
Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish. Images, text files, Word Documents, Markdown and more become blog posts automatically.
Data Patterns Catalogue
I really like the work that IF are doing to document patterns around handling data:
- Signing in to a service
- Giving and removing consent
- Giving access to data
- Getting access to data
- Understanding automated decisions
- Doing security checks
Each pattern has a description, advantages, limitations, and examples.
What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs
Nolan writes up what he learned making accessibiity improvements to a single page app. The two big takeways involve letting the browser do the work for you:
Here’s the best piece of accessibility advice for newbies: if something is a button, make it a
<button>. If something is an input, make it an<input>. Don’t try to reinvent everything from scratch using<div>s and<span>s.
And then there are all the issues that crop up when you take over the task of handling navigations:
- You need to manage focus yourself.
- You need to manage scroll position yourself.
For classic server-rendered pages, most browser engines give you this functionality for free. You don’t have to code anything. But in an SPA, since you’re overriding the normal navigation behavior, you have to handle the focus yourself.
Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die — by Craig Mod
Craig compares and contrasts books to “attention monsters”:
That is, any app / service / publication whose business is predicated on keeping a consumer engaged and re-engaged for the benefit of the organization (often to the detriment of the mental and physical health of the user), dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times a day.