Adactio: Links—Tagged with markup

HTML attributes to improve your users’ two factor authentication experience - Twilio

The many ways of improving a single form field in HTML.

I love these kinds of deep dives into markup!

Why `details` is Not an Accordion - daverupert.com

At the risk of being a broken record; HTML really needs <accordion> , <tabs>, <dialog>, <dropdown>, and <tooltip> elements. Not more “low-level primitives” but good ol’ fashioned, difficult-to-get-consensus-on elements.

Hear, hear!

I wish browsers would prioritize accessibility improvements over things like main thread scheduling optimization to unblock tracking pixels and the Sisyphean task of competing with native.

If we really want to win, let’s make it easy for everyone to access the Web.

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.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search

Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements.

This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:

…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.

The difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript | Zell Liew

HTML lets you create the structure of a website.

CSS lets you make the website look nice.

JavaScript lets you change HTML and CSS. Because it lets you change HTML and CSS, it can do tons of things.

Beyond automatic accessibility testing: 6 things I check on every website I build - Manuel Matuzović

Six steps that everyone can do to catch accessibility gotchas:

Check image descriptions

Disable all styles

Validate HTML

Check the document outline

Grayscale mode

Use the keyboard

The “P” in Progressive Enhancement stands for “Pragmatism” - Andy Bell

With a Progressive Enhancement mindset, support actually means support. We’re not trying to create an identical experience: we’re creating a viable experience instead.

Also with Progressive Enhancement, it’s incredibly likely that your IE11 user, or your user on a low-powered device, or even your user on a poor connection won’t notice that they’re experiencing a “minor” experience because it’ll just work for them. This is the magic, right there. Everyone’s a winner.

do you know your tags?

Test your knowledge of the original version of HTML—how many elements can you name?

The perfect responsive menu (2019) | Polypane responsive browser

I don’t know about “perfect” but this pretty much matches how I go about implementing responsive navigation (but only if there are too many links to show—visible navigation is almost always preferable).

An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle - Cloud Four

When I liveblogged Jason’s talk at An Event Apart in Chicago, I included this bit of reporting:

Jason proceeds to relate a long and involved story about buying burritos online from Chipotle.

Well, here is that story. It’s a good one, with some practical takeaways (if you’ll pardon the pun):

Use HTML5 input features

Support autofill

Make autofill part of your test plans

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

Redux: Lazy loading youtube embeds

Remy has an excellent improvement on that article I linked to yesterday on using srcdoc with iframes. Rather than using srcdoc instead of src, you can use srcdoc as well as src. That way you can support older browsers too!

Lazy load embedded YouTube videos - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

This is a clever use of the srcdoc attribute on iframes.

Native lazy-loading for the web | web.dev

The title is somewhat misleading—currently it’s about native lazy-loading for Chrome, which is not (yet) the web.

I’ve just been adding loading="lazy" to most of the iframes and many of the images on adactio.com, and it’s working a treat …in Chrome.

Form design: from zero to hero all in one blog post by Adam Silver

This is about designing forms that everyone can use and complete as quickly as possible. Because nobody actually wants to use your form. They just want the outcome of having used it.

Maybe You Don’t Need a Date Picker | Adrian Roselli

In some situations, a date picker is overkill:

I have relied on plain text inputs as date fields with custom validation for the site, typically using the same logic on the client and the server. For known dates — birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, etc — it has tested well.

The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously | Filament Group, Inc.

Scott re-examines the browser support for loading everything-but-the-critical-CSS asynchronously and finds that it might now be as straightforward as this one declaration:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/path/to/my.css" media="print" onload="this.media='all'">

I love the fact the Filament Group are actively looking at how deprecate their loadCSS polyfill—exactly the right attitude for polyfills in general.

Link tags: markup

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