Tags: markup

Using aria-live

A terrific explanation of the aria-live attribute from Ire. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is vital knowledge.

Reluctant Gatekeeping: The Problem With Full Stack | HeydonWorks

The value you want form a CSS expert is their CSS, not their JavaScript, so it’s absurd to make JavaScript a requirement.

Absolutely spot on! And it cuts both ways:

Put CSS in JS and anyone who wishes to write CSS now has to know JavaScript. Not just JavaScript, but —most likely—the specific ‘flavor’ of JavaScript called React. That’s gatekeeping, first of all, but the worst part is the JavaScript aficionado didn’t want CSS on their plate in the first place.

Introducing the Button element - HankChizlJaw

It’ll never catch on.

HTML elements, unite! The Voltron-like powers of combining elements. | CSS-Tricks

This great post by Mandy ticks all my boxes! It’s a look at the combinatorial possibilities of some of the lesser-known HTML elements: abbr, cite, code, dfn, figure, figcaption, kbd, samp, and var.

How do you mark up an accordion? — Sara Soueidan

I love this deep dive that Sara takes into the question of marking up content for progressive disclosure. It reminds me Dan’s SimpleQuiz from back in the day.

Then there’s this gem, which I think is a terrificly succinct explanation of the importance of meaningful markup:

It’s always necessary, in my opinion, to consider what content would render and look like in foreign environments, or in environments that are not controlled by our own styles and scripts. Writing semantic HTML is the first step in achieving truly resilient Web sites and applications.

Conversational Semantics · An A List Apart Article

I love, love, love all the little details of HTML that Aaron offers up here. And I really like how he positions non-visual user-agents like searchbots, screen readers, and voice assisants as headless UIs.

HTML is a truly robust and expressive language that is often overlooked and undervalued, but it has the incredible potential to nurture conversations with our users without requiring a lot of effort on our part. Simply taking the time to code web pages well will enable our sites to speak to our customers like they speak to each other. Thinking about how our sites are experienced as headless interfaces now will set the stage for more natural interactions between the real world and the digital one.

The Web I Want - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Scores of people who just want to deliver their content and have it look vaguely nice are convinced you need every web technology under the sun to deliver text.

This is very lawnoffgetting but I can relate.

I made my first website about 20 years ago and it delivered as much content as most websites today. It was more accessible, ran faster and easier to develop then 90% of the stuff you’ll read on here.

20 years later I browse the Internet with a few tabs open and I have somehow downloaded many megabytes of data, my laptop is on fire and yet in terms of actual content delivery nothing has really changed.

Front-End Performance Checklist

A handy pre-launch go/no-go checklist to run through before your countdown.

Understanding why Semantic HTML is important, as told by TypeScript.

Oh, this is such a good analogy from Mandy! Choosing the right HTML element is like choosing the right data type in a strongly typed programming language.

Get to know the HTML elements available to you, and use the appropriate one for your content. Make the most it, like you would any language you choose to code with.

Accessibility: Start with the foundations | susan jean robertson

I encourage you to think about and make sure you are using the right elements at the right time. Sometimes I overthink this, but that’s because it’s that important to me - I want to make sure that the markup I use helps people understand the content, and doesn’t hinder them.

Designing for Everyone: Building Great Web Experiences for Any Device

The slides and video from a really great well-rounded talk by Aaron, filled with practical examples illustrating concepts like progressive enhancement and inclusive design.

On Designing and Building Toggle Switches

Sara shows a few different approaches to building accessible toggle switches:

Always, always start thinking about the markup and accessibility when building components, regardless of how small or simple they seem.

Short note on progressive ARIA by The Paciello Group

Léonie makes a really good point here: if you’re adding aria attributes to indicate interactions you’re making available through JavaScript, then make sure you also use JavaScript to add those aria attributes.

Web Components in 2018 - Blog | SitePen

A good explanation of web components, complete with some code examples.

Web Components are not a single technology. Instead, they are series of browser standards defined by the W3C allowing developers to build components in a way the browser can natively understand. These standards include:

• HTML Templates and Slots – Reusable HTML markup with entry points for user-specific markup
• Shadow DOM – DOM encapsulation for markup and styles
• Custom Elements – Defining named custom HTML elements with specific behaviour

Sending your First Webmention from Scratch • Aaron Parecki

A nice little tutorial from Aaron.

Responsive Blue Note Album sleeves recreated in the browser using HTML and CSS

These recreations of Blue Note record covers are quite lovely!

Don’t Use The Placeholder Attribute — Smashing Magazine

A lot of the issues here are with abuses of the placeholder attribute—using it as a label, using it for additional information, etc.—whereas using it quite literally as a placeholder can be thought of as an enhancement (I almost always preface mine with “e.g.”).

Still, there’s no getting around that terrible colour contrast issue: if the contrast were greater, it would look too much like an actual pre-filled value, and that’s potentially worse.

Designing Web Content for watchOS - WWDC 2018 - Videos - Apple Developer

If you don’t fancy watching this video, Eric Runyon has written down the salient points about what it means for developers now that websites can be viewed on the Apple Watch. Basically, as long as you’re writing good, meaningful markup and you’ve got a sensible font stack, you’re all set.

Or, as Tim puts it:

When we build our sites in a way that allows people using less-capable devices, slower networks and other less than ideal circumstances, we end up better prepared for whatever crazy device or technology comes along next.

Know your ARIA: ‘Hidden’ vs ‘None’ | scottohara.me

When to use aria-hidden="true", and when you might need display: none:

aria-hidden by itself is not enough to completely hide an element from all users, if that is the end goal.

When to use role="presentation" (or role="none"):

Where aria-hidden can be used to completely hide content from assistive technology, modifying an element’s role to “none” or “presentation” removes the semantics of the element, but does not hide the content from assistive technologies.

CSS and Markup in Javascript is an Evolutionary Dead End

The bet to make is that we’re going to see more use of specialized languages. And HTML and CSS are the grandaddy specialized languages that have enough social consensus and capital investment to be the seeds of the next generation.