Adactio: Links

Creating accessible menus-Part 1

James has been tweaking the accessibility of his site navigation. I’m looking forward to the sequel.

Web Components: The Long Game – Infrequently Noted

One of the things we’d hoped to enable via Web Components was a return to ctrl-r web development. At some level of complexity and scale we all need tools to help cope with code size, application structure, and more. But the tender, loving maintainance of babel and webpack and NPM configurations that represents a huge part of “front end development” today seems…punitive. None of this should be necessary when developing one (or a few) components and composing things shouldn’t be this hard. The sophistication of the tools needs to get back to being proportional with the complexity of the problem at hand.

I completely agree with Alex here. But that’s also why I was surprised and disheartened when I linked to Monica’s excellent introduction to web components that a package manager seemed to be a minimum requirement.

Occasionally, people e-mail me to say something along the lines of “I’ve come up with something to replace HTML!”.

Five years ago, Hixie outlined the five metrics that a competitor to the web would have to score well in:

Be completely devoid of any licensing requirements.
Be vendor-neutral.
Be device-neutral and media-neutral.
Be content-neutral.
Be radically better than the existing Web.

You come at the king, you best not miss.

cassidoo/HTML-CSS-Tutorial: Tutorial for HTML and CSS

Here’s a great free curriculum for teaching HTML and CSS.

Mapping in HTML – a proposal for a new element – Terence Eden’s Blog

I quite like this proposal for geo element in HTML, especially that it has a fallback built in (like video). I’m guessing the next step is to file an issue and create a web component to demonstrate how this could work.

That brings up another question: what do you name a custom element that you’d like to eventually become part of the spec? You can’t simply name it geo because you have to include a hyphen. geo-polyfill? geo-proposal? or polyfill-geo? proposal-geo?

10 guidelines to improve your web accessibility | Aerolab

Do not depend on color

Do not block zoom

Rediscover the alt attribute

Add subtitles and captions to your videos

Semantics = accessibility

Use the right mark-up

Use roles when necessary

On hiding elements

Follow web accessibility standards

Audit and review

Tooltips & Toggletips

Another great deep dive by Heydon into a single interface pattern. This time it’s the tooltip, and its cousin, the toggletip.

There’s some great accessibility advice in here.

Jekyll Includes are Cool - daverupert.com

Dave explains how Jekyll Includes are starting to convert him to web components. The encapsulation is nice and neat. And he answers the inevitable “but why not use React?” question:

Writing HTML that contains JavaScript, not JavaScript that contains HTML, feels good to me.

The key feature for me is that this approach doesn’t have to depend on JavaScript in the browser:

I like that Web Components are an entirely client-side technology but can be rendered server-side in existing tech stacks whether it’s Jekyll, Rails, or even some Enterprise Java system.

Let small include subheadings? · Issue #929 · w3c/html

Here’s an interesting proposal to slightly amend the semantics of the small element so it could apply to the use-case that hgroup was trying to cover.

Fixing fieldsets — That Emil is Emil Björklund

This is an excellent proposal from Emil. If we can apply display: contents to fieldsets, then we would finally have a way of undoing the byzantine browser styles that have hindered adoption of this element. This proposal also ensures backwards compatibility so there’d be no breakage of older sites:

The legacy appearance of fieldsets probably needs to be preserved for compatibility reasons. But display: contents is not supported in any old browsers, and is most likely used on exactly zero sites using the legacy look of fieldsets.

Whaddya say, browser makers?

Microformats : Meaningful HTML

A great one-page intro to microformats (h-card in particular), complete with a parser that exports JSON. Bookmark this for future reference.

Inclusively Hidden | scottohara.me

Comparing different ways to hide content accessibly:

There are three reasons behind hiding content in an interface, and it’s important to identify what those reasons are, as they will correlate with the appropriate technique needed to hide such content.

Temporarily Hidden Content

Purposefully Visually Hidden Content

Purposefully Visual-Only Content

A Todo List

A great step-by-step walkthrough by Heydon of making an accessible to-do list, the “Hello World” of JavaScript frameworks.

There’s a lot of great knowledge in here that can be applied to plenty of other interface elements too.

Amber Wilson: Markup-Masterclass

Yesterday was a good day with Amber. She’s been marking up her CV and it was the perfect opportunity to take a deep dive into HTML.

How Our CSS Framework Helps Enforce Accessibility | eBay Tech Blog

Following on from Ire’s post about linting HTML with CSS, here’s an older post from Ebay about how being specific with your CSS selectors can help avoid inaccessible markup getting into production.

State of Responsive Images 2017 - Cloud Four

Jason revisits responsive images. On the whole, things are looking good when it comes to browser support, but he points out that scrset’s precursor in CSS—image-set seems to have dropped off the radar of most browser makers, which is a real shame.

Do we need a new heading element? We don’t know - JakeArchibald.com

Jake is absolutely spot-on here. There’s been a lot of excited talk about adding an h element to HTML but it all seems to miss the question of why the currently-specced outline algorithm hasn’t been implemented.

This is a common mistake in standards discussion — a mistake I’ve made many times before. You cannot compare the current state of things, beholden to reality, with a utopian implementation of some currently non-existent thing.

If you’re proposing something almost identical to something that failed, you better know why your proposal will succeed where the other didn’t.

Jake rightly points out that the first step isn’t to propose a whole new element; it’s to ask “Why haven’t browsers implemented the outline for sectioned headings?”

(I added a small historical note in the comments pointing to the first occurrence of this proposal way back in 1991.)

Tags: markup

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