Web
A JavaScript-Free Frontend
This has some neat tricks that I hadn’t thought of for doing “live” front-end without JavaScript. The checkbox/label trick is really cool, though it’s a little over-complicated for my taste, and besides, doesn’t degrade well in browsers that don’t support CSS. The fact that you can use it to build a modal dialog is crash, though.
I’m using details/summary for subject/Content Warning in brutaldon. It degrades okay. The live behavior isn’t available in older browsers, but you do at least get all of the text displayed. The forms and input validation is an example of the “paving the cowpaths” approach that browser vendors should be taking for enabling behavior without JavaScript. Unfortunately, they aren’t doing it as much as they should. The author of this article recommends a few more HTML elements that would let you dump more JavaScript, like a native modal and standard drag-and-drop-sorting.
Digital guide to low tech
This article is another “how to build a low tech website”, using a lot of the same tips as the other article. The main criticism I’ve seen is that the image processing is performative – you could actually get smaller images without the dithering done in the article.
The web we broke.
tldr; Web developers don’t care about accessibility. And we often do things that require going out of your way to break things that are accessible in standard HTML.
Some emulations in the browser of older browsers
Jason Scott @textfiles Since it’s the 30th anniversary of the world wide web, let me just link to some emulations-in-the-browser of browsers, so you can see some of where it could have gone before we all decided to let Ol’ Sociopathic Googly be the entire engine for everything.
The Hottest Chat App for Teens is Google Docs
Nature, uh, finds a way. People will use whatever tools are actually available to them to achieve their goals; taking away the chat apps won’t make people stop chatting.
Generative.fm
Generative ambient music. This is very much my thing, and it would be ideal for listening to at work, if it weren’t against office policy :(
Politics and Adjacent
‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ at Fifty
A good review.
Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group
O’Rourke’s life story is pretty compelling to me (punk band, Cult of the Dead Cow), but that’s not how I choose candidates to support. His policy record is pretty conservative, and that’s the opposite of what we need today.
Move Fast and Build Solidarity
Activism at Google and Amazon paid off. But can the emerging “tech left” forge long-term alliances between janitors, drivers, and engineers?
Elizabeth Warren’s Big Tech Beatdown will Spark a Vital and Unprecedented Debate
Electroshocking the corpse of anti-trust law.
User’s guide to search or request SC FOIA and public records
Something actually concrete and useful from our local fishwrap! If you’re not in SC, I’m sure you have similar or better resources available to you. A guide to what you can actually get from FOIA and public records.
Parenting
How Inuit Parents Raise Kids Without Yelling – And Teach Them To Control Anger
Basically, adults never show anger at kids, and they let kids know that showing anger is for babies, but in a playful way. And they use stories and play to let children practice controlling their anger while they are not mad.