web

jeffhuang.com jeffhuang.com
The web is becoming more and more ephemeral.
"Vanished are amazing pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture, and a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; gone are Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of dominance over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, disappeared."
This article includes some steps you can take that could help preserve what you publish. Complex frameworks, walled-gardens, and serverless publishing trade away endurance for convenience.
The Guardian The Guardian
image from The Guardian
Wow, this is some awful antisocial behavior from a company (and marketing firm) that should know better. Can we have one or two ad-free spaces?
Twilio Twilio
image from Twilio
These security and perfomance changes for websites are easy to add and include some new browser features I wasn't aware of before. I went with the recommendation here for a simple CSP header but it looks like you could really batten down the https hatches with that one if you read through the spec.
forbes.com
image from forbes.com
"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."
This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.
Eric Bailey Eric Bailey
The current state of accessibility in web design is not good even though awareness is up and related development tools are becoming more available. Eric Baily does a nice job here of summarizing a recent WebAIM analysis of the top million home pages and putting it in context. One thing I learned is that Firefox added a new accessibility pane for developers: Accessibility Inspector. It's very handy to be able to get color contrast info with a click and I hope the ease of use and ubiquity of tools like this will help developers make more accessible choices.
crawshaw.io crawshaw.io
This post resonated on many levels, especially: "Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy." I agree that a separate search engine would be nice but automatically differentiating indie content from sponsored content seems like an impossible task. Maybe more human curation of the web is the answer. (Said by a human who likes to curate the web.)
sidebar.io
image from sidebar
Welcome to Newsletter Wednesday! (I just made that up so it's a thing now.) Sidebar shares five daily links about web design and it's a good one to subscribe to via email. I've recently been diving down a microcopy best practices rabbit hole and I'm blaming Sidebar for that.


(Depending on what browsers you need to support.) This is a nice resource that includes some pure CSS methods for features you'd typically build with JavaScript.
Strange Loop IP Spoofing Talk

An engineer at Cloudflare shares some data from the front lines of fighting DDoS attacks. He also makes the connection between DDoS and service centralization and offers some potential solutions. (Unfortunately I don't see any incentive for big companies to fix this problem.)
  • This is a fantastic idea! You install a bit of software on your server to automate the security certificate garbage. It'd be great for low-stakes sites where the hassle of setup is the barrier.
  • (MeFi's own) hoder became a human time capsule spending six years in an Iranian prison for blogging. He's shocked by the state of the Web: "The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking."
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