As I paraphrased from Sara Soueidan in a previous post, “accessibility is a core frontend component”. It is not something that you should “add on” after the project is finished, like we used to do with “now make it work on phones and tablets”… it needs to be baked right in from the start. And that means we need not only the knowledge of how to do that, but also the tools to test if we’re doing it correctly. Christian Heilmann has written a couple of great articles on this topic:
- Seven ways to test for accessibility of your web site with browser Developer Tools
- Let’s not send developers to the accessibility tree tool
And even has a course on the subject:
No one is saying this is easy, just that it is the right thing to do.
From Tania Rascia comes Intro to GraphQL. Have not yet dabbled with this one, but I want to, and I know her writing is always easy to read and highly informative, so… bookmarking this one right here…
And speaking of “QL“s, Bruce Lawson shares SQLime, “Kinda like JSFiddle, but for SQL”. Nice!
Holy crap! I just watched the promo video for BrowserFlow… A better name might be HeadExplode… as in, “my head is exploding from all the ideas trying to get to the front of my brain queue”… Amazing!
Chris Coyier shared several variations on the same “sticky list” theme. Be sure to view them all, and appreciate the subtle variations. Love how simple some things are getting now-days…
Jeremy Keith shared htmx, an extremely light, subset of features framework for creating SPAs. Intriguing. And certainly a lower threshold than any other SPA framework…
Dave Rupert and friends have been working on a spec for a Native HTML Tab element. Certainly an unwieldy beast to try to tame, with so many variations in layout and functionality. One option I have been using a lot lately, that kinda fits into the accordion conversation is the details element.
Yes, it would be nice to control the opening/closing a little better, maybe adding some transitional CSS animation, but it is native, semantic, and does what I need.
Create eye-catching social images auto-magic-ally! This is a nice touch! In related news, my social media posts feel really, really lame now…
With more than 17k JS files in their repo, Etsy’s decision to switch to TypeScript was not easy. Luckily for us, they were nice enough to document and share the experience…
Ever try to convince a large organization to do something that doesn’t seem like it contributes to the bottom-line? It seems like a pretty solid approach, in this case getting buy-in for creating a design system, is to make a number…
And finally, back to Jeremy Keith for a second, for a little trip down memory lane, remembering where the web started, and how we got to where we are now… Revisiting such technology crutches as Flash, jQuery and Sass, and showing some long-overdue respect and thanks for helping push the web forward, giving we developers access to features and functionality that we desperately needed wanted, while we waited for the web standards and browsers to catch up… And a big, fat, roaring-loud hallelujah to the end pitch, to make the web better! Thanks, Jeremy.
Happy reading,
Atg