Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 21

me as a young webdev: let me expend excruciating effort to make this thing work exactly the same in all browsers

me as an older webdev: eh, let's just use the best modern API for the job and try to make it fall back to something reasonable in older browsers

USER AGENT: Hey website, please don't track me

WEBSITE: Aha, you are one of the 0.5% of users who request not to be tracked. This is an excellent way to track you

WebKit release notes for Safari Technology Preview 75: https://webkit.org/blog/8594/release-notes-for-safari-technology-preview-75/

"Removed support for the expired Do Not Track standard to prevent potential use as a fingerprinting variable." Endlessly ironic that the thing that was supposed to prevent tracking has become just another vector for tracking 🤦♂️

Still, I think Mastodon has done more to make decentralized tech accessible than anything else I've seen. There are non-techies on the fediverse! There are people here who don't know what SSH is! That's a miracle.

I hope we continue doing this kind of good work and bringing more people into the humane, privacy-respecting, own-your-own-data world. It would be a shame if we succeeded on the technical front but failed on the human front, and people turned around and went back to the silos.

The stuff on my mind today, though, is less about the interface and more about the culture. How do we make the fediverse a place people *want* to be? How do we increase the sum of human kindness and joy? Can we make social media less of a "slot machine that makes me feel anxious" and more of a "window into other people's lives that gives me connection and compassion"?

Pinafore doesn't have good answers for this. I still don't have good answers for this. It still troubles me.

"Your TV Is Now a Computer, but Not in a Good Way" by Alexis C. Madrigal https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/smart-tvs-are-dumb/581059/

Dumb TVs FTW. I'm never going to buy a "smart" TV if I can avoid it.

Living a Google-free life is like saying, "I'd prefer not to breathe air. Let me show you my elaborate system of scuba gear that allows me to live my life air-free."

"WebExtensions v3 considered harmful" by Daniel Glazman http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2019/01/23/WebExtensions-v3-considered-harmful

This is a good overview of Web Extensions from an extension vendor perspective, but I want to offer the perspective of a browser vendor. (thread)

Web dev protip: if you're searching for an open-source component, use the keyword "accessible" or "a11y." E.g. "accessible dialog," "accessible carousel," "accessible autocomplete."

Accessibility is like the brown M&Ms in Van Halen lore – if they didn't mess that up, then they probably didn't mess anything else up either. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/

Don't get me wrong, LetsEncrypt is doing great work and has definitely lowered the barrier to entry for SSL. But it grinds my gears when technical folks don't take that *little* bit of extra effort to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. It shows a lack of empathy and a myopia towards whatever technical problems they're trying to solve.

And it also means I'm going to ignore whatever they're saying until someone writes the simple "explainer" blog post.

On blink-dev mailing list:
“Intent to Implement and Ship: CSS prefers-reduced-motion media query” https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/NZ3c9d4ivA8

Random thought:

a. software dev lies at the intersection of tech and arts & humanities.
b. the other industry at that intersection is fashion
c. the two industries have similar dynamics
d. comparing the history of fashion with the history of software would be a very fun project