Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe), page 33

“Gone in 1100 seconds — The weirdest bug I have ever met. A story of hunting bugs on the Edge of WebRTC"
https://medium.com/confrere/gone-in-1100-seconds-hunting-bugs-on-the-edge-of-webrtc-132a186c45dd

"Reddit and the Quest to Detoxify the Internet" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the-quest-to-detoxify-the-internet

Good read. Content moderation is hard.

Great talk from Jake Archibald about how the browser event loop works. This stuff can be really hard to grok, but his visualizations are great. https://youtu.be/cCOL7MC4Pl0

For Mastodon, we added an explicit user setting for "prefers reduced motion" (https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/5393), but this is cumbersome and isn't scalable across the entire web. Nobody's going to configure NYTimes and The Guardian and every other website to do this.

Imagine if users could just do a one-time setting in their browser, and have a reasonable expectation that websites would honor this setting. And imagine if web authors could just use a single CSS media query to support it.

This is a good example of why WebKit is right and we need the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media feature: https://source.opennews.org/articles/motion-sick/

Background on the standard: https://webkit.org/blog/7551/responsive-design-for-motion/. Basically it allows users to configure their browser to tell websites that they prefer reduced motion.

It's been neat to watch PWAs go from this weird thing the Chrome team was pushing, to a handful of "hello world" apps, to some impressive apps for emerging markets like Flipkart and Konga, to a mainstream thing that all browsers are embracing and big players like Twitter and Instagram are building for as well.

BTW fun fact: every Mastodon instance is its own PWA. 😁

One neat thing I noticed about writing e2e tests: it kind of forces you to get a11y right. If something isn't observable for your tests, it probably isn't observable to an AT.

“Finding the Exhaust Ports | Jon Gold’s blog”
https://jon.gold/2018/02/exhaust-ports/

WFH today (I'm a software developer), and my son, who has taken an interest in "functions and variables" comes to ask what I'm currently doing. This is the exchange:

Son: "Hey dad... whatcha doin now?"
Me: "Well, the last thing I did... see how that has a period?"
Son: "Yeah"
Me: "See how that doesn't?"
Son: "Yeah"
Me: "Well, it shouldn't have one, so I removed it"
Son: *pauses for a moment*...Then, thoughtfully: "And you get paid for this?"

"immutability is the real strength of email" https://blog.fastmail.com/2018/02/14/email-is-your-electronic-memory/

Web designers need to know of this exchange between my parents:

Father: Ah - they've updated their web site!

Mother: Oh no.

Father: It looks good ...

Mother: Can you find the things we need?

... (long pause) ...

Father: No ...

What the shit is the Shadow DOM anyway?
#development

https://blog.rowan.website/2018/02/15/what-the-shit-is-the-shadow-dom-anyway/

Yo admins! In preparation for a better joinmastodon.org sign-up wizard, https://instances.social directory now lets you set a category for your instance, in the admin area.

The categories are: art, music, books, activism, sports, games, tech, academia. It's ok to not have a category, too, like for example octodon.social is just a general purpose instance. But if yours is themed, you better categorize it.

If you think a crucial category is missing, tag @TheKinrar