Hello fellow developer, who watches the watchmen and what is a monopoly? Well, let's find out and learn a few things about new web features and accessibility along the way.
News and Articles
It is official that Google has monopolised search through illegal deals, much like Microsoft did with browsers. This will influence tech competition and The Verge has the all the spiciest parts of the ruling. The biggest affected third party in this isn't Apple, but Mozilla and Firefox as 86% of its revenue comes via a search deal. Their new CEO, Laura Chambers, talks about some of that in this interview.
In more tech news from the big G, Chrome’s Manifest V3 is around the corner and you can soon send money to websites in Chrome. There is insight into how Google search handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process and how it transfers 1 exabyte a day using a tool called - wait for it - effingo (more details in the paper and in the talk video below). Google Fonts violates GDPR which is another reason to self host and google webfonts helper, well, helps with that. Cloudflare Fonts is another option when GDPR is on your must-have list.
On to AI news: Argentina is going full minority report and wants to predict crime using AI algorithms. More detail in Spanish are in the official announcement. France also seems to become "grand frère" as reports of the mass AI surveillance at the Olympics are making the rounds. OpenAI, who have just been called a competitor by Microsoft has a tool that catches students cheating by using ChatGPT but won't release it yet. GitHub introduced GitHub Models, a Hugging Face style community where you can test and compare LLM results. NVIDIA seems to scrape 'A Human Lifetime’ of videos per day to train AI, Gartner predicts that 30% of GenAI projects won't get past POC stage by end of 2025 and the EU's AI Act is now in effect. And the big question is if exploited humans are what powers AI?
In security news, CrowdStrike released a root cause analysis of the big outage, Homebrew had a detailed audit finding a lot of flaws and hotels started searching hotel rooms during DEFCON.
And, finally, DHH claims that cookie banners show whats wrong with the EU (true, they're called biscuits) and MacOS Sequoia will bug you with a weekly permission prompt for screenshot and screen recording apps.
Quick Tricks
Sometimes you want to make it easy for people to copy something to the clipboard. Using the navigator.clipboard API, it is not hard to implement a "copy this" button.
Accessibility Focus
Here are some focused links on the topic of accessibility and usability:
- Alternative text in action - a UK government guide
- Dungeons & Dragons taught me how to write alt text
- Readability: The Optimal Line Length
- A handful of reasons JavaScript won’t be available
- AT Is More Than Screen Readers
Code and Tools
Safari 18 is catching up and now supports View Transitions, a pretty exciting web feature although there are some misconceptions about them and using them breaks incremental rendering. Stefan Judis has a great round-up of what other Safari web features are usable across browsers. CSS font-size-adjust is one of them and has been added to baseline. Anchor positioning is also pretty cool and a great way to create flow charts. Or did you know that you can use <details> to create accordions without any scripting? One thing Flash had from the get-go the web lacks is video with alpha transparency and Jake Archibald shows it can be done. Tachometer is a new JavaScript benchmark and you can use Playwright to track supermarket prices. The costliest coding error anyone has ever made lost $457m and if you don't know how CPUs work why not simulate them in code?
Some tools for you:
- Rendley - an embeddable JavaScript Video Editor in the Browser
- WorldWideWeb source code - surf like it is 1991 and Tim Berners-Lee
- FakeTraveler - set the geographical location of your phone without a VPN
Books
Talks and Videos
We are still working on all the recordings of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress but here is the official after-movie showing you all the bits and bobs you missed.
Other videos and talk write-ups of note:
- Chris Heilmann: Talk notes: Let’s make a simpler, more accessible web
- Michał Zasadziński, Krzysztof Rzadca: An Exabyte a Day: Throughput-Oriented, Large Scale, Managed Data Transfers
Work and Jobs
News about more layoffs, 15,000 at Intel and 12,500 at Dell. Microsoft ties bonuses and promotions to security performance and X leaves San Francisco office for somewhere cheaper. "Return-to-office" hurts employee retention and productivity. You shouldn't have to ask for permission to do your job correctly and demand time to prevent tech debt as "20% for tech debt" doesn't work. Apparently there are good ways to get promoted and a lack of soft skills gets you stuck at senior engineer level. Last, but not least, the question should the daily stand-up die?
Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web
- The best ROM hack website is shutting down after nearly 20 years
- There are 2,000-plus dead rockets in orbit—here’s a rare view of one
- Mumbdle - recognise mumbled songs
