The Best Of The Internets

This is a great peek behind the curtain on LinkedIn Lite, a progressive web app from the LinkedIn India team. I love seeing more companies embracing the web over apps when it makes sense to do so.

There is so much to love about this piece, especially this bit:

Honestly — what technology are you using that’s not assistive? Your smartphone? Your eyeglasses? Headphones? And those three examples alone are assisting you in multiple registers: They’re enabling or augmenting a sensory experience, say, or providing navigational information. But they’re also allowing you to decide whether to be available for approach in public, or not; to check out or in on a conversation or meeting in a bunch of subtle ways; to identify, by your choice of brand or look, with one culture group and not another.

Making a persistent, overt distinction about “assistive tech” embodies the second-tier do-gooderism and banality that still dominate design work targeted toward “special needs.” “Assistive technology” implies a separate species of tools designed exclusively for those people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic “impairments” — impairments, in other words, that have been culturally designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly abnormal. But are you sure your phone isn’t a crutch, as it were, for a whole lot of unexamined needs?

❤️

More thoughtful (and actionable) advice about performance budgets. Would that more companies would do this!

I’m super-intrigued by being able to render and control modal dialog boxes in a standardized and accessible way. Here’s to the future!

I love it when code is consistent. This is a great tutorial on how to use ESLint and Prettier to make sure your (or your team’s) JavaScript always follows a standard convention.

I love this project. It ticks so many boxes for me as it’s all about doing more with less. I love the ways they’ve found to reduce consumption on the server side and throughput to their users as well. So much to unpack!

Amy Leak offers a straightforward comparison of alt text and captions, including some excellent examples of when and how to use each. There’s so much great advice in this article, I won’t take up any more of your time. Go read it!

More great thoughts on privacy and permissions from Jo Franchetti. I love her list of suggested improvements at the end. Especially “Encourage/standardise clearer wording and UI to explain reasons for permissions and how long permissions will be granted.”

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about privacy and permissions both generally and in web browsers and our product that rely on them. I very much appreciated this perspective from Sally Lait.

[M]y personal preference is generally to continue as normal, and then to use whatever’s being requested as an enhancement, as a natural part of whatever task I am hoping to do, at a time that makes sense to me rather than having it pushed on me out of context or at a time that doesn’t make sense.

This is true for me as well. I hate going to a new site only to be immediately bombarded with requests to see my location or send me notifications. It makes your site appear desperate, socially-awkward, and a bit sociopathic.

I definitely believe there’s room for improvement in terms of how browsers relay requests for permission. Personally, I’d love to see permission requests require an accompanying link to the section of that site’s privacy policy covering how the information being requested will be used. Sure, most users probably won’t click on it, but having to provide something might make some developers think twice about it (and more directly tie these requests to the site’s governing entity from a legal standpoint).