Dispatches From The Internets

303 Creative LLC v. Elenis is Incredibly Problematic

Pop art style illustration of a white woman holding her hand up to say stop.

Before I get into this, let me start with this preface: I am not a legal expert by any means. I never even watched Law & Order. That said, I am keenly interested in the law and how it relates to bias and discrimination, particularly if that intersects with technology, especially the web. Which brings me to the subject at hand: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. I tweeted about this case, which is currently before the Supreme Court of the United States, the other day, but felt like I owed it a lengthier—and perhaps more enduring—discussion. So here goes…

Do you really understand CSS radial-gradients?

This is an amazingly deep dive into the world of radial gradients in CSS. It includes a ton of practical examples and a thorough dissection of the syntax and what you can do with them.

🤯

A National Day of Mourning

If you live in the U.S., please take the time to learn the real history of Thanksgiving, rather than clinging to the B.S. we were taught in school. This week’s episode of Native Opinion is a good place to begin that journey.

GOV.UK to examine Google and Microsoft tools in bid to ‘significantly improve’ search

This is awesome to see. GOV.UK is going to be replacing their search functionality. The contract is estimated to be worth £900,000. The kicker’s below:

Work to replace GOV.UK’s search infrastructure is due to begin in early next year, with the initial phase of the project dedicated to identifying and evaluating products. Such assessments will be focus on “functional and non-functional requirements, based around user needs [and] include accessibility requirements… and progressive enhancement”.

JavaScript

When we old timers bemoan developers’ overreliance on JavaScript, we are coming at it from the perspective of folks who were building for the web before JavaScript was a server-side thing.

Some of us remember the early attempts at bringing JS to the server too. Remember Jaxer? JsExt? Rhino? Fun times.

Product Accessibility: Building an Inclusive Product

Alice lays out a great roadmap for shifting accessibility earlier in your project lifecycle. Why, you ask?

Just like chocolate chips, accessibility is a key ingredient in your product pancake — and it’ll always taste best when it’s added to the mix at the beginning. It’s also more time- and cost-effective, as fixing a usability issue after the product has been released can cost up to 100 times more than earlier on in the development process.