June 3rd was my last day on the Edge team. It’s been an absolute honor and privilege to work with such an amazing team all these years, moving from Internet Explorer (IE) to “Spartan” Edge and, finally, to “Anaheim” Edge.
Dispatches From The Internets
A Bittersweet Goodbye
Beyond WCAG: Losing Spoons Online
Have you ever considered that your website might be an energy vampire?
This excellent piece from Lē McNamara takes you on a brief tour of design patterns that actively deplete the mental and physical stamina of your users, potentially incapacitating them for days.
You need to read this.
Make Beautifully Resilient Apps With Progressive Enhancement
A good walkthrough on how to build a form that hooks into an API and works either with or without JavaScript.
One note however: Austin in incorrect in that you absolutely can define nested objects in your forms. I’ve done it many times. Your field names just need to use bracket notation like this:
<input name="foo['bar']['baz']">That will pipe through as the value for the baz property of bar within foo.
Making the world’s fastest website, and other mistakes (Series)
This 4 part series walks through the various levels of Hell you must traverse to actually achieve solid web performance on a large e-commerce platform. What is most amazing to me is how things continue to align pretty directly with the philosophy of progressive enhancement.
Web Components as Progressive Enhancement
Building (and improving) PWAs in VSCode just got even better. Many thanks to the PWA Builder team for all their hard work!
The Right Stuff
Would people who are disabled here on Earth make excellent astronauts? Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen thinks they could. This episode of Radiolab takes zero-gravity flight with a host of people with disabilities to explore that question.
This podcast brought me so much joy in experiencing the participants’ profound joy in both weightlessness and freedom. It also brought me so much sadness with respect to how far we’ve yet to come with our treatment of people with disabilities here on Earth. In the end though, it left me with hope though. Lots of hope.
See also: AstroAccess
30 days of PWA
Today, some colleagues and I kicked off a new series on developing Progressive Web Apps. It will run for 30 days and takes you from the point of knowing nothing about PWAs all the way through integrating some of the amazing advanced capabilities available to web apps today.
Announcing PWA Studio, the VS Code extension for building Progressive Web Apps!
Building (and improving) PWAs in VSCode just got even better. Many thanks to the PWA Builder team for all their hard work!
Short note on emoji text alternative variations
Steve Faulkner offers a little more insight into how emoji show up for folks who rely on screen readers. And the results may not be what you expected.
Div divisiveness
If you’re at all confused about when it’s cool to use a div and when it’s not, this is the post for you.