Dispatches From The Internets

Acessibilidade: O verdadeiro diferencial dos livros digitais

It’s nice to see folks in the digital book space beginning to embrace the potential of their medium:

Para abraçar verdadeiramente o potencial do digital, é essencial adotar uma mentalidade ‘digital first’. Isso significa que o conteúdo digital não deve ser uma simples transposição do impresso, mas sim algo que aproveita ao máximo as funcionalidades únicas do meio digital.

The UX of HTML

Somehow my students are allergic to semantics and shit. And they’re not alone. If you look at 99% of all websites in the wild, everybody who worked on them seems to be allergic to semantics and shit. On most websites heading levels are just random numbers, loosely based on font-size. Form fields have no labels. Links and buttons are divs. It’s really pretty bad. So it’s not just my students, the whole industry doesn’t understand semantics and shit.

I feel this… deeply. And I 100% agree with where Vasilis is coming from here. I do take a bit of umbrage with the idea that heading levels don’t matter—they really do—but his point about getting folks excited about the stuff they get for free by paying attention to their markup is something I’ve been pushing for years as well.

If you’re interested in a related deep dive into HTML’s lack of dependencies, check out this piece I wrote for Smashing Magazine. If you’d like to dive deeper into forms, I have this talk you might like.

Sharing in the Age of 3p Cookie-mageddon

Isolated picture of two humanoid robots. One is very large, the other one is small. The smaller one is handing the other a piece of paper with the word “share” on it to the larger robot. Style of a pulp science fiction novel cover.

Over a decade ago, I wrote up detailed instructions on how to enable users to share your content on social media without allowing them to be tracked by every social media site via cookies. In a few short weeks “third party” cookies will get the boot in Chromium-based browsers. If you’re still relying on third party share widgets on your site, your users may start seeing problems. Now is a good time to replace them with code that Just Works™. Here’s how…