Posts by nolan@toot.cafe
(DIR) Post #Ab2ODgWcS94MSMvs6S by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-10-22T18:25:33Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
"Challenges with Chromium Accessibility" by Benjamin Beaudry and Chris Harrelson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyN7HvwZj18A lot of the BlinkOn talks are really good, but I especially enjoyed this deep-dive into accessibility in Chromium. It's sad that, currently, your browser can be 6x slower when using a screenreader, and that a lot of the focus is on how to avoid having the accessibility APIs accidentally turned on for non-screenreader users. But I'm glad there's work being done to fix that overall problem.
(DIR) Post #AbEmUXyb5AByifs1wG by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-10-26T18:15:01Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
"Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You" by Steve Yegge https://steve-yegge.medium.com/dear-google-cloud-your-deprecation-policy-is-killing-you-ee7525dc05dcAn oldie, but a goodie. I've been thinking a lot about backwards compatibility recently, and this is *so* on point.
(DIR) Post #AbQCQW7rBsf4aKrTf6 by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-10-29T18:51:14Z
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I feel like our industry is increasingly treating accessibility, performance, and security as box-ticking exercises:- Get WCAG compliance- Get green on Core Web Vitals- Update all your vulnerable dependenciesMaybe this is better than the status quo (since we're so bad at these things), but I worry it removes a lot of the thought and artistry from the job. If all your energy is spent on box-ticking, there's no time for anything else. And management thinks it's "done" when the box is ticked.
(DIR) Post #Ac8sdkewT2WI5i1QnY by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-11-24T17:57:16Z
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OK I take it back, Safari might be the new IE: https://github.com/nolanlawson/emoji-picker-element/pull/379The WebKit team has been doing amazing work recently, but it doesn't help users stuck on old versions of the OS.E.g. Safari 16.4 was a massive release from back in March, but about a third of Safari users are still on <=16.3. This accounts for 6.5% of *all* browsers! https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_elementinternalsI know the solution is "just buy a new iPhone," but how much e-waste is that going to generate? And how many people can afford it?
(DIR) Post #AcPoG2eYooAyoobL84 by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-12-03T00:11:57Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
"Fastest Way of Passing State to JavaScript, Re-visited" by @kurtextrem https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2023/fastest-way-passing-state-javascript-revisited/I love performance deep-dives like these, where each argument is backed up by meticulous benchmarks and analysis.
(DIR) Post #AcRgAPaYDox8teRxuy by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-12-03T21:50:10Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
"Resource Loading at the Cutting Edge" by @programmingart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV034VqHv5QEntertaining and slightly horrifying talk about how buggy HTTP resource priorities are across browsers, servers, HTTP versions… My takeaway is that I will probably just defer to the experts on this stuff instead of trying to go mucking around in the priorities myself.
(DIR) Post #ActbyS3GHp6nl6M9z6 by nolan@toot.cafe
2023-12-17T01:51:45Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Accessibility actually serves as a great "Van Halen brown M&Ms" test for websites:- Press enter on an input, does it actually submit the form?- Click a label, does it actually focus the input?- Does Tab change focus?If any of these things are broken, then I can be pretty certain something else on the site will be busted, like it'll forget my password or get stuck in an infinite redirect loop.BTW if you don't know the lore: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
(DIR) Post #AdcuKIbCSVJfpcQgIC by nolan@toot.cafe
2024-01-08T04:28:54Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Trying to find good guitar tools online really feels like a statement on the degradation of the web:- Can't find a decent guitar tuner or metronome that isn't plagued with ads or junk, so I use random PWAs written by web devs as software demos: https://guitar-tuner.appspot.com/ https://rx-metronome.web.app/- Searching for chords/tabs for popular songs gives you text files on shady-looking sites that prevent you from copying the text… and the text files look like they were written decades ago
(DIR) Post #AiKh2NDiZpoFiyku2K by nolan@toot.cafe
2024-05-27T23:35:56Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Learning Rust after using JavaScript almost exclusively for 10 years is a humbling experience. I feel stupid and unproductive in a way I haven't felt in years.But it's good! Learning new things is good. Gaining empathy for newer programmers is good. I like the challenge.
(DIR) Post #AllzKBfIcGCE9erorg by nolan@toot.cafe
2024-09-07T21:37:20Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Got a bug report on emoji-picker-element that it's super slow if you have ~20k custom emoji (some fediverse instances… 😵💫). I was about to write some complex virtualization logic until I remembered that `content-visibility` exists: https://web.dev/articles/content-visibility~15% perf boost in Chrome, ~5% in Firefox, Safari has it in Tech Preview I guess. And no accessibility pitfalls or complicated code to maintain. Not as good as virtualization, but amazing what a few lines of CSS can do. https://github.com/nolanlawson/emoji-picker-element/pull/445
(DIR) Post #AnCjdvN1YaL1b4PU80 by nolan@toot.cafe
2024-10-20T17:17:28Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Every time I mess around with sysadmin stuff, I'm always flummoxed by dumb things like "what is the difference between /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin, what the heck is an LD_LIBRARY_PATH, should I use sudo for this build tool or not," etc.). I guess this is how backend devs feel when they have to tweak a Webpack config.
(DIR) Post #Aq4v5o9B331z2c9mi0 by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-01-14T16:22:46Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
#LineageOS is pretty incredible. I have an 8-year-old OnePlus 5T rocking the latest version of Android thanks to LineageOS 22.1. The battery still lasts more than a day, and the phone only cost me $500 (in 2017 dollars). Pretty great value for money.
(DIR) Post #AsUmJ6clqTGkL7W1FA by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-03-27T13:48:20Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
"Servo vs Ladybird" by @niccolove https://thelibre.news/servo-vs-ladybird/Great breakdown, and exciting to see how both projects are progressing!
(DIR) Post #AuNWYawssYmdmeEbyK by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-05-23T00:54:31Z
2 likes, 2 repeats
"The Copilot Delusion" by Jj https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/"You’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph."Infinitely quotable. I wish I could write like this.
(DIR) Post #Ayp1Fa1QISgH5Eu5D6 by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-10-03T04:57:44Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
TIL that `cowsay` comes with multiple "cow files" built-in, so you can replace the default cow ASCII art with Stimpy, Hello Kitty, or the Ghostbusters ghost.Really feels like a relic of a different era
(DIR) Post #Az7TjQqrFe00tKGOFU by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-10-12T01:31:05Z
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With Windows 10 support ending in a few days, I guess it's time to remove the last vestige of Windows in my house and install Ubuntu on my gaming PC. Luckily every Steam game I want to play (Slay the Spire, Civ6, Stardew Valley) already supports it, so it's not a big sacrifice.I literally used to be on the Windows team, so it gives me no pleasure to say this. End of an era.
(DIR) Post #B0ggG39Gc9FubO4dwO by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-11-27T16:54:42Z
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"The top-line takeaway is chilling: sites that are explicitly designed as SPAs, and which have intentionally opted in to metrics measurement around soft-navigations are seeing one (1) soft-navigation for every full page load on average."Amazing research and analysis as always from @slightlyoff https://infrequently.org/2025/11/performance-inequality-gap-2026/
(DIR) Post #B1PaUQ1OVtrnz43Zg0 by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-12-19T15:57:33Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
Rejected my first AI-authored open-source PR today.I'm not an anti-AI zealot, but it just feels weird to take a bunch of code that wasn't written by a human and incorporate it into one of my open-source projects. And similarly it doesn't feel weird to reject it – in the previous era, I'd feel bad for rejecting something that someone worked hard on, but in this case… it's not really their work.I'm probably swimming against the tide but this new era is just bizarre to me.
(DIR) Post #B1TCZNmCvzsyfaNjWa by nolan@toot.cafe
2025-12-20T19:55:36Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/115747270686025370Really happy to see this landing in browsers. It's the #1 problem with shadow DOM, and it was a MASSIVE effort to get it specced out. Ben Howell and @sundress and everyone else who worked on it deserve mad props.
(DIR) Post #B2r8xyRUgqkDDl86Iy by nolan@toot.cafe
2026-01-31T21:08:03Z
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People keep citing water/energy use to me and I remain unconvinced. The single best thing you can do for the planet is to have one less kid. A distant #2 and #3 are avoiding cars and flights: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541A recent estimate says using Claude Code is similar to running a dishwasher: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/20/electricity-use-of-ai-coding-agents/If you are a vegan monk who never drives and also hates LLMs, good for you: you have my respect and admiration. But I don't think this is what's motivating most people's arguments.