I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone…
Continue reading →
A curious little data leak, but one I struggle to care about. Perhaps useful for a bit of fingerprinting? Websites can access your system's camera and microphone. That's how modern video conferencing works in the browser. In an effort to retain user privacy, the browser asks the user for permission to use the camera and mics. No audio or video will be sent until the user agrees. But some…
Continue reading →
Lynx is a text based browser. You think the people who browse without JavaScript are weird? Lynx doesn't even do images or CSS! It downloads HTML and renders it at blazing fast speed. If you ever wondered just how slow modern web development has made the web - Lynx will show you the meaning of haste. I use Lynx most days. Not as my exclusive browser - I'm not a masochist - but as a handy tool.…
Continue reading →
This experiment has now ended. The code is available on https://gitlab.com/edent/very-slow-website One thing most websites try to do is try to serve you the page as fast as possible. So I've decided to do the opposite. I've made a (toy) web server which goes as slow as humanly possible. You can visit it at http://slowww.rf.gd - but you'll need to be patient. This delivers a page at about 175 …
Continue reading →
Recently, my blog was featured on Coil's list of monetised content. I'd like to take a little time to explain what Web Monetisation is, how to get set up with it, and what my thoughts are. Quickstart Stick this line in the <head> of your HTML page. <meta name="monetization" content="$ilp.uphold.com/ieELEKD7epqw"> That's it. You should replace my uphold address…
Continue reading →
(Written because I couldn't find an easy guide online.) Here's the code (formatted for readability): <time datetime="{{page.first_published_at|date:"c"}}"> {{page.first_published_at|date:"j F Y"}} </time> You can also use last_published_at if it is a page which has been updated. WHY?!??! Semantics. HTML5 contains the <time> element. The contents of it show up as normal running text, but…
Continue reading →
Someone took a nice photo of me recently. I'd like to use it as my avatar photo everywhere to present a consistent image. This is not easy to do. I've had to manually change it on a dozen different Slacks, a bunch of social networks, a few forums, all my email accounts, and I'm still not done. I just want to change my photo once. Because I'm vain and lazy. For a nerd like me, the solution is…
Continue reading →
Noodling thoughts. The humble <img> element is one of the oldest parts of HTML. It allows you to put a static image in a document. Later revisions allowed for animated images - like GIFs. And the <map> element made parts of the image clickable. But what about interactive images? Like panoramas and photospeheres? Here's a 360° image. You can drag it to see all around. That uses the …
Continue reading →
My friends, and former employers, at the Government Digital Service have written a spectacularly good blog post "Making GOV.UK more than a website". In it, they describe how adding Schema.org markup to their website has allowed search engines to extract semantic content and display it to a user. For example, the "Learn to drive" page has content which can appear directly in a search engine: …
Continue reading →
Hello! It looks like you're writing a blog post - would you like help with that? chuckles Me and my colleagues at Microsoft have decided that the world needs more Clippy - the adorable animated paperclip. To help with that, we're bringing a new feature to Edge 6.0. Web Developers can now use <clippy> to call up an animated virtual assistant. I've spoken to several people in Microsoft, and we …
Continue reading →
The ridiculous proliferation of TLDs (Top Level Domains) continues unabated. I wondered how much you'd have to spend to secure your name on every TLD. tl;dr;tld Over $300,000! (Roughly €280.000 / £245,000.) But... This estimate is pretty rough. A few caveats: This only covers one version of your domain name - it doesn't cover misspellings. I've assumed a single year of registration. Some d…
Continue reading →
I don't like AMP. I think that Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive. So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don't want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first physical meeting after several exploratory video calls. These are my…
Continue reading →
