Links

TIL that UK monarchs choose their own Royal Cypher, a “symbol to represent their personal authority”.

In September 2022, the College of Arms announced His Majesty King Charles III’s Royal Cypher, which features the monarch’s chosen crown. This Cypher features the Tudor Crown, rather than the St Edward’s Crown chosen by Queen Elizabeth II following her Accession in 1952. Her Royal Cypher was itself a change from her father King George VI.

On each accession, the monarch will choose a Royal Cypher, or symbol to represent their personal authority. You can see the Royal Cypher in many places, for example post boxes, on police and military uniforms or on the side of official buildings.

(From: Updating GOV.UK’s crown - Inside GOV.UK)

With a government wide design system, the digital version of that can be rolled out much more efficiently. Yay design systems!

paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money.

(From: Paying people to work on open source is good actually - Jacob Kaplan-Moss)

Isaac Lyman (Stack Overflow) looks at whether software gets worse. He notices software, unlike sandwiches and movie tickets, is hard to sell:

There are only two demographics that are willing to pay for good software: corporations and video gamers. We’ve somehow blundered our way into a world where everyone else expects software to be free.

(From: Is software getting worse? - Stack Overflow)

Developers have leverage, the post concludes, they have the power to insist on quality, but aren't really using it. This seems unlikely to change overnight, says Isaac.

Wouter Groeneveld ran a Webmentions server then decided to stop running it, because it costs him too much time:

I’d rather spend my Sunday doing something else.

(From: Why I Retired My Webmention Server | Brain Baking)

He questions if it's worth having mentions at all if most are likes and most are sent from Bridgy, a centralised service.

Food for thought. I think I like even the mentions that are just likes… not as some vanity metric, but because it adds a layer of humanity and, community, at least in my bubble. But it is at the expense of privacy. And simplicity (shoutout to Mu-An and Robb's OpenHeart, which is indeed “much, much, much simpler”). And efficiency, especially if you recheck for deletion of replies, as Robb concludes you probably should (not the same Robb).

In Django accessibility in 2023 and beyond, the accessibility team of Python framework Django reflects on their work in the year 2023 and looks to the future. This makes me happy to see, as I'm a bit of a CMS/built-in accessibility nerd (see this intro to CMS accessibility with ATAG and Your CMS is an accessibility assistant). CMS and framework accessibility projects have the potential to increase a lot of accessibility at once: better defaults, better guidance and better output can all lead to a ripple effect. Better admin interfaces can increase how many people can make content for the web, which, again, is great.

Django updated forms in their core, improved the admin UI in lots of ways, updated guidance and automated tooling (including CI/CD). On top, they improved their website and did a bunch of outreach. Great to see it, may more CMSes follow suit (shoutout to WordPress Accessibility Day and Drupal's Accessibility Project).

In Don’t Disable Form Controls, Adrian Roselli explains that, while it sometimes can be ok to disable buttons, it's never ok to disable submit buttons (or any form fields):

Telling authors not to disable submit buttons is too narrow. Authors should not disable any form fields.

Every day, I get to work with people who do good work, who care about things like privacy, ethics and accessibility. We exist. We just are drowning, drowning in algorithmically-guarded walled gardens that are nothing more than quagmires of enshittification, of AI-generated content, of snake-oil solutions.

(From: Have we forgotten how to build ethical things for the web? - Nic Chan)

This piece from Nic resonated. There's a lot of good people in the web industry, doing good things. But there's also a lot of very bad practices that have an impact way beyond their initial uses. From content optimised for search engines (and thus not for humans) to extreme tracking (very far from just figuring out how many people visit which pages).

To avoid bad practices and build more ethically as an industry, I think what Nic shares would actually be the most effective way: to actively question practices and orders we receive as individuals in teams. In What kind of ethics do front-end developers need? I listed a bunch of other things that individuals in teams can make a fuss about.

Aaron Gustafson:

AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

(From: Opportunities for AI in Accessibility – A List Apart)

In this post, Aaron shares some examples of where ‘AI’ could be used to make content more broadly accessible. This is a controversial subject, because there are many automated ‘solutions’ that don't actually remove barriers, so caution is warranted. Such solutions often focus on people who want to comply with accessibility instead of people with disabilities. And accessibility is about people with disabilities, period. Aaron acknowledges this in the post, and calls for including people with disabilities.

What if, he suggests, users could ask specific questions about complex charts? As Aaron acknowledges, hallucinations exist, there could still be a use, especially with more diverse training data. Other examples of where ‘AI’ could remove barriers in his post: voice preservation, voice recognition and text transformation.

I'm still sceptical, because I've seen too many claims from automated tools that don't work that well in practice, but I understand it's worth to at least explore different options, and weigh them against the reality of today's web. For the voice and text tools I am actually somewhat optimistic.

Bruce on how Apple now seems to plan for breaking PWAs:

Presumably Apple doesn’t want PWAs to open in third-party browsers that have more powerful features than Safari, because those would directly compete with native apps in its own App Store. However, in the EU, it can’t privilege PWAs in Safari with its own private APIs any more. And so its solution, in its spirit of malicious compliance, seems to be “if we can’t have them, nobody can!”

(From: Bruce Lawson's personal site  : Is Apple breaking PWAs out of malicious compliance?)

I loved to see Apple invest in web platform features and Safari a lot more in recent years. I hate to see the way they seem to want to place themselves above (what seems to
me is fair) European law.

Molly White wrote an excellent review of a book written by Chris Dixon, an investor specialised in crypto companies and blockchain at Andreessen Horowitz. Like Molly, I’m very scepticical of crypto companies. While I understand people want to try and get rich from tech investments, and that creating hype could help with such goals, I continue to not get the premise of this particular hype.

We’ve now had many years of solid crypto and blockchain criticism. From Molly’s review I gather Dixon’s book doesn’t really engage with that criticism, at all. He just dismisses it. While bashing on other technologies, like RSS. Strikes me as ironic that Dixon can’t see the use cases for RSS, while advocating for blockchaim, a technology still in search for a compelling application. Is it that RSS isn’t ‘monetised’, and that the ’value‘ he’s looking for is ’value as in money‘? Rather than ‘is how podcasts work and lots of people use this to keep up to date with content’?

Or, as Ahmet A. Sabanc wrote, in RSS is not dead:

RSS was never dead. I don’t know why people claimed that just because a tech overlord decided something is not profitable for them. People are still using it and it’s as good and alive as it’s always been.