Garrett LeSage @garrett@mastodon.xyz

In my experience, the biggest source of unnecessary energy waste in websites is JavaScript doing some kind of polling while the page is idle. Think about it: you spend ~95% of your time on a web page not doing much: maybe scrolling, maybe typing, maybe literally doing nothing. So if there's something running during "idle" time, consuming CPU, then that will be your biggest battery drain. Especially if you're unfortunate enough to leave the tab open for a long time.

"Thinking About Power Usage and Websites" by Chris Coyier https://css-tricks.com/thinking-about-power-usage-and-websites/

It's an interesting thought experiment. In general, on the client side, more CPU does map to more energy usage. And Safari's dev tools actually do have an estimate of battery consumption now.

Better privacy, fine-grained media permissions, improved UI: GNOME Web has a lot to offer with this release! Check out Michael Catanzaro’s blog post for the full details https://blogs.gnome.org/mcatanzaro/2020/09/16/epiphany-3-38-and-webkitgtk-2-30/ #Linux #opensource #GNOME

Important PSA:

The web wasn't lost by people posting baby pictures to Facebook. The web was lost when Google leveraged market dominance to enact a complete abrogation of web standards -- since the HTML 'standard' is now a 'Living Document,' the standard is "do whatever Chrome does," which is an unattainable goal.

There are four voting members of WHATWG. Two of them use Google's web rendering engine. A third is entirely financially dependent on Google. The other one is Apple. Who speaks for you? Nobody.

Honestly, I think it is a huge mistake for Mastodon to not just treat Twitter like yet-another instance. At least automatically handle @-mentions in the @foo@twitter.com format. It feels like idealism to pretend Twitter doesn’t exist, but I think we should be far more realistic.

uhoh

introverts with social anxiety in March 2020: MY TIME HAS COME

introverts with social anxiety in September 2020: i can no longer interact with other humans and i get panic attacks from being within eyesight of more than five people at once

also look at this one!!!! she's doing her best!!!!

I think it goes to show how immature our field is, when software engineers can work for decades without learning how to make their apps usable by blind or otherwise disabled people. Imagine if architects designed buildings without wheelchair ramps, or if civil engineers designed crosswalks without grooves or curb cuts.

They used to! And it was super dangerous! But now there are regulations forcing the engineers to figure this stuff out. I imagine accessibility will be the same in the future.

The A11ycasts series by Rob Dodson was definitely the most helpful starting point for me when learning how to do accessibility correctly. It lays out step-by-step how to actually install and use screen readers like VoiceOver and NVDA.

This is invaluable, because even with all the automated accessibility tooling out there, there's really nothing better than just using the app yourself and seeing if it's possible via sound and touch alone. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNYkxOF6rcICWx0C9LVWWVqvHlYJyqw7g

It still amazes me that #accessibility is one of the major selling points of #Pinafore. When I first started, I thought it would be speed, offline capabilities, simple UI, something like that. Accessibility was not my main focus. https://mastodon.tardis.pw/objects/ab75df50-175d-4e2b-8f44-37d15bb95461

"What is the Value of Browser Diversity?" by @davatron5000 https://daverupert.com/2020/09/the-value-of-browser-diversity/

Great post, there's a lot I agree with here. Whatever the answer is, I have a nagging suspicion that we will find out sooner or later.

Nature really likes crabs and keeps trying to evolve more of them.

Carcinisation is the name of a process of convergent evolution, in which crustaceans evolve into crab-like forms. In decapod crustatceans, there have been at least 5 distinct times when crab-like animals have evolved.

Coconut crabs, king crabs, and hermit crabs are not types of true crab, and are only distantly related.

if your github readme is meant to explain how to run your application, but running all the commands you list fails to start your application, your readme sucks

90% of the times that i give up on using/contributing to FOSS it's because the readme assumes i already have and am a poweruser of some dependency that i've never used and doesn't explain anything about how to use it

Behold, the jeyboard (jean keyboard)