This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.9, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop.
- The end of responsive images – As another perp behind the ungainly responsive images syntax, I too feel Matttt Marquis’ pain, and say yay sizes=”auto” for lazyloaded images.
- Roving Tabindex – A simple dependency-free HTML web component that implements the roving tabindex pattern for building accessible menus and grids
- Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User’s Notes
- (One) Good A.I. is here writes Anil Dash
- Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender – “Ashley MacIsaac, who is seeking $1.5m in civil lawsuit, says inaccurate information led to concert cancellation”
- Talking of which… Google’s Prompt API – No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use”, says glamorous Matttt Marquis.
- America Doesn’t Need to Invade Canada. It Has Our Data – see also: UK, EU. And we continue to give it away.
- In its push to become Big Tech’s data center hub, India is overlooking local resistance – “Such corporate giveaways divert scarce public resources away from essential sectors like healthcare, education, and rural development, thereby undermining the right to equitable development”. Human development, and food, are frivolous, anyway.
- Under the hood of MDN’s new frontend – in which it is revealed that using React to serve essentially static content “accumulated quite a lot of technical debt”, and is better replaced by … Web Components and CSS, AKA “the web platform”. And also the revolutionary new concept of “Shipping only what’s required”.
- Web browsers – a data portability patchwork by Tom Fish of the Data Transfer Initiative
- How Many Bites at the Apple? – Gene Burrus, who headed up Microsoft legal after the landmark IE browser monopoly case, writes “Apple has again asked the Supreme Court in the United States to excuse its engagement in unfair methods of competition and contempt of court”
- Some kids are bypassing age-verification checks with a fake mustache – Some age-verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.
- Microsoft isn’t removing Copilot from Windows 11, it’s just renaming it – to “ClippAI”?
- Silicon Valley enabled brutal mass detention and surveillance in China, internal documents show – “Prevent problems before they happen,” IBM promised Chinese officials”. “Because of this technology … we have no freedom at all. At the moment, it’s us Chinese that are suffering the consequences, but sooner or later, Americans and others, too, will lose their freedoms.”