WDRL — Edition 261: Society Action, Unlabelled inputs, Constructable Stylesheets and Trust as Leader.

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Hey,

Today is a big climate action day and pupils around the world will stand up and ask governments, politicians, their parents and relatives and businesspeople to finally show responsibility for the young generation that’ll face the results of a changing climate directly. It’s clearly not their intent to not go to school but it’s sort of a last call to make their lives still livable in the upcoming decades, because if human society doesn’t drastically change the way we live and work, there’s a lot of trouble coming up to people. And most people in power today will not be affected much but the next generation is, so let’s ensure that those who we love can live a life worth living in a nature that nourishes our minds, that makes us happy and not sad. I’m joining the local event today to support them, that’s the least I can do today.

And finally, here’s one of the backstories that shows what drives these young people to risk their school graduation. Another week and another introduction where I deliberately choose to drop my initial frontend-related introduction and replaced it with the more important ethical and society-affecting one. I hope it helps all of us, let’s try to act as a community and show the big bosses in the world that we don’t accept their inactivity to solve the real problems of our planet and the world’s society anymore.

News

• Chrome 74 brings nice additions in the DevTools for us engineers: We can now see all elements that are affected by a CSS property highlighted, Lighthouse 4 is now integrated into the Audits panel, and there’s now a WebSocket binary message viewer.

Generic

• ‘People think that data is in the cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean.’ — Let’s clear this up and deep dive into how communication works and how it happened that Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon together own more than half of the undersea bandwidth. It prominently shows how the Internet depends on these big four companies nowadays and if we’d avoid them we face heavy struggles and performance impacts.
• “Let’s improve our analytics” is one of those sentences I hear in so many companies and from everyone again and again. Louise Petre from gov.uk shares how to use data in user research when you have no web analytics.

Web Performance

• Tim Kadlec has a lot of experience with performance budgets and the problems with clients being unable to make improvements of them and how to escape this and work out performance budgets that stick and last long.

Accessibility

• I see it in many projects myself and Alex Carpenter wrote up collections of the Top 1 million sites: 59% of form inputs are unlabeled. This means that 2/3 of the forms that we see on these pages are not accessible, but more than that: They’re not even providing helpful forms to people who aren’t required to use assitive technologies like a screen reader but actually all of us. It’s as easy as wrapping the input and describe it, for example like this: <label>Name<input name="name"></label>. Surely there are even better labelling practices but this would be enough already to significantly make a difference for all users of a website, including for you and me.
• Accessibility Insights is a new platform service that provides developers nice tools to analyse the accessibility of their web projects and brings accessibility testing as well.

CSS

• Constructable Stylesheets is a new way of initialising an external stylesheet or set of styles in a non-blocking way. In opposite to appending a new style element to the document’s head, this new method allows us to dynamically construct stylesheets via JavaScript. This is especially nice and useful when we use it for Web Components in a ShadowDOM. The feature is available in Chrome Preview builds currently.

Work & Life

• How do we build trust as leaders? Claire Lew on why business retreats and team building activities, thanking the team and transparency are only small fractions and don’t matter much compared to the real points like showing vulnerability as leader, communicating intent behind actions, and finally following through on commitments.

Go beyond…

• What does a public event like a concert feel like if there are no phones allowed? David Cain experienced it at a Jack White concert and is sharing the emotions, the different atmosphere and why it’s important to think about how we experience our life with a smartphone and how without it.

—Anselm