Cotton Coder

The 2024 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages — spoiler: it’s a rather bleak state of affairs. The “G” in WCAG stands for “guidelines” but “an average of 56.8 errors per page” suggests those guidelines are not even read.

Lydia Hallie presents an excellent guide to Promises with a look into the internal workings of JavaScript’s event loop and task queues. Available both in video and blog post form.

An open list of known AI robot user-agents. Should you wish to block them with robots.txt (if they respect it and it isn’t already too late). More can be found at Dark Visitors.

An hour long documentary on YouTube about the history of Node.js and Ryan Dahl.

Garry Ing presents an interactive article about the history of observable web development with clever presentation.

JavaScript API compatibility across runtimes like Node, Deno, Bun, and the various Worker environments. The data is auto-generated and doesn’t promise to be 100% accurate but still a good resource.

Jeremy Keith writes about progressive enhancement for progressive disclosure with his usual mix of anecdote, wisdom, and code examples. Make sure that the default state is safe. Then enhance.

HTMX is a refreshing alternative to the myriad JavaScript UI frameworks. HTML is rendered on the server and sent as-is to the browser. HTMX does the plumbing using attribute directives. Bring your own server-side framework.

A new podcast hosted by Johannes Schickling discussing the idea of local-first software. Similar to offline-first and self-hosting, local-first is specifically focused on keeping data and functionality on device ensuring it remains open and working regardless of connectivity.

A new JavaScript runtime reaches 1.0. WinterJS is WinterCG compatible (an effort towards API interoperability). It’s based on Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey, written in Rust and uses Tokio. And guess what — it’s faster! Like everything ever published for JavaScript it’s faster.

Browser vendors have collaborated to develop the Speedometer 3.0 test. Safari on my MacBook Air M2 clocks a pathetic 14.5, Firefox hits 21, and Brave smokes at 29. As expected except my iPhone 12 hits 18.9 beating the laptop. More details on the WebKit blog.

Alexandre H.T.R. Bonfitto explains the new HTTP versions with plenty of diagrams, codes, and references. On reliable and stable connections, HTTP/2 many times offers better performance than HTTP/3. — interesting!

My blog post where I discuss implementing the Shiki syntax highlighter with with extra styles to improve code presentation.

Shiki is a JavaScript syntax highlighter ideal for server-side rendering. Shiki uses the same TextMate grammar that powers VS Code. I’ve found it to produce much better results than Hightlight.js and Prism.js.

Obsidian have open sourced JSON Canvas — a file format specification for infinite canvas tools. The v1.0 spec is simple (maybe too simple) and intended to give users ownership over their data.

In this blog post I share some lesser-known CSS styles to improve usability and accessibility.

A book written by Marijn Haverbeke about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital.

The BBC have published their first C2PA video with digitally signed content credentials. Readers can: see transparently what has been done to an image — it does not mean the original content is real or fake.

Adorn your rose-tinted glasses and check out Rachel Kwon’s collection of articles that opine for the old days of the internet.

Following on from my first impressions I’ve blogged a follow up review of JSR; the JavaScript registry. I discuss new features and new issues.