A sizeable chunk of my work at Igalia so far involves editing and updating the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), and a smaller chunk has me working on the Web Platform Tests (WPT). In both cases, the content is stored in large public repositories (MDN, WPT) and contributors are encouraged to fork the repositories, clone them locally, and push updates via the fork as PRs (Pull Requests). And while both repositories roll in localhost web server setups so you can preview your edits locally, each has its own.
As useful as these are, if you ignore the whole “auto-force a browser page reload every time the file is modified in any way whatsoever” thing that I’ve been trying very hard to keep from discouraging me from saving often, each has to be started in its own way, from within their respective repository directories, and it’s generally a lot more convenient to do so in a separate Terminal window.
I was getting tired of constantly opening a new Terminal window, cding into the correct place, remembering the exact invocation needed to launch the local server, and on and on, so I decided to make my life slightly easier with a few short scripts and aliases. Maybe this will be useful to you as well.
First, I decided to keep things relatively simple. Instead of writing a small program that would handle all server startups by parsing shell arguments and what have you, I wrote a couple of very similar shell scripts. Here’s the script for launching MDN’s localhost:
alias mdn-server="open -a Terminal.app ~/bin/mdn-start.bsh"
Translated into English, that means “open the file ~/bin/mdn-start.bsh using the -application Terminal.app”.
Thus, when I type mdn-server in any command prompt, a new Terminal window will open and the shell script mdn-start.bsh will be run; the script switches into the needed directory and launches the localhost server using yarn, as per the MDN instructions. What’s more, when I’m done working on MDN, I can switch to the window running the server, stop the server with ⌃C (control-C), and the Terminal window closes automatically.
I did something very similar for WPT, except in this case the alias reads:
alias wpt-server="open -a Terminal.app ~/bin/wpt-serve.bsh"
And the script to which it points reads:
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/repos/wpt/
./wpt serve
As I mentioned before, I chose to do it this way rather than writing a single alias (say, local-server) that would accept arguments (mdn, wpt, etc.) and fire off scripts accordingly, but that’s also an option and a viable one at that.
So that’s my little QoL (Quality of Life) upgrade to make working on MDN and WPT a little easier. I hope it helps you in some way!
Today marks one month at Igalia. It’s been a lot, and there’s more to come, but it’s been a really great experience. I get to do things I really enjoy and value, and Igalia supports and encourages all of it without trying to steer me in specific directions. I’ve been incredibly lucky to experience that kind of working environment twice in my life — and the other one was an outfit I helped create.
Here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to:
Generally got up to speed on what Igalia is working on (spoiler: a lot).
Redesigned parts of wpewebkit.org, fixed a few outstanding bugs, edited most of the rest. (The site runs on 11ty, so I’ve been learning that as well.)
Wrote a bunch of CSS tests/demos that will form the basis for other works, like articles and videos.
Drafted a few of said articles. As I write this, two are very close to being complete, and a third is almost ready for editing.
Edited some pages on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), clarifying or upgrading text in some places and replacing unclear examples in others.
Reviewed various specs and proposals (e.g., Miriam’s very interesting @scope proposal).
And that’s not all! Here’s what I have planned for the next few months:
More contributions to MDN, much of it in the CSS space, but also branching out into documenting some up-and-coming APIs in areas that are fairly new to me. (Details to come!)
Contributions to the Web Platform Tests (WPT), once I get familiar with how that process is structured.
Articles on topics that will include (but are not limited to!) gaps in CSS, logical properties, and styling based on writing direction. I haven’t actually settled on outlets for those yet, so if you’d be interested in publishing any of them, hit me up. I usually aim for about a thousand words, including example markup and CSS.
Very likely will rejoin the CSS Working Group after a (mumblecough)-year absence.
Assembling a Raspberry Pi system to test out WPEWebKit in its native, embedded environment and get a handle on how to create a “setting up WPEWebKit for total embedded-device noobs”, of which I am one.
That last one will be an entirely new area for me, as I’ve never really worked with an embedded-device browser before. WPEWebKit is a WebKit port, actually the official WebKit port for embedded devices, and as such is aggressively tuned for performance and low resource demand. I’m really looking forward to not only seeing what it’s like to use it, but also how I might be able to leverage it into some interesting projects.
WPEWebKit is one of the reasons why Igalia is such a big contributor to WebKit, helping drive its standards support forward and raise its interoperability with other browser engines. There’s a thread of self-interest there: a better WebKit means a better WPEWebKit, which means more capable embedded devices for Igalia’s clients. But after a month on the inside, I feel comfortable saying most of Igalia’s commitment to interoperability is philosophical in nature — they truly believe that more consistency and capability in web browsers benefits everyone. As in, THIS IS FOR EVERYONE.
And to go along with that, more knowledge and awareness is seen as an unvarnished good, which is why they’re having me working on MDN content. To that end, I’m putting out an invitation here and now: if you come across a page on MDN about CSS or HTML that confuses you, or seems inaccurate, or just doesn’t have much information at all, please get in touch to let me know, particularly if you are not a native English speaker.
I can’t offer translation services, unfortunately, but I can do my best to make the English content of MDN as clear as possible. Sometimes, what makes sense to a native English speaker is obscure or unclear to others. So while this offer is open to everyone, don’t hold back if you’re struggling to parse the English. It’s more likely the English is unclear and imprecise, and I’d like to erase that barrier if I can.
The best way to submit a report is to send me email with [MDN] and the URL of the page you’re writing about in the subject line. If you’re writing about a collection of pages, put the URLs into the email body rather than the subject line, but please keep the [MDN] in the subject so I can track it more easily. You can also ping me on Twitter, though I’ll probably ask you to email me so I don’t lose track of the report. Just FYI.
I feel like there was more, but this is getting long enough and anyway, it already seems like a lot. I can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months!
The first week on the job at Igalia was… it was good, y’all. Upon formally joining the Support Team, got myself oriented, built a series of tests-slash-demos that will be making their way into some forthcoming posts and videos, and forked a copy of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) so I can start making edits and pushing them to the public site. In fact, the first of those edits landed Sunday night! And there was the usual setting up accounts and figuring out internal processes and all that stuff.
To be perfectly honest, a lot of my first-week momentum was provided by the rest of the Support Team, and setting expectations during the interview process. You see, at one point in the past I had a position like this, and I had problems meeting expectations. This was partly due to my inexperience working in that sort of setting, but also partly due to a lack of clear communication about expectations. Which I know because I thought I was doing well in meeting them, and then was told otherwise in evaluations.
So when I was first talking with the folks at Igalia, I shared that experience. Even though I knew Igalia has a different approach to management and evaluation, I told them repeatedly, “If I take this job, I want you to point me in a direction.” They’ve done exactly that, and it’s been great. Special thanks to Brian Kardell in this regard.
I’m already looking forward to what we’re going to do with the demos I built and am still refining, and to making more MDN edits, including some upgrades to code examples. And I’ll have more to say about MDN editing soon. Stay tuned!
Today is my first day as a full-time employee at Igalia, where I’ll be doing a whole lot of things I love to do: document and explain web standards at MDN and other places, participate in standards work at the W3C, take on some webmaster duties, and play a part in planning Igalia’s strategy with respect to advancing the web. And likely other things!
I’ll be honest, this is a pretty big change for me. I haven’t worked for anyone other than myself since 2003. But the last time I did work for someone else, it was for Netscape (slash AOL slash Time Warner) as a Standards Evangelist, a role I very much enjoyed. In many ways, I’m taking that role back up at Igalia, in a company whose values and structure are much more in line with my own. I’m really looking forward to finding out what we can do together.
If the name Igalia doesn’t ring any bells, don’t worry: nobody outside the field has heard of them, and most people inside the field haven’t either. So, remember when CSS Grid came to browsers back in 2017? Igalia did the implementation that landed in Safari and Chromium. They’ve done a lot of other things besides that — some of which I’ll be helping to spread the word about — but it’s the thing that web folks will be most likely to recognize.
This being my first day and all, I’m still deep in the setting up of logins and filling out of forms and general orienting of oneself to a new team and set of opportunities to make a positive difference, so there isn’t much more to say besides I’m stoked and planning to say more a little further down the road. For now, onward!
For my 2020 holiday break, I decided to get more serious about supporting the use of alternative text on Twitter. I try to be rigorous about adding descriptive text to my images, GIFs, and videos, but I want to be more conscientious about not spreading inaccessible content through my retweets.
The thing is, Twitter doesn’t make it obvious whether someone else’s content has been described, and the way it structures (if I can reasonably use that word) its content makes it annoyingly difficult to conduct element or accessibility-property inspections. So, in keeping with the design principles that underlie both the Web and CSS, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Which is to say, I wrote a user stylesheet.
I started out by calling out things that lacked useful alt text. It went something like this:
…and so on, layering on some sizing, font stuff, and positioning to hopefully place the text where it would be visible. This failed to satisfy for two reasons:
Because of the way Twitter nests it dozens of repeatedly utility-classes divs, and the styles repeatedly applied thereby, many images were tall (but cut off) or wide (ditto) in ways that pulled the positioned generated text out of the visible frame shown on the site. There wasn’t an easily-found human-readable predictable way to address the element I wanted to use as a positioning context. So that was a problem.
Almost every image in my feed had a big red and yellow WARNING on it, which quickly depressed me.
What I realized was that rather than calling out the failures, I needed to highlight the successes. So I commented out the Big Red Angry Text approach above and got a lot more simple.
Three consecutive tweets from my timeline on Friday, January 1st, 2021. The blurring of the images in the top and bottom tweets is an effect of the Data Saver preference, not my CSS.
Just that. De-emphasize the images that have the default alt text by way of their enclosing divs, and remove that effect on hover so I can see the image as intended if I so choose. I like this approach better because it de-emphasizes images that aren’t properly described, while those which are described get a visual pop. They stand out as lush islands in a flat sea.
In case you’ve been wondering why I’m selecting divs instead of img and video elements, it’s because I use the Data Saver setting on Twitter, which requires me to click on an image or video to load it. (You can set it via Settings > Accessibility, display and languages > Data usage > Data saver. It’s also what’s blurring the images in the screenshot shown here.) I enable this setting to reduce network load, but also to give me an extra layer of protection when disturbing images and videos circulate. I generally follow people who are careful about not sharing disturbing content, but I sometimes go wandering outside my main timeline, and never know what I’ll find out there.
After some source digging, I discovered a decent way to select non-described videos, which I combined with the existing image styles:
The fun part is, Twitter’s architecture spits out nested divs with that same ARIA label for videos, which I imagine could be annoying to people using screen readers. Besides that, it also has the effect of applying the filter twice, which means videos that haven’t been described get their contrast double-reduced! And their grayscale double-enforced! Fun.
What I didn’t expect was that when I start playing a video, it loses the grayscale and contrast reduction effects even when not being hovered, which makes the second rule above a little over-written. I don’t see the DOM structure changing a whole lot when the video loads and plays, so either videos are being treated differently for filter purposes, or I’m missing something in the DOM that’s invalidating the selector matching. I might poke at it over time to find a fix, or I may just let it go. The user experience isn’t too far off what I wanted anyway.
There is a gap in my coverage, which is GIFs pulled from Twitter’s GIF pool. These have default alt text other than Image, which makes selecting for them next to impossible. Just a few examples pulled from Firefox’s Accessibility panel when I searched the GIF panel for “this is a test”:
testing GIF
This Is ATest Fool GIF
Corona Test GIF by euronews
Test Fail GIF
Corona Virus GIF by guardian
Its ATest Josh Subdquist GIF
Corona Stay Home GIF by INTO ACTION
Is This A Test GIF
Stressed Out Community GIF
A1b2c3 GIF
I assume these are Giphy titles or something like that. In nearly every case, they’re insufficient, if not misleading or outright useless. I looked for markers in the DOM to be able to catch these, but didn’t find anything that was obviously useful.
I did think briefly about filtering for any aria-label that contains the string GIF ([aria-label*="GIF"]), but that would improperly catch images and videos that have been described but happen to have the string GIF inside them somewhere. This might be a relatively rare occurrence, but I’m loth to gray out media that someone went to the effort of describing. I may change my mind about this, but for now, I’m accepting that GIFs which appear in full color are probably not described, particularly when containing common memes, and will try to be careful.
I apply the above styles in Firefox using Stylus, which also available for Chrome, and they’re working pretty well for me. I wish I could figure out a way to apply them in mobile contexts, but that’s a (much bigger) problem for another day.
I’m not the first to tread this ground, nor do I expect to be the last, sadly. For a deeper dive into all the details of Twitter accessibility and the pitfalls that can occur, please read Adrian Roselli’s excellent article Improving Your Tweet Accessibility from just over two years ago. And if you want apply accessibility-aid CSS to your own Twitter experience but can’t or won’t use Stylus, Adrian has a bookmarklet that injects Twitter alt text all set up and ready to go — you can use it as-is, or replace the CSS in his bookmarklet with mine above or your own if you want to take a different approach.
So that’s how I’m upping my awareness of accessible content on Twitter in 2021. I’d love to hear what y’all are using to improve your own experiences, or links to tools and resources on this same topic. If you have any of that, please drop the links in a comment below, so that everyone who reads this can benefit. Thanks!
For years, I’ve had a bash alias that re-runs the previous command via sudo. This is useful in situations where I try to do a thing that requires root access, and I’m not root (because I am never root). Rather than have to retype the whole thing with a sudo on the front, I just type please and it does that for me. It looked like this in my .bashrc file:
alias please='sudo "$BASH" -c "$(history -p !!)"'
But then, the other day, I saw Kat Maddox’s tweet about how she aliases please straight to sudo, so to do things as root, she types please apt update, which is equivalent to sudo apt update. Which is pretty great, and I want to do that! Only, I already have that word aliased.
What to do? A bash function! After commenting out my old alias, here’s what I added to .bash_profile:
please() {
if [ "$1" ]; then
sudo $@
else
sudo "$BASH" -c "$(history -p !!)"
fi
}
That way, if I remember to type please apachectl restart, as in Kat’s setup, it will ask for the root password and then execute the command as root; if I forget my manners and simply type apachectl restart, then when I’m told I don’t have privileges to do that, I just type please and the old behavior happens. Best of both worlds!
Another aspect of the meyerweb redesign I’d like to explore is the way I’m using CSS Grid rows to give myself more layout flexibility.
First, let’s visualize the default layout of a page here on meyerweb. It looks something like this:
So simple, even flexbox could do it! But that’s only if things always stay this simple. I knew they probably wouldn’t, because the contents in those two sidebars were likely to vary from one part of the site to another — and I would want, in some cases, for the sidebar pieces to line up vertically. Here’s an example:
That’s the basic layout of archive pages. See how the left sidebar’s Archives lines up with the top of the Feeds box in the right sidebar? That’s Grid for you. I thought about lumping the Feeds and Categories into a the same grid cell (thus making them part of the same grid row), which would have meant wrapping them in a <div>, but decided keeping them separate allows more flexibility in terms of responsive rearrangement of content. I can, for example, assign the Feeds to be followed by Archives and then Categories at mobile sizes. Or to reverse that order.
More to the point, I also wanted the ability to place things along the bottoms of the sidebars, down near the footer but still next to the main content column, like so:
An early design prototype for the blog archives put the “Next post” and “Previous post” links in some of those spots, before I moved the links into the bottom of the main content column. So at the moment, I don’t have anything making use of those spots, although the capability is there. I could cluster content along the tops and the bottoms of the sidebars, as needed.
But here’s the important thing, and really the point of this article: I’m not rewriting the row structure and grid cell assignments for each page type. There’s a unified row template applied to the body on every page that uses the Hamonshū design. It is:
The general idea here is, the first seven rows are sized to be the minimum necessary to contain content inside those rows. This is also true of the last three rows. And in between those sets, a 1fr row that takes up the rest of the grid container’s height, pushing the two sets apart.
In the simplest case, where there’s just a header, main content column, and a footer, with nothing in the sidebars (the layout has three columns, remember), the content will fill the rows like so:
Thus: The header fills all of row one. The content expands row two from its placement in the center column. The footer fills all of the last row, which is specified via grid-row: -2 (because grid-row: -1 would align its top with the bottom edge of the grid container). There’s no more content, so all the other min-content rows have no content, so their height is zero. And there’s no leftover height to soak up, so the 1fr row also has a height of zero. Seems like a lot of rows specified to no real purpose, doesn’t it?
But now, let’s add some sidebar content to columns one and three; that is, the sidebars. For example, you might remember this layout from before:
Given this setup, we can’t just assign the main content column to grid-row: 2 and leave it at that — it’s going to have to span rows. Really, it needs to span all but the last, thus ensuring it reaches down to the footer. So the CSS ends up like this:
Grid-line visualization courtesy the Firefox Web Inspector.
The first set of min-content rows are all gathered up against the bottom of the top part of the layout, and the second set are all pushed down at the bottom. Between them, the 1fr row eats up all the leftover space, which is what pushes the two sets of min-content rows apart.
I like this pattern. It feels good to me, having two sets of rows where the individual rows accordion open to accept content when needed, and collapse to zero height when not, with a “blank” row in between the sets that pushes them apart. It’s flexible, and even allows me to add more rows to the sets without having to rewrite all my layout styles.
As an example, suppose I decided I needed to add a few more rows to the bottom set, for use in a few specialty templates. Because of the way things are set up, all I have to do is change the row template like this:
That’s everything. I just changed the number of repeats in the second set of rows. All the existing pages will continue on just fine, no layout changes, no CSS changes. In the few (currently hypothetical) pages where I need to put a bunch of stuff along the bottom of the main content column, I just plug them in using grid-row values, whether positive or negative. It all just works.
The same is true if more rows are added to the first set, for whatever reason. Everything gets managed in a single CSS rule, where you can add rows for the whole site instead of having to write, track, and maintain a bunch of variants for various page types. (Subtracting rows is harder without causing layout upset, but could still be done in some scenarios.)
As a final note, you’re probably wondering: Is that one 1fr row actually necessary to get a layout like this one? Not really, no. Let’s take it out, like this:
grid-template-rows: repeat(11,min-content);
What happens as a result is the rows that aren’t directly occupied by content (the ones that previously collapsed to zero height), but are still spanned by content (the center column), divvy up the leftover space the 1fr row used to consume. This leads to a situation like so:
To the user, there’s no practical difference. Things go to the same places either way. You just get the “extra” rows stretching out, instead of being pushed apart by the 1fr row.
I certainly could have left it at that, and it arguably would have been cleaner to do so. But something about this approach doesn’t sit quite right with me; there’s a tickly feeling in the back of my instinct that tells me there’s a downside to this. Admittedly, it could be a vestigial instinct from the Age of Floats; I doubtless have many things I still have not unlearned. On the other hand, it could be something about Grid I’ve picked up on subconsciously but haven’t yet brought into full realization.
If I ever pin the tickle down enough to articulate it, I’ll update the post to include it.
Let’s talk about image optimization. There are a few images used in meyerweb’s new design, and while I wanted them to be pleasing to the eye, I also wanted them to be lightweight. My rough goal was to not have the design elements (images plus CSS) be more than half the total page weight for a typical blog post, not counting any post-specific images like photos or diagrams. Thus, if a typical blog post’s page weight was 500KB, I didn’t want the images and CSS to add up to more than 250KB or so.
Spoiler: I achieved my goal, but at the same time fell short. What I had overlooked was custom fonts, which I’ll get to in a later post.
I found out that how you optimize images matters a whole lot. Let’s consider one example: the spiral-like image (which, yes, is a quiet callback to past work) at the center of the previous-next links at the bottom of blog posts and archive pages. After I extracted a full-resolution copy of that particular sketch from pages 13-14 of Hamonshū, Vol. 1 and did a little cleanup with filters and so on, it became a 1.4MB Acorn file.
The full-size image in Acorn.
(Side note: Acorn’s “Transparentomatic” filter was an enormous time-saver on this project — it made dropping out the page texture a breeze, and easily adjustable, without forcing me to create and retouch mask layers and whatnot. Thanks, Flying Meat!)
With the image ready to be tested in-browser, I would use Acorn’s Web Export dialog to save it as a PNG. The nice thing about this dialog is its built-in Resize feature, which let me keep the Acorn file at its native size (almost a thousand pixels on each side) and export it to the size I wanted — in this case, 200 pixels across. I did this sort of thing a lot, because I tested a variety of images for every design element.
Once I settled on the image I wanted, I’d drop it on ImageOptim to optimize it. This usually slammed all eight cores in my aged laptop’s CPU for a good few seconds, and resulted in up to 5% size savings.
That last paragraph probably looks like an indictment of ImageOptim, but wait! It’s fully redeemed by the end of the post, by which time I will have indicted myself instead.
At this point, my spiral image had gone from a 1.4MB Acorn file to a 30KB PNG. That’s pretty good, even if 30KB feels a tad bulky for a 200×200 image. I just assumed, what with all the transparency and shades of color and all that, it wasn’t too far out of line. But as the whole design started to come together, I discovered that when you added up all the illustration images on, say, the home page, I’d let image bloat sneak up on me in the worst way. They were totalling close to a megabyte, and they’d all been through ImageOptim already.
I went back to Acorn to see if I could squeeze any more out of the file size, maybe convert some of the images to JPGs if they didn’t need the transparency. As I flipped between file formats in the Web Export dialog, I noticed something I’d previously overlooked in the PNG export options: a bit depth slider. I’d been saving the PNGs with no bit depth restrictions, meaning the color table was holding space for 224 colors. That’s… a lot of colors, roughly 224 of which I wasn’t actually using.
When I clicked the “Index PNG Colors” checkbox and changed the slider until I started getting dithers or obvious color loss, then brought it up a notch or two, the difference was astounding. Instead of a 30KB file, I got a 4.4 KB file. Instead of saving at 75% the original size, it was now 11%.
Wait a second… how long has THAT been there?
So I went back through the directory with all my design elements and repeated the process. I do have batch image processing software installed, but I elected to do this manually so I could pick the best color depth for each file by eye. It could be that some would be okay at 4 colors instead of 8; others might need 16 or 32 to retain visual fidelity. Fortunately for me, I only had a couple dozen images to go through, but it would have been worth it even at 10 times that many.
Once I’d gone through all the images and saved them with restricted color depth, my theme’s image directory was down to 242KB total. The biggest of them, the separator wave illustrations, had gone from being ~150KB each to ~25KB each — all five of them together now totalled less than just one of them had before I did the color indexing.
The directory, well and fully smooshed.
At this point, I thought, “All right, let’s see what ImageOptim does with these.” It squeezed them down even further, taking my total from 242KB to 222KB, a nine percent reduction. Which is to say, the percentage savings I got on these already-small files was larger than I’d been getting on the much bigger files — plus, ImageOptim processed them quickly and with a minimum of CPU slamming. Which is honestly pretty great, given the age of my laptop (about seven years).
So: did I meet my performance goal? As I said at the outset, yes, but also no. For a single blog post with around 10KB of text content and no embedded media, the page weight is around 460KB, with the size varying a bit depending on how much markup is needed for the 10KB of text. (Here’s one recent example with some content variety.) Of that, the CSS, split across two files, totals 35.2KB. The images add up to 102.9KB. Add them together, and you get just a hair over 138KB, or right around 30%. Huge success!
Except I hadn’t factored in custom fonts, which all by themselves currently total 203.6KB (44% total page weight), mostly due to the three faces of IM Fell I’m using. That’s right: The fonts weigh more than the CSS and images put together. Once they’re added in with the CSS and images, the design elements end up being almost 75% the total page weight — about 341.6KB of the 460KB total. Most of the rest is the 104.4KB chewed up by showdown.js, the enhancement script I’m using to allow the use of Markdown in post comments.
Thus, next up on my performance quest is looking into subsetting the fonts I’m using in order to get their weight down, and finding out if there’s anything I can do to subset Showdown as well.
But as of now, I’m well pleased with where I ended up on image optimization. I just need to go back and do the same for post-specific images I’d left at unrestricted color depths, where I anticipate a similar 90% savings in file sizes. If you’ve got a lot of images, particularly PNGs, try running them through a process that lets you restrict the color depth, and see how much it saves. The results might surprise you!
