4 days agoManipulative Language, Historical Lies, Popularist Fictions… More Critical Thinking Is Required.In my last critical thinking article I mostly talked about how numbers and statistics can be used to lie. Thing is we are surrounded by lies daily. Even in school we’re told outright fictions as if they were fact. Soft Language To Control The Narrative A subtle and insidious technique to watch out for is how…Propaganda17 min read
Published in CodeX·May 15Facts Can Be Used To Lie — A Lesson In Critical ThinkingI recently wrote an article “PHP Isn’t Dying” where a lot of people missed the point. I was ridiculing the endless stream of articles claiming it was dead, when all they had for facts was fear-mongering, card-stacking, and general false conclusions. Only a handful recognized that I was using it…Statistics10 min read
Published in CodeX·May 9Stop Putting Style, Scripts, BASE64 Images And SVG In Your Markup!I’ve written about site speed before in other articles, but five months ago I had a friend ask me for help with their painfully slow site and thought everyone could learn from this. …HTML14 min read
Published in CodeX·May 7Are ARIA-Roles Ignorant Code-Bloat Manure?Mostly Yes. ARIA roles have always kind of confused me in terms of “why the blazes do these even exist?” This initial reaction was only compounded by how the documentation for them even says things that make them sound utterly pointless. So let’s go over some of the reasons I…HTML7 min read
Published in CodeX·May 2Why I Walked Away From Three Possible Contracts In A RowAs an accessibility and efficiency consultant, what I do differs from what some people think of when they hear the word “consultant”. I don’t just show up for a bunch of meetings, show some charts, spew glittering generalities, pat people on the back, tell them what they want to hear…Accessibility11 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 24Stop Looking For Alternatives If You’ve Not Explored What Already Is!I’ve seen lots of articles over they years where the authors seem to be diving for different ways of doing things, where their initial example seems to have been sabotaged to look worse than it is. Often this seems to be done to try and make bloated alternatives look better…Java Script9 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 20What Was So “Wrong” With HTML 3.2And why recreating it with PRESENTATIONAL classes is just plain stupid. I’ve wanted to write a better explanation of this for the folks who “weren’t there” but lacked a decent example to work from. That changed when I got pointed at this article about Abe Hiroshi’s outdated website. It’s fun…HTML26 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 9PHP Is Not “Dying” You Clickbait Wankers!PHP gets a lot of unfounded hate and gibberish flak about how it is on its way out the door. If this were in any way true we would probably see certain projects — like Wordpress — looking for alternatives to start porting to. …PHP11 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 9This “Two Dozen Favicons” Rubbish Is Getting Out Of ControlI’m working on a site for a client right now I can’t go into too many details about — NDA and all — but one of the most ridiculous things in their existing site is this: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon"> <link rel="shortcut icon" sizes="196x196" href=“/images/favicon-196.png" type="image/png"> <link rel="icon" href="/images/favicon-32.png" sizes="32x32" type="image/png"> <link…HTML12 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 3Learning JS Modules & Classes Part 4 : Refactoring, Cleanup, Bouncy-Balls, Time Scaling.Last time out we got the Canvas up and running and got the playfield code in place. Before I get into stuff that has actual logic to it, I like to double-check and refactor the code so as to best “solve” any related problems. As such the first half of…Java Script17 min read
