📯 letter@marcus.io Issue #1: Upload filters, Web Accessibility, and a video series for a great CMS
Caution! This article was published over a year ago, and hasn't been updated since. Situation, software and support of the topic below could have changed in the meantime.
Hello everyone!
I won't go too much into meta territory, but let me say just this - thanks for your subscription to my little newsletter and make this little experiment work!
But now for the essential part - here are some links worth reading:
Politics
It may not be the best idea to start a newsletter about web development with EU politics, but it is a pressing issue: The copyright reform of the European Union. Just some minutes from now the European Parliament will have a crucial vote about Article 13 (#Uploadfilters) and Article 11 (#Linktax) - and everyone but big publishing companies are against it - for example Cory Doctorow who wrote an article on how upload filters and link tax would affect Wikipedia and free speech on the Web as a whole. (You can also read the German translation of the article here.) But nevertheless, it seems that the crucial part of the relevant politicians follows the proven false argument of publishers.
Web Accessibility
If you are interested in web accessibility I pretty certain that you have stumbled upon Heydon Pickering's great and in-depth analysis of the common Card pattern and it's accessibility implications. (If not, just click the link 🤓). But there has been more of #a11y goodness the last weeks:
- The Swiss Foundation "Access For All" released their great microsite Accessibility Developer Guide just yesterday
- In "ARIA lists", Scott O'Hara reports about the differences between ol, ul and role="list", especially when it comes to screen readers
Content Management Systems
If you know me from the context of ProcessWire you'll know that I am really rooting for this ingenious but heavily undervalued Content Management Framework. To further spread the word about the system Jonathan Lahijani created a video series on YouTube, comparing ProcessWire to the top dog, WordPress. Quote:
I made this series to introduce ProcessWire to advanced WordPress developers after having searched for an alternative to WordPress. I worked with WordPress for over 8 years and became unsatisfied with many aspects, such as the reliance of plugins that should really be in the core (for example, Advanced Custom Fields), major security issues, performance problems, and wanting true control of my frontend.
In "Writing for a broad audience with Drupal 8: A11y and SEO", Mike Gifford introduces his way to create accessible content in regards of understandability and semantics, sharing links to tools and writing tips of the W3C. While Drupal 8 is the article's example this workflow is applicable for any other CMS.
So, that's it for issue #1! You are very welcome to give feedback - just drop me a note at letter@marcus.io or ping me at Twitter: @_marcusherrmann. And if you are enjoying this letter, please spread the word about it!
Either way, many thanks for reading and have a good time until we read again,
Marcus