My post two weeks ago on How a BBC navigation bar component broke depending on which external monitor it was on has had a lot of discussion and feedback, including today on Hacker News. After reading the comments, I wanted to clarify some things.| Josh Tumath
Last week, I joined the CSS Working Group at the W3C, representing the BBC.| Josh Tumath
As long ago as the year 2018, the CSS Working Group at the W3C agreed to add a new function to the border-color and outline-color properties. The function is called stripes().| Josh Tumath
At the BBC, we recently had a brand refresh. It was known internally as the Chameleon Project. Done in partnership with Wolff Olins – who had done branding projects for the likes of Google, Uber and TikTok – its aim was to take the BBC out of its dusty old past of Gill Sans typefaces and a vast array of sub-brands designed around the world of broadcast TV.| Josh Tumath
Until now, this site's been running on Jekyll, and I thought I'd join the Eleventy bandwagon.| Josh Tumath
Me and Dave Morris wrote an article for the BBC Design+Engineering blog.| Josh Tumath
When learning to develop for the Web, do you ever feel like you're being taught about all the tools in a toolbox, but not how to actually use them together to build something? If you want to assemble a shed, it's all well and good learning how to use a power drill to drill a hole in a plank of wood, but how do you use that tool along with a screwdriver, a saw to actually build a wall or a roof or a door?| Josh Tumath
For the past three years, I've been running this website on a really cheap| Josh Tumath
I wrote an article for the BBC Design & Engineering blog.| Josh Tumath
Here's the situation: You've got a service that's used by millions of people. You've got a great coverage of unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests and acceptance tests for it. However, in the real world, this service is combined with lots of other services to work correctly, so you need an end-to-end test suite as well to be 99.9% confident that you're safe to deploy a new version. However, if the test is truly end-to-end, it will start sending out fake test data to your millions of user...| Josh Tumath
It's only a weekend to go now until I start at the BBC in their Software Engineering Graduate Scheme in Manchester, and I'm really looking forward to it. All of us on the scheme are being sent to the White City offices in London on the first week for an induction, and then to the BBC Academy in the second week. I still have absolutely no idea where I'll be living in Manchester yet, but hopefully I'll have some idea soon!| Josh Tumath
The website has been upgraded to HTTP/2.0, which delivers a much snappier experience when downloading Web pages.| Josh Tumath
Hooray! After a year in my sandwich placement at GloverSure and a busy first semester during my final year at University, I've finally gotten round to a much needed upgrade to my website.| Josh Tumath
One of the developers I follow on Twitter who works on the Rust compiler posted an interesting thought today:| Josh Tumath
If you thought there was still a shred of hope that EME would never be supported in all major browsers, I’m afraid that all changes as of today. Mozilla have announced that they’ve had to back down and support EME in Firefox. They originally vowed to stand against it, but it’s become clear that it’s implementation and use on Web site is increasing too much for them to boycott it now.| Josh Tumath
The development of EcmaScript 6 is coming along smoothly. But with so much talk about iterators, generators, more useful variable declarations using const and let, arrow functions, default parameters and rest parameters (which are – admittedly – very exciting new features), there’s very little talk on what – I think – will be the most exciting and influential features of ES6: classes and modules.| Josh Tumath
At Mozilla Research, two research projects are underway – probably two of the most important things going on with the Web today. These projects are Rust and Servo. In part two of this series, I’m going to be talking about Servo.| Josh Tumath
At Mozilla Research, two research projects are underway – probably two of the most important things going on with the Web today. These projects are Rust and Servo. In part one of this series, I’m going to be talking about Rust.| Josh Tumath
Recently, our family bought themselves a Samsung Smart TV. As they are not known for being technology-literate, I can’t imagine them making use of its smartness, but it was interesting to use one for the first time. I was surprised to see that all the apps were built using the Web.| Josh Tumath
A couple of weeks ago, I was writing a document for a university assignment in LaTeX. Learning the syntax isn’t too bad, but can take a while. It is similar to HTML; especially in the sense that it is a semantic mark-up language. But it’s old, and mostly used by academia. Meanwhile, CSS has – for years – supported styling printed documents. I’m planning an experiment to see if it would be possible to create a stylesheet and a HTML syntax for creating documents, and I’m calling it ...| Josh Tumath
There have been many times that I hear people say: responsive Web design cannot be done on “real” Web applications or Web sites that want to provide a rich, content-heavy user experience. Is that really so? Is that really the pessimistic attitude we should have towards our ever-evolving Open Web Platform?| Josh Tumath
Since a couple of years ago, I haven’t been supporting any version of Internet Explorer below IE8 in any personal Web projects. Microsoft have started to really care about standards and interoperability since they began development on IE8, so supporting it is much easier than in the past. There are a few annoying quirks, but nothing major, and thankfully its usage share will likely be dropping dramatically next year as Microsoft end support for Windows XP. Google even announced last June th...| Josh Tumath
Normally, when I’m developing a Web site, I can’t test it on Safari on iOS. I don’t own an Apple device. However, when I finally got a chance to do that today as I was finalising site, I was very surprised by what happened.| Josh Tumath
When the Web was created, it ran on one Web browser that ran on one type of desktop PC. But the technologies behind it all ran on open standards, so it didn’t take long before the Web proliferated into all of the devices we now use it on. Web developers don’t just have to worry about 640 × 480 desktop PC monitors. The Web runs on large monitors, small laptop monitors, TVs, high-DPI displays, mobiles, tablets, printed paper, screen readers…. The list goes on.| Josh Tumath
The Web has a problem. An old problem. It’s the same problem that it’s had for a decade. Fragmentation. If Web users all used the latest versions of their favourite Web browsers, life would be simple. But they don’t. Companies insist on using old versions of Windows that come with equally old Web browsers. And mobiles have the same problem, as there are hundreds of millions of Android phones that can’t be upgraded to the latest version of Android, due to lazy OEMs not being bothered t...| Josh Tumath
On 19th July 2012, a fissure was created between the W3C and the WHATWG; the two most important standards organisations leading the development of the Open Web Platform.| Josh Tumath
When I first went to study Computer Science at university, I was curious exactly how my department would approach teaching the students of today about our modern and now very powerful Open Web Platform. So much had changed from the days when I was learning about the Web; back when Web sites were just moving away from the “Microsoft Web” that Internet Explorer 6 had created. Many Web pages would say in their footers either “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “Best viewed in Firefox...| Josh Tumath
Encrypted Media Extensions. Anyone that knows what they are knows that they are synonymous with one thing: DRM And those that know that also know the controversy that ensues. The problem is this: DRM restricts users from viewing a video or listening to an audio track unless they are given permission by the media content’s owner (such as by signing into an account and paying to view it). That seems very reasonable from a business sense, but does that kind of practice belong on an Open Web Pl...| Josh Tumath
Ever since the mid-noughties, there has been a general disdain for Internet Explorer. Everyone from Web developers to your tech-savvy grandad hates the browser. Back in the day, IE was by far the most widely used Web browser; owning a monopoly in the browser market. Today, however, the situation is very different. NetApplications reports it to be at a much healthier market share of 56%, as of April 2013.| Josh Tumath
Ever since Google Chrome launched in 2008, it has used the layout engine WebKit for dealing with all of the functions a Web browser needs to display Web pages to users. WebKit is very widely used – particularly by mobile Web browsers – and has therefore become one of the main layout engines that Web developers test their Web sites on.| Josh Tumath
This was originally presented at Aberystwyth University on 2013-02-22.| Josh Tumath
Opera Software announced yesterday that their Opera Web browser now has over 300 million users spread across various devices that the application supports. However, hidden within that press release was far more serious news.| Josh Tumath
As you no doubt already know, Microsoft has had a number of spats with the European Union this past summer. While they sorted out the disappearance of the browser ballot screen on Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8, a more recent issue still remains. However, this issue is not with Windows 8 as such, but, rather, Microsoft’s newest operating system: the confusingly named Windows RT. While this OS may look the same as Windows 8 on the covers, underneath it actually runs on the ARM processor archite...| Josh Tumath
Recently, my team and I fixed an absolutely bizarre bug that only one person in the team could reproduce. And to make it even weirder, she was only able to reproduce the issue when using her work laptop at home; it worked fine with the same laptop in the office.| Josh Tumath