Adactio: Links—Tagged with detection

“Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks

Smart advice on future-proofing and backward-compatibility:

There isn’t a single, specific device, browser, and person we cater to when creating a web experience. Websites and web apps need to adapt to a near-infinite combination of these circumstances to be effective. This adaptability is a large part of what makes the web such a successful medium.

Consider doing the hard work to make it easy and never remove feature queries and @supports statements. This creates a robust approach that can gracefully adapt to the past, as well as the future.

Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string - Google Groups

Excellent news! All the major browsers have agreed to freeze their user-agent strings, effectively making them a relic (which they kinda always were).

For many (most?) uses of UA sniffing today, a better tool for the job would be to use feature detection.

Accessibility Events | CSS-Tricks

If you’re using Apple’s VoiceOver, both your phone and your computer will broadcast your assumed disability to the entire internet, unless and until you specifically tell it to stop.

Apple’s new feature a step towards digital apartheid - Axess Lab

I also discussed this accessibility events feature with my friend who is a screen reader user herself. She said it feels like it’s a first step towards a well-meant digital apartheid.

Detecting text in an image on the web in real-time - Tales of a Developer Advocate by Paul Kinlan

The text detection API is still in its experimental stage, but it opens up a lot of really interesting possibilities for the web: assistive technology to read out text, archiving tools for digitising text …it’s all part of the nascent shape detection API.

Feature.js

A lightweight alternative to Modernizr. It doesn’t add classes to your markup so it’s up to what you do with the results of any test.

It’s perfect for cutting the mustard on a case-by-case basis.

Cutting the Mustard Revisited — sixtwothree.org

Jason revisits some cutting-the-mustard techniques, as started by the BBC and refined by Jake. This kind of feature-testing is indispensable for progressive enhancement.

Personally though, I’m still uncomfortable with the assumptions baked into equating particular features with particular browsers …maybe I’ve known PPK too long.

I much prefer to cut the mustard on a case-by-case basis by feature testing the actual APIs I’m about to use in a script. I realise that might be harder to scale, and it’s more verbose, but it’s the only way to be absolutely sure.

The Mobile Web should just work for everyone - IEBlog

One more reason why you should never sniff user-agent strings: Internet Explorer is going to lie some more. Can’t really blame them though—if developers didn’t insist on making spurious conclusions based on information in the user-agent string, then browsers wouldn’t have to lie.

Oh, and Internet Explorer is going to parse -webkit prefixed styles. Again, if developers hadn’t abused vendor prefixes, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

isMobileDevice and the death of innocence

A nice bit of sleuthing to trace the provenance of one piece of ill-advised user-agent sniffing JavaScript code.

Good luck getting that script updated for the thousands of sites and applications, you say to yourself, where it’s laying dormant just waiting to send devices the wrong content based on a UA substring.

Brett Jankord – Active development on Categorizr has come to an end

I think it’s a bit of a shame that Brett is canning his mobile-first device-detection library, but I totally understand (and agree with) his reasons.

There is a consensual hallucination in the market, that we can silo devices into set categories like mobile, tablet, and desktop, yet the reality is drawing these lines in the sand is not an easy task.

gaia/build/ua-override-prefs.js at master · mozilla-b2g/gaia · GitHub

And this is why user-agent sniffing not a future-friendly technique. A new mobile browser comes along, and it has to spoof a fake UA string to all of these sites.

It’s a Red Queen arms race.

Responsive typography demo

This is a pretty wacky experiment in altering font size based on the user’s distance from the screen (allow the page to access your camera and enable the “realtime” option for some real fun). I don’t know how much real-world application this has, but it’s a cute’n’fun exercise.

Link tags: detection

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