A lot of us have a lot of reading to do during eternal Caturday.
A lot of us have a lot of reading to do during eternal Caturday.
Wherever you wake up, hoping you have a good eternal Caturday!
Thank you all who are protesting for a better eternal Caturday. Take care of one another and stay safe.
A little bit of meta-caturday-fun.
Zzzzz… zzzternal… Caturdzzzz…
Wheew all that preparation was exhausting I am gonna take a break now. Good eternal Caturdaying everyone.
“The first working draft of the CSS variables module was published around 2012, and CSS custom properties for cascading variables (as it was more accurately renamed) finally gained traction around 2017 with browser support parity.”
Am I doing eternal Caturday right??
So close to being ready. Eternal Caturday, here I come!
Hang on, eternal Caturday, I am almost ready to deal with you.
Just a few more personal tasks and I’ll be ready to face this week of eternal Caturday. Probably.
This post got me. Ordered! 😂
Thanks, Ryan! I see the same behavior on Firefox, but probably wasn’t clear explaining it (“start typing from somewhere in the middle”). I do use this when I’m on my full computer, and it helps!
Where I get really frustrated is on my iOS device, where I never seem to get autofill suggestions…
Great nod to aaronpk’s auto-http(s):// script! I try to make use of it in all web sign-in projects that I work on!
A lot to catch up on after a long weekend! Y’all are busy during eternal Caturday.
If you've ever seen your browser automatically fill in your shipping address, or seen your iPhone offer to scan a credit card on an e-commerce site, you're seeing Autofill in action.
Autofill has been part of the WHATWG HTML Standard for some years now. This 2016 write-up by Jason Grigsby gives a pretty good sense of what can be done with it.
The spec describes ways that an HTML <input> element can use the "autocomplete" attribute to hint to the browser that it should offer to fill it with specific Autofill data, if the browser has it and if Autofill is enabled. There's a long list of values related to names, addresses, phone numbers, dates, and more. Additionally, since users might have more than one of a thing, these can be scoped with values like "home", "work", etc. It's possible to further group addresses by "shipping" and "billing", and even to group larger chunks of forms by named sections.
An example might look like:
<input name="home-street-address" autocomplete="shipping home street-address">
Web sign-in is a very IndieWeb concept where you sign into websites using your personal web address, rather than an email address or username.
As with any repetitive tasks, typing my site’s URL into these login forms gets annoying. My main browser (Firefox) is pretty smart. Autocomplete kicks in after I type a few characters from my URL and it will offer to fill in URLs that I’ve typed before. However, since most URLs start with “https://“, autocomplete suggestions aren’t very useful until I’ve typed out 9 or more characters (or if I start typing from somewhere in the middle).
Helpfully, “url” is one of the many attributes in the WHATWG Autofill spec! It’s described like so:
Home page or other Web page corresponding to the company, person, address, or contact information in the other fields associated with this field
In theory, it should be possible for sites with Web Sign-in to improve this process with the help of the browser and Autofill. For example:
<input name="url" type="url" autocomplete="url">
Or more specifically, use your "home" (personal) URL:
<input name="url" type="url" autocomplete="home url">
It's my thinking that, with this in place, a browser should automatically suggest my URL without me typing anything at all!
I tried this out by setting up url autocomplete suggestions on two different apps with Web Sign-in. (Specifically, my personal instance of Aperture, and the IndieWeb webring).
I then tried signing in and out several times to both sites, using the same URL each time. Browsers tested include Firefox, Chromium, and iOS Safari, all with Autofill enabled.
I am sad to report that none of the tested browsers attempted to automatically fill in the URL value. The extra autocomplete attribute didn't break the default autocompletion, but I still see it suggest every URL it knows about rather than learning one.
I have had trouble finding documentation on how specific browsers implement Autofill. One note in Jason's 2016 article suggests that browsers may need multiple "hints" before it will decide that a particular input is part of a group which should be auto-filled.
Another hint comes from Chromium's settings for managing Autofill data. This is what the form looks like for adding a new address:
Notice a field that isn't there?
On Saturday my partner put on Broken Arrow (“Why?” “It’s on HBO Now and I don’t remember how it’s different from Face/Off”).
Me, around 15 minutes in: Oh yeah the park ranger! Gosh she is so familiar.
Me, around 40 minutes in: Argh, who is she, this is going to drive me crazy.
Me, around an hour in: OH. SHE’S PRINCESS DAISY FROM THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS MOVIE.
Later, watching Super Mario Bros. (film).
Me: I don’t know why they added a personal-assistant-slash-love-interest for Koopa.
Partner: She’s my favorite so far.
Me: What? Why?
Partner: She’s in Killing Eve!
Me: 😯
If you’d like to follow this thread yourself, some kind soul has uploaded the otherwise-apparently-unavailable-on-streaming-services SMB film to Vimeo.
Apple no
Happy Monday! Or Secret Sunday, if you are celebrating.
The classic is back! Still one of my favorite prints.
Rawr! A three-day weekend means a second chance at eternal Caturday!
Nothing like a rainy day in eternal Caturday.
Oh, were you planning on going somewhere? Eternal Caturday encourages you to reconsider.
“The smaller the amount of code, the lower the cognitive load you impose on them to envision all the moving parts and any potential side effects.”