Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social)

Apparently 86% of websites have “Low Contrast Text”, making it the most common #accessibility issue (even more than missing alt text). I’m quite surprised by this, as I thought most websites still have white background with black type. Maybe it’s a font size thing in many cases…Anybody have more info on this issue? https://accessibility.day/

@aardrian I meant...er, *more information*. The links you provide are helpful, yes, but don't answer my question: why are 86% of pages failing the 'low contrast text' test? Do you know?

@luke thankfully my website has no text contrast issues. I did discover, however, that there is an alert for "Redundant alternative text", which I didn't even know was a thing. Seems a bit odd to recommend no alt text, but I will bear it in mind going forward. #accessibility

I can’t quite get my head around this “no, actually you don’t always need alt text” thing. Seems to go against everything a certain type of Mastodon user yells at other Mastodon users about. Do they even know about this rule?! https://dewp.space/@matze/114513124884939890

Someone sent me their new website today, which at first glance looked like a Flash site — highly interactive, very snazzy. Turns out the site was built using Readymag (https://readymag.com/), which seems to be a modern take on Flash. The Readymag site itself uses a heck of a lot of JavaScript, and its homepage is over 12MB before first scroll. It's marketed as a "no code" site builder. I will look more into it...but it did strike me that *of course* the modern equivalent of Flash is JS-based.

20 years ago…how time flies. Also, I was Bloglines’ biggest fan. https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114480068009241767

@Gargron I think he was saying that, in enterprises at least, often it was the product manager that defined the business logic, and once that was done it would be passed to the developers to implement. And from my time (long ago, admittedly) working in IT departments, that was mostly how it worked. But now that AI can generate code, developers are being tasked more with business logic and architecture. YMMV I suppose, but that’s a trend a senior Field CTO is observing.

One trend I thought was notable from the discussion: developers are now acting more like architects, says Brian Wald from GitLab. In the AI era, devs are spending more time on upfront design, defining business logic, and creating high-context environments to guide AI-generated code. “So you become kind of the orchestrators of the code, versus the writers of the code,” he told me.

I realize there's a lot of AI-skepticism on Mastodon, but I think it's important to track how AI is being used more widely. So I spoke to GitLab's head of Field CTOs Brian Wald about how enterprises are implementing AI technology. Among other things, we discussed whether IT departments allow #VibeCoding, what types of AI #agents enterprises are building, how the #developer role is shifting to an architect-type role, and GitLab's own AI strategy. https://thenewstack.io/the-field-cto-view-ai-vibe-coding-and-developer-skillsets/

After a travel hiatus, Cybercultural is back with another sack of online memories from the 1990s -> Online music retail was thriving by 1996, thanks to sites like Music Boulevard and CDnow. But music downloads and streaming was more of a challenge — as David Bowie discovered in September 1996. https://cybercultural.com/p/online-music-distribution-1996/ #InternetHistory #OnlineMusic #1990s #BowieForever

While I was writing my Web 2.0 memoir, I realised that I didn’t have nearly enough screenshots from that era. The ones I did have were usually done with Skitch. I wish I’d used it more though! https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114248027432834035

@jdp23 I think the best thing about the fediverse is that YOU (the user) can choose which version of the fedi you want to live in. If you don’t want Meta, then choose an instance that blocks them out (or self-host). If you don’t want people searching your content, you can shut that off in your settings. If you don’t want “normies” here, then you can close the doors via your instance. What annoys me is people who want to make *their* version of the fedi the default.

Ah, the glory days of Plain Blue Links. Back when we knew how to link to each other. And of course, @davew improved that situation even more by building blogging tools and RSS. https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114205823193887379

I've moved my Mastodon account that posts screenshots of old websites to a new handle: @classicweb. It's a manually curated bot that posts memorable websites from the past, like this strange 2006 site that appeared out of nowhere (was it microblogging, was it a new form of txting? Nobody knew at that point...)
https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114201528286279570

Sometimes I think the fediverse is actually saving the Web. I don’t know about you, but I want the web to always be a HUMAN network. I’ll be producing my “pretty .html static pages” for many years to come, for human readers not LLMs. I get why it makes sense for software documentation to be 99% for AI, as Karpathy says, but it’s his “Repeat for everything” that I find incredibly obnoxious. Fortunately that kind of nonsense is mainly on X. I feel like the fediverse is human-first and web-first.

Three Hollywood movies were released in 1995 with internet themes: the Keanu Reeves cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic (with an accompanying website), The Net with Sandra Bullock, and Hackers. As well as these 3 films, I look back at William Gibson's now extinct mid-90s website, "William Gibson’s Yardshow", and the equally lost to time Johnny Mnemonic net.hunt, an online scavenger hunt. https://cybercultural.com/p/cyberspace-movies-1995/ #InternetHistory #90smovies

Some great points here about email newsletters — including that email open stats are starting to become unreliable due to AI and big tech like Apple screwing around with the inbox (no, email is not immune to enshittification!). All this is part of why I moved away from calling my site Cybercultural a "newsletter". I'm not exactly sure how to define Cybercultural currently, but it will involve fediverse as a community-driver going forward. #IndieWeb #WebLife2025

ref: https://www.therebooting.com/the-newsletter-bubble/

@evan I think you should name this “me-centralisation” (kind of a pun on re-centralisation)

“What makes me hopeful is that when you find a way to look at how people are really using the web, a lot of it still feels like the early internet. It's expression, communication, connection. Fundamentally, it's a place where regular people share themselves and do wonderful things." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250306-inside-youtubes-hidden-world-of-forgotten-videos

A look back at GeoCities in 1995 (30 years ago!), including a couple of rare screenshots of the GeoCities website from 1995 — when it was still known as Beverly Hills Internet. https://cybercultural.com/p/geocities-1995/ #InternetHistory #GeoCities (special thanks to @GIFmodel for the knowledge and @andrewjbtw for the 1995 BHI images)