As annoying as cookie banners are I like seeing them because they give me the choice to deny being tracked but also because I get to see all the vendors a company would have otherwise sold my data too. The longer the list the further I tend to stay away from site unless absolutely necessary. The linked write-up on Bite Code! is a neat summary on why the banners don't have to be as bothersome as they typically are especially because we could have had a standard Do Not Track HTTP header!

There has been for years a proposal for a standard, designed in 2009 (!), still available in all the popular web browsers (except safari) that can make for a seamless experience: the DNT header.

Almost no website have implemented it, because companies WANT to nag you, hopping to trick you into being tracked. They know nobody would click yes on those settings.

So now it's deprecated.

Companies are making your life hard by choice. They got told by the EU they could not be secret abusers anymore, so now they decided to be irritating on top.

I was not aware of how much of an accessibility issue having only a dark colour scheme posed. I know there are preferences but seeing the replies on Nai's Mastodon post about the difficulty of reading white text on a dark background for some with astigmatism was surprising.

But there are some people (like me) who may be visually impaired. Astigmatism, for example, can make reading text that is white on dark a real PITA. An effect known as "halation" occurs, where each letter behaves as if it were a flashlight, gaining its own halo of light and making all text read more blurry than normal.

No matter how good your glasses are, astigmatism still causes you to see a little blurry—it's something you get used to. But this damn effect makes all the text read as if you don't have your glasses on, or even worse, leading to much more tired eyes or even pain.

Linked in the thread is a Vice article in which the author also shares similar difficulty reading dark colour schemes with astigmatism but also why dark backgrounds work for others.

My own very-astigmatic eyes are exhausted by dark mode, but for many others, dark themes are an accessibility benefit. White backgrounds emphasize floaters, those tiny spots of fibers that appear in some people’s vision. People with disorders like photophobia or keratoconus, conditions that cause high sensitivity to light, might read more easily with dark themes.

CSS Grids as simple as they are to design can get pretty complicated. Josh W Comeau's interactive guide to CSS contains sections that build on each other with examples and animations to visualise the concept.

SVG is an interesting and versatile text-based image format. Now I know it's not the Christmas season, but Hunor Márton Borbély has put together an advent calendar for SVG examples, and I've only now started working through them. It's very interactive and informative. I know I'll definitely be using these examples as references in the future.