#dev 2026-05-22

2026-05-22 UTC
TwinAdam, [tw2113] and troojg joined the channel
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slashbark aaronpk[d] hi aaron! i submitted my indieauth registration via email about a week ago, would appreciate you letting me know ^^ thanks
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btrem Anyone care to do a code check? https://pastes.io/WWeeerD0
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btrem The goal is to get the `p-name` of a web page that has one and only one mf-marked up item.
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btrem It does not check that the type is `h-entry`. Might be worth thinking about.
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[tantek] going down the emoji markup rabbithole a bit further, and finding more things I can improve
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[tantek] emoji << [https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H86 W3C WCAG 2.2: Providing text alternatives for emojis, emoticons, ASCII art, and leetspeak]
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Loqi ok, I added "[https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H86 W3C WCAG 2.2: Providing text alternatives for emojis, emoticons, ASCII art, and leetspeak]" to the "See Also" section of /emoji https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=110995&oldid=110961
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[tantek] now to go fix my home page accordingly
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gRegor ooh, nice
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gRegor Can't say I ever expected to see "leet" in a W3 doc haha
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gRegor I just used an emoji in my last post, will also update
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[tantek] this has been a good week for emoji deep-diving, and really appreciate everyone who has participated in that conversation
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gRegor Are the alternatives equally valid or is span.aria-label method preferred? The tooltip that would appear on the abbr seems nice, but abbr doesn't quite seem semantically correct?
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gRegor I need to experiment more with screenreaders. I'm on Windows 11 now and I think it has one built in.
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[morgan] Just one random fact, custom HTML element names currently can include a lot of emoji range of unicode. Really dont know how that would affect markup and assistive tech, but it can be done
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gRegor `<😮>whoa</😮>`
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[morgan] That would be invalid as it has a single character, but `<a-😮>whoa</a-😮>` would work for example
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[snarfed] jeffgoldblumjurassicpark.gif
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gRegor lol
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gRegor emojis, uhh... find a way :D
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[tantek] gRegor, I did some spot searches re the abbr technique and it seems the sentiment is mostly negative so I'm not using it
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[tantek] one exception, I did just markup a pilcrow with abbr like this: `Appendix A <abbr title="paragraph">¶</abbr> 4`
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[tantek] though I believe that's not technically an emoji and is more extended text. and abbrs are supposed to be for text
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[snarfed] gRegor hah i was thinking more, "so busy trying to figure out if we could, we didn't stop to ask if we should"
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[snarfed] only re emoji in elem names
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gRegor haha true true
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[morgan] The common keyboard character for dollar sign is not allowable in custom element names, but I believe a Unicode point for a dollar sign is
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[morgan] I found that interesting
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[tantek] these feel like footguns, not particularly helpful (and potentially harmful) my 2¢ 😉
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[morgan] I think all the docs like don't recommend doing this it's just it remains for potentially compatibility or extension capacity, it's just intriguing! But yeah screen readers are important to consider when it comes to reading the elements
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[snarfed] (shh tantek it's friday)
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gRegor Welp, Windows Narrator didn't do great. It reads the aria label, then "Image", then the name of the emoji
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[morgan] Like if I had to generate from my own brain a reason for why it's possible but not advisable - it's because they want to allow a whole Unicode set of some kind to work with the standard? Like they have different considerations to consider when making the thing. Surely no one advises `<😁😁😁-☕>` in practice and definitely not around users
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btrem Tangentially related to accessibility of emojis: I tried using svg and various aria thingies to achieve accessible wordle tiles. (And spent a fair amount of time on the svgs, all for nought. Read on.) In the end, I abandoned it all and went with <span> wrapped around the tile, like so: `<span role="img" aria-label="right">🟩</span>`.
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btrem N.B. aria-label truncated here for readability.
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gRegor yeah, that's the WCAG recommendation we updated the wiki with today
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gRegor have you tried with a screenreader? How well does it work on your OS?
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btrem No. I have limited screen reader tools. I think Ubuntu has some sort of screen reader, but I haven't looked to far into it. :-/
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[morgan] I have to test with voiceover on Mac sometimes I'd say I'm ok at it
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[tantek] gRegor that welp result was with abbr right?
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gRegor No, span.aria-label
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[tantek] https://chat-uploads.indieweb.org/files/2026/05/dev-20260522-193759-image_from_ios.jpg
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gRegor I agree with you, abbr doesn't seem ideal so didn't try it. I can, but I expect the same result from Narrator
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[tantek] lol Slack posting an image instead of an emoji while we're chatting about emoji
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gRegor Indeed, what on earth XD
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[tantek] gRegor that's pretty bad since that WCAG markup advice has been there since WCAG 2.0
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btrem gRegor: do you mean <span aria-label>? (Surely not <span class="aria-label">!)
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gRegor yes, lol
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btrem Any recommendations for an node html parser? There are a *lot* of options. I'm looking at jsdom and node-html-parser. But happy to consider other tools if you think I should.
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gRegor just being lazy in my typing haha
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btrem Woops, sorry, meant to ask that after this discussion. Sorry.
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gRegor looks for a way to submit Windows Narrator bugs
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gRegor It's the emoji end of first paragraph under the first video here: https://gregorlove.com/2026/05/the-kids-are-alright/
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[morgan] I just meant to share a fun thought also but definitely defer to the actual testing and problem solving here. More awareness the better hat tip to you all trying and learning
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gRegor If anyone else would like to try with a screenreader, I'm curious
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[morgan] Will do after work if it's still of interest 😁
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[morgan] JAWS is not free, NVDA is excellent but a little different, and VoiceOver is like well it's a little brittle but it's a very common segment
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[morgan] Right now I just have VoiceOver to test with
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btrem What I meant to say before, instead of my node question: TBH, I am sort of miffed at jumping through accessibility hoops. I feel like if I mark up my document honestly, it should be up to tools to do something useful with them.
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btrem Like the "jump to content" or "skip navigation" links that became fashionable some time ago. I never liked it. If there's a user-driven need to skip navigation, and I have a <nav> element, then isn't it better for the user-agent to provide that functionality? They'll almost certain do a better job than any javascript I throw at the problem.
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[morgan] Very valid point, and ways to program and customize the tools in practice is how a lot of people with accessibility needs get by, I guess if I had to suggest a thought about the miffed aspect is that the web doesn't exist in a vacuum, the screen reader tech has it's own pressures
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[tantek] yes a lot of the older a11y advice was workarounds for either the lack of modern markup like <nav>, or the lack of supporting implementations
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[tantek] it's a reasonable frustration
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[morgan] I think I talk about skip links in the right way where on my blog I suggest if your nav has few items it might be better just as a list of links
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[morgan] But there are some pages with 30+ items in a nav
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[tantek] in general I think you're fine following minimal valid semantic markup, because yes the presence of that on the web also adds more pressure to reader to support it, especially when WCAG says how to do so
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[artlung] Yes, [snarfed] it is Friday. https://codepen.io/artlung/full/GgNEwwE
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[tantek] [artlung] is that a 💩-post?
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[artlung] It's as close as I get to one
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gRegor haha [artlung]++
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Loqi [artlung] has 43 karma in this channel over the last year (241 in all channels)
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gRegor So far Narrator is getting a poor grade from me. abbr[title] doesn't read the title attribute, only the emoji name. span[aria-label] reads the label + "Image" + emoji name.
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[capjamesg] I thought I diplomatically segued us from that discussion earlier 😂
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[morgan] Im having a great Friday, my thoughts were a little off topic definitely defer to the actual dev stuff happening. But hey I'm down for some screen reader testing ! It takes some practice to speed it up I find also to a speed that many people use them
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[artlung] Alas, James.
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[capjamesg] In any case I have enjoyed following the emoji discussion.
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[capjamesg] It has me thinking that I should test my seasonal emoji script with a screen reader.
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[capjamesg] I add a title=“” attribute with a description of why the emoji is there on a given day.
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[capjamesg] I haven’t yet tested how a screen reader announces that.
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[capjamesg] Always nice to have a weekend project!
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[morgan] I find that when I've tested websites with screen readers with emojis there's a real difference in experience whether the emoji is used with intent like 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐ rating versus something ambient like a reaction somehow. I think I've seen the 5 star rating thing come up the most in my journeys in this area
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[morgan] "Star, Star, Star, Star, Star"
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[capjamesg] Oooh yeah ideally that would be read out as “five stars”
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[morgan] Indeed. At least not 5x "Icon of a Star" or "Star logo" or much less "star.png" which can happen in the wild sometimes
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[tantek] capjamesg I have add your subtle use of emoji (e.g. tea for yesterday) on your entry in the holidays page: https://indieweb.org/holiday_theme#capjamesg
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[capjamesg] [tantek]++
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Loqi [tantek] has 22 karma in this channel over the last year (135 in all channels)
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btrem [morgan] and [tantek]. I know, my markup doesn't exist in a vacuum. And I do make some efforts. But I also think whatever I come up may not work, and my testing toolbox is pretty limited.
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[morgan] Absolutely. some of the SRs are not cheap, testing is patchy, so many competing variables and interests.
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btrem Related note: I had a very pleasant surprise at work, specifically at a restaurant where I was bartender and also web admin. There was a regular who was blind. He sometimes held his phone to his ear while scrolling. One day, he did that just before ordering. I asked him what he was doing. He replied, "browsing your menu." He was *listening* to the menu!
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btrem It justified my decision to create an *html* menu, instead of doing the lazy thing that so many restaurants to, uploading a .pdf. Blech!
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[morgan] I have a great joy of working with a woman in leadership of a small non profit who has no vision, and just learning an incredible amount from them, and basically she affirms a lot of touchstones: websites basically work best, often have problems, better than an app, better than huge swathes of PDFs out there which are not usually made well completely
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[tantek] that's awesome btrem. HTMLmenu++
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Loqi HTMLmenu has 1 karma over the last year
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btrem It was an awesome moment. The karma really belongs to a web language that allows for the same markup to be displayed in a gui browser and read by whatever software he was using. So html++
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Loqi html has 2 karma in this channel over the last year (4 in all channels)
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btrem and posh++
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Loqi posh has 1 karma over the last year
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btrem (Not sure what you meant by "HTMLmenu." The markup I used was, IIRC, <dl> elements. Which, by the way, was why I asked hixie for a list item element for <dl>, to add microdata. I later abandoned microdata in favor of mf, but the argument is more or less the same.)
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[morgan] I sent a HTML page I made to my friend I mentioned and they said they were able to play 6 different `<audio>` tags to create a "cacophony" of sound that they enjoyed. All non visual from Firefox browser visiting my website
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[morgan] That was my highlight
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[tantek] I just meant a menu done in HTML
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[tantek] sometimes shorthands for karma purposes are not the clearest
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[tantek] capjamesg, did any of your work/experiments with displaying a license, markup, etc. make it to the /license page?
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[tantek] I will also note that the bottom of this post has a nice subtle licensing display and text: https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/
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[capjamesg] Not yet. I might write it up as a blog post first.
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btrem [tantek]: gotcha!
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btrem BTW, though I didn't mean to insert by query in the middle of the emoji/accessibility discussion, I'd still like to know if anyone has any recommendations for a node html parser. I'd be using it to find an <h1> or <title> element in pages that I fetch. For possible use in IndieNews submissions of bookmarks, if that matters.
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btrem ...insert my query...
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[capjamesg] The http://tante.cc example is a good one in terms of concision.
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[capjamesg] https://www.jvt.me/ has one that is a bit longer in the footer; “Post content and code snippets licensing is detailed on respective pages, otherwise default to https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0.html and https://spdx.org/licenses/Apache-2.0.html.”
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[morgan] @btrem I would suggest Cheerio
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[morgan] Based on past experiences, your described use case
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[tantek] capjamesg, yes to more license examples. I've cleaned up the /license page a little so hopefully it's easier/more obvious what/where to add things
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[capjamesg] [tantek]++
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btrem [morgan]++ thanks for recommendation. It uses jquery syntax, which I'd rather not relearn if I can help it. I'm going to try node-html-parser, which uses dom syntax, e.g., `.querySelector`. If it goes sideways, I'll try Cherrio.
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Loqi [morgan] has 7 karma in this channel over the last year (23 in all channels)
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[morgan] Just one thing I found revisiting docs, "Emoji and more Unicode in element and attribute names and namespace prefix (valid names match HTML parser)" is supported in major browsers except Safari
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[morgan] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/CustomElementRegistry/define#browser_compatibility
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[morgan] So basically the spec allows for emoji and more unicode, and several major browsers, but not Safari
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gRegor I just reviewed and merged two PRs on https://github.com/indieweb/mention-client-php Might be ready for a new release
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Loqi [preview] [indieweb] mention-client-php: Client library for sending webmention and pingback notifications
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gRegor Handful of older issues I have not reviewed, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/indieweb/mention-client-php/issues
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