This checkin to GC3H1WG Good'fell'as reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
A quick and damp scramble from the footpath above brought my right to the cache. SL, TFTC. Container seal has perished and logbook pretty wet; signable, but only barely.
This checkin to GC2BJTQ Noah's Cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Came out for a walk with my Ruth and the kids. While Ruth sat on a rock and the kids went with their uncle up to explore a small cave above, I broke from the path to find this cache. QEF in the second host I looked at.
Took travel bug to move along, signed log, then went to retrieve the kids. TFTC.
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I’ve been going by the name Dan Q for almost 19 years… so like two-thirds of my adult life. I haven’t even needed to show a deed poll to anybody in over a decade1
But just sometimes, somebody asks2 “Yeah, but what does your birth certificate say?”
It didn’t used to say “Dan Q”, but nowadays… yes, that’s exactly what my birth certificate says.
Y’see, I was born in Scotland, and Scottish law – in contrast to the law of England & Wales4 – permits a change of name to recorded retroactively for folks whose births (or adoptions) were registered there.
And so, after considering it for a few months, I filled out an application form, wrote an explanatory letter to help the recipient understand that yes, I’d already changed my name but was just looking for modify a piece of documentation, and within a few weeks I was holding an updated birth certificate. It was pretty easy.
I flip-flopped on the decision for a while. Not only is it a functionally-pointless gesture – there’s no doubt what my name is! – but I was also concerned about what it implies.
Am I trying to deny that I ever went by a different name? Am I trying to disassociate myself from my birth family? (No, and no, obviously.)
But it “feels right”. And as a bonus: I now know my way around yet another way for (some) Brits to change their names. Thanks to my work at FreeDeedPoll.org.uk I get an increasing amount of email from people looking for help with their name changes, and now I’ve got first-hand experience of an additional process that might be a good choice for some people, some of the time5.
1 By the time you’ve got your passport, driving license, bank account, bills etc. in your name, there’s really no need to be able to prove that you changed it. What it is is more-important anyway.
2 Usually with the same judgemental tone of somebody who insists that one’s “real” name is the one assigned closest to birth.
3 If you’re zooming in on the details on that birth certificate and thinking “Hang on, he told me he was an Aquarius but this date would make him a Capricon?”, then I’ve got news for you about that too.
4 Pedants might like to enjoy using the comments to point out the minority of circumstances under which a birth certificate can be modified retroactively – potentially including name changes – under English law.
5 I maintain that a free, home-made deed poll is the easiest and cheapest way to change your name, as a British citizen, and that’s exactly what FreeDeedPoll.org.uk helps people produce… and since its relaunch it does its processing entirely in-browser, which is totally badass from both a hosting and a user privacy perspective.
Modern CSS is freakin’ amazing. Widespread support for nesting, variables, :has, and :not has unlocked so much potential. But I don’t yet see it used widely
enough.
Suppose I have a form where I’m expecting, but not requiring, a user to choose an option from each of several drop-downs. I want to make it more visually-obvious which drop-downs haven’t yet had an option selected. Something like this:
<select name="guess[69427976b65e3]"> <option></option> <option value="1">First answer</option> <option value="2">Second answer</option> <option value="3">Third answer</option> </select>
Suppose I want to style that <select> when the first, default, “empty” option is selected.
That could be as simple as this:
select:has(option:not([value]):checked) { outline: 6px dotted red; }
What that’s saying is:
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube<select>
<option>
<option> does not have a value="..."
<option> is currently selected
Or in short: if the default option is selected, highlight it so the user knows they haven’t chosen a value yet. Sweet!
I can’t understate how valuable it is that we can do this in CSS, nowadays. Compared to doing it in JavaScript… CSS gives better performance and reliability and is much easier to implement in a progressively-enhanced manner.
Here’s another example, this time using a fun “dress-up Dan” feature I from a redesign of my blog theme that I’m hoping to launch in the New Year:
Every single bit of interactivity shown in the video above… from the “waving” Dan to the popup menu to the emoji-styled checkboxes to the changes to t-shirt and hair colours… is implemented in CSS.
The underlying HTML is all semantic, e.g. the drop-down menu is a <details>/<summary> pair (with thanks to Eevee for
the inspiration); its contents are checkbox and radiobutton <input>es; the images are SVGs that use CSS variables (another killer feature these years!) to specify
colours (among other things), and virtually everything else… is CSS.
Consider this:
:root { /* Default values for Dan's t-shirt, hair, and beard colours used throughout the site: */ --dan-tshirt: #c3d4d7; --dan-hair: #3b6f8f; --dan-beard: #896a51; /* ...more variables... */ } /* When the page contains a "checked" checkbox, update some variables: */ :root:has(#dan-tshirt-color-white:checked) { --dan-tshirt: #c3d4d7; } :root:has(#dan-tshirt-color-purple:checked) { --dan-tshirt: #7429a8; } /* ... */ :root:has(#dan-hair-color-natural:checked) { --dan-hair: #896a51; } :root:has(#dan-hair-color-blue:checked) { --dan-hair: #3b6f8f; } /* When "dye beard" is checked, copy the hair colour: */ :root:has(#dan-dye-beard-toggle:checked) { --dan-beard: var(--dan-hair); }
:root CSS variables, based on the status of user-controlled elements like checkboxes within the document, unlocks amazing options for interactivity. It
also works in smaller scopes like HTML Web Components, of course, for encapsulated functionality.
If you’re still using JavaScript for things like this, perhaps it’s time you looked at how much CSS has grown up this last decade or so. CSS gives you performance benefits, less fragility, and makes it easier for you to meet your accessibility and usability goals.
You can still enrich what you create with JavaScript if you like (I’ve got a few lines of JS that save those checkbox states to localStorage so they persist
through page loads, for example).
But a CSS-based approach moves more of your functionality from the “nice to have” to “core” column. And that’s something we can all get behind, right?
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Waiting for the ideal time to finally do that thing you’ve been procrastinating on? Greg’s clever new micro-site will help you decide the perfect time to do it (and no, it doesn’t necessarily just say “now!”).
I’m not sure which of our children was last in this bath, but the configuration in which they’ve left their toys makes me feel as though I’m the subject of some kind of waterfowl-related shunning.
Perhaps they finally got wind or my heretical opinions on the God of Ducks (may he throw us bread) and they’ve collectively decided to disassociate from me?
A few pockets of the morning’s freezing fog still cling to the hedgerows as the dog and I set out on a chilly West Oxfordshire morning walk.
Obviously I wasn’t planning on going to the US anytime soon, but if I did… they might struggle with my visa application when I put every “email address I’ve used for the last 10 years” on, because I actively use a variety of catch-all domains/subdomains.
I’ve probably missed some addresses (e.g. to which I’ve only ever received spam that’s since been deleted), but a conservative estimate of the number of personal email addresses which I’ve sent mail from or to would be… 7,669 email addresses. 🤣
Rather I show you than tell you? Here’s a demo page.
Right now, my blog uses a CSS-based approach using anchors and the <dialog> element to make “lightbox” images work, but I
plan to replace this soon with a similar approach that uses the <details> and
<summary> elements to provide a more semantically-sound and accessible approach1.
An additional thing I wanted to implement – again, for the next version of my blog’s theme – was an “alt text viewer”. Mastodon has one, and it’s excellent2. Mastodon’s viewer requires JavaScript, but I was inspired when I saw James come up with a CSS-based version that used a re-styled checkbox.
But I wanted to do one better. Displaying alt text, too, seems like an example of what would semantically be best-represented by a
<details>/<summary> pair.
My first attempt tried to put the alt-text widget inside the <summary> of the original image, but that’s an accessibility no-no, so instead I
wrap both <details> blocks (the lightbox, and the alt-text revealer) inside a container and then reposition the latter over the former.
The rest is all the same kinds of tricks I demonstrated previously, to ensure that you can click in-and-out of both in an intuitive way and that keyboard navigation works as you’d
expect.
I can’t use it on my blog yet (because if I do, it’ll probably break horribly when I add the functionality to my entire theme, later!), but I’ve put together a demonstration page that showcases the technique, plus a GitHub repo with all of the code (which is all public domain/unlicensed). Go have a play and tell me what you think!
1 As a secondary goal, using <details>/<summary>
means that it’ll behave better when CSS is disabled or unavailable, which’ll make it easier to celebrate Naked CSS Day!
2 Why would I, a sighted person, need an alt text viewer, you ask? All kinds of reasons. Good alt text is for everybody, and can help by providing context, e.g. “explaining” the joke or identifying the probably-well-known-but-I-didn’t-recognise-them subject of a photo. Here’s some more reasons.
3 If you love owls and you love accessibility, this is the kind of example you should give a hoot about.
Since I relaunched freedeedpoll.org.uk three months ago (with new features) and made an explanatory demo video, the volume and kinds of questions I’ve been emailed has… become larger and more diverse.
I still get questions about childrens’ names and citizenship and gender recognition certificates and things.
But now I also get questions like “how do I print multiple copies of the PDF?” and “why does my homemade deed poll not have a serial number?” 😂
Not sure I’m a fan of these new ultra-minimalist Christmas trees.
For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.
This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, because it’s the kind of scope-creep that my “uninterested-in-sports-news” brain couldn’t conceive that anybody would want! But I got there in the end.
If anybody’s looking for their fill of “BBC News Feeds… But Better!”, give it a look.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Woodcraft Folk stands in solidarity with every trans child, young person and volunteer who faces exclusion from Girlguiding UK following the announcement on Trans inclusion.
We recognise that Girlguiding UK have taken this decision in the context of intense political pressure and legal uncertainty. However, this does not make the outcome acceptable. Young people should never bear the consequences of political disputes. All children and young people deserve respect, safety and inclusion in their youth organisations.
…
Excellent statement from Woodcraft Folk.
I was saddened to hear the news that Girlguiding will no longer accept trans girls as members. It seems to me that it would have been perfectly reasonable for them to change their articles in response to the Supreme Court silliness: instead of declaring themselves as being for the benefit of “girls and women” they could have become for the benefit of “girls, women, trans girls, and trans women”.
Yes, obviously it’s horrible that the Supreme Court’s othering decision means that people have to spell out that “by women, we mean all women, including trans women”. But that’s a thing that a charity can do. It’s perfectly reasonable for a charity to be for the benefit of multiple groups.
But no, they took the easy option.
So it’s great to see youth-supporting organisations like Woodcraft Folk make a statement like this that trans kids continue to be welcome with them. Okay, this was easier for them than for Girlguiding because Woodcraft’s articles didn’t contain any gendered language in the first place. And it’s fine that Girlguiding’s does use gendered language – it’s okay for charities to be gender-specific! – but it’s a shame that they didn’t… pardon the pun… have the balls to stand up for what’s right for all women and girls, in spite of the UK’s growing transphobia. Ugh.
Anyway: nice work, Woodcraft Folk.
We got our dog a Christmas jumper.
My favourite thing about it is that its coat hanger contains instructions for use:
“Please insert dog” 🤣
I find a lot of these “this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases” emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They’re a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying “No, please help protect my brand identity, I’ll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!”
But I’ve always wondered – what happens if you reply and say “Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains.” I’d know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)… but they can’t admit that they know that.
Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)
