Web Witch Weekly: Issue 15

Making color palettes with color-mix(), LLM hallucinated security reports in open source, how browser features get built and more!

December 10, 2024

Welcome to issue 15 of Web Witch Weekly! Despite myself having a busy week, I can feel things slowing down at work as people prepare to take time off the rest of the year.

On the Web, About the Web

A new era of slop security reports for open source
What maintainers can do to try and combat an uptick in spammy and seemingly LLM hallucinated security issues being opened in open source projects.

How some of the world's most brilliant computer scientists got password policies so wrong
A look into how we ended up in password hell with all these rules based on a bad hunch and no way to test it.

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike...
Léonie shares adventures in asking ChatGPT for an accessible button.

Ship It Anyway
Cassidy encourages us to ship the thing we want to, even if someone else has already done something similar.

You can pay for that: How web browser features get built
I wrote about all the different ways that browser features/APIs/bugs can be funded, prioritized and built. And it’s not just down to browser vendors…

🔊 Hey, Listen!

Igalia Chats: Magic Piles of Money featuring Robin Bender Ginn
Discussing ecosystem health with the executive director of the OpenJS Foundation.

ShopTalk 644: Mouthblogging HTML in 2025
Dave & Chris talk about all things HTML in this episode.

Tutorials & Tools

Swap between black and white text based on background color
Use CSS relative colors and calc to adjust the text color depending on the lightness of the background in the LCH color space.

Quick and Dirty Colour Palettes using color-mix()
Stuart gives us a nice and quick overview of color-mix and how to use it to make a quick color palette with tints and shades.

Book Highlight of the Week

Lead Developer Career Guide

Want to advance your career as a developer? “Lead Developer Career Guide” will give you the foundation and skills to help you transition from IC to Lead. It takes more than code to make that jump and author Shelley Benhoff has the expertise and experience to lead you through it.

Outside the Web

Cracking the Color Code of Ancient Mesoamerican Art
A short but interesting article about the use of color in Mesoamerican history, how pigment was made and an exhibition exploring these things.

The Booze-Soaked Lives of Wild Animals
Ethanol consumption in nature is much more common than we realized and may not be accidental.

UnitedHealthcare is Now Medicare for All
Dripping with sarcasm but also informative for those unfamiliar with how big the business of healthcare is in the US.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

The Web Witch (Stephanie)

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