With the first extension, an attacker who triggers a misissuance would compromise it for a few days or hours months.

typo (emphasis mine)

Regarding ACME clients that support not before/notAfter, Posh-ACME also supports this via the LifetimeDays parameter.
poshac.me/docs/latest/Function…

I also wasn’t aware ZeroSSL had added support on the server side. So thanks for that.

my rationale for using basic security measures as a filter is that i have to efficiently narrow down millions of domains to something I can manually check, and I might as well pick something positive.

after the “good security” filter, I’ll isolate domains with a main and h1 tag with no trackers in a “good page content” filter. Then I’ll figure out how to narrow it down further before cursory accessibility reviews and reading what people post in the Tor Browser.

Partway through, I decided to start filtering out Nextcloud and Searx(Ng) instances. I was already filtering out Masto instances and some others. I ran a second filter to check for the existence of hyperlinks on the page to avoid dead-ends, and to ensure they don’t block Tor.

I filtered a subset of duplicates and handled a subset of redirects. I’m down to around 1.1k domains, around 350 of which are the ones that qualified from Tranco’s top 2.6M domains. Many more are from the HSTS Preload list and Internet.nl Hall of Fame. Around a couple dozen more are uniquely from my browsing history, site outlinks, old chatrooms, web directories, and other more obscure locations.

I can manually pare this down over a couple weeks but that’s too much work. Need to figure out the right set of additional filters. Maybe a “points system” for privacy, security, and accessibility features and then taking the top 250 domains with the most points.

@timbray Right now the filter is TLSv1.3, has a strict content-security policy header (with the exception of allowing unsafe-inline styles), has no common tracking third-parties in the CSP, allows Tor. Then it needs a main, h1, a, and meta viewport element.

I’ll then add a points system to cut it in 1/3 and manually review a few domains per day.

Or I could run a subset of Axe-Core on every page and let my fans spin up.

Axe-Core is one of the only page-content checkers out there that doesn’t have a ton of false positives. Even the Nu HTML checker (often incorrectly referred to as the HTML5 Validator; HTML5 can’t be validated) has a ton of them. But some of Axe’s errors, like dupe link names, are way too trivial compared to easy-to-spot manual-only checks like “this h1 is used for the site name but it should be used for the page title”.

@khm its existence hearkens back to the “standard” page layout most settled on early in the Web’s history: a header, a main, maybe a couple aside elements on the side, and a footer. A “skip to content” link, if it exists, should typically skip to the first non-decorative thing in main.

Viewing your post on the remote instance, I imagine that main may begin just before your profile banner.

my activitypub software (snac2) does not use main. I'm willing to open a pull request to fix this if I can grasp the intent properly...

one main tag for the feed body, with each post wrapped in article tags?

I ran an aggressive filter on the sites, but scrapped it because I had already seen too many of the personal sites that passed.

that filter mandated multiple of the following:

• CAA record paired with DNSSEC
• OCSP Stapling
• COEP + COOP headers
• No third party content in the CSP
• An onion-location header.

and all of the following:

• Not enabling the insecure XSS Auditor with the X-XSS-Protection. Either leaving out the header or explicitly disabling it.
• Disabling MIME sniffing with X-Content-Type-Options.

Instead I’ll just manually comb through 100-200 domains a day in the Tor Browser to trim my way down to 500-600 sites or so, then figure out how to proceed. I’ll throw out dead ends, login pages, cryptocurrency, very corporate pages, pages for large organizations without much interesting reading material, LLM-related pages, and anything that doesn’t work in the Tor Browser’s “safest” mode (no media, JS, or a bunch of other features).

When I’m down to a few hundred I’ll probably run a mini version of Axe, decide on an actual points system, and spend more than a few seconds on each site looking for original writing, projects, and/or art and reviewing accessibility.

I should document how I do these incomplete-but-helpful “lightning audits” more thoroughly. After looking at a hundred sites the process has become automatic.

biggest things I look for in an automated audit like Axe are skipped heading levels, missing landmarks (main is big one), and missing alt attributes (mainly on non-decorative images, though decorative images should also have an empty alt).

with inspect element i also look for some semblance of page structure. is it all div soup or is there a header, nav, main, and footer when applicable?

I open the site in a regular browser profile and in my personal profile with an adblocker and forced colors mode, and make sure that tabbing around works in both with focus indicators.

Automated contrast checks are good but also not terribly nuanced. A more nuanced check like APCA with awareness of font size, the type of element (decoration? spot element like a superscript? fluent text?), font weight, etc. is what we should use but that takes time. For a lightning audits i just eyeball it and flag it if the contrast seems very obviously bad.

I used to think that contrast was only talked about so much only because violations were common and it was easy to spot, not because it was one of the most important issues.

Then I started using a shitty dim screen at night with screen gamma adjustment and extra-strong nighttime orange-tinted blue-blocking computer glasses and it got personal.

I don’t think everything should be perfect under such extreme conditions; your visited links and unvisited links appear to have the same hue with a low-contrast night-optimized display. but I should be able to read a paragraph of text, and see the beginnings and ends of links.

almost done checking the ten millionth domain lmao

i narrowed 5m domains to around 300. i’m hoping my quality filters will give me 500 sites to work with. then I can start being ✨subjective✨ and narrow it down to 200-300 interesting ones for a directory, plus a hall of fame containing maybe 25 sites.

Some of the most common #accessibility issues I see in the shortlist of 300-400 sites (filtered from 10 million):

• Links only distinguishable through a hue change. I consider links discernible through page structure (e.g. simple navbar links) exempt, but for in-text links we need to see the beginnings and ends of their interactive regions. Underlines work; outlines are another approach I’ve seen.
• No landmarks, or stuff outside landmarks. Everything should be in a landmark: header, main, section, footer, and/or aside are what you typically want on the top-level, directly under body. main is the most important.
• Misuse of or missing headings. Your page needs one (yes, one) h1 that titles the page, not your entire website. Don’t skip heading levels just to get smaller text. Don’t use headings for stylized text. A lower heading following a higher heading looks like a subtopic of the higher heading, not its own thing.
• Contrast. I recommend the APCA contrast tool. Don’t lose sleep over the occasional superscript having barely sub-optimal contrast; focus on bigger issues if you’re 99% perceptible. Often, background images are the culprit; remember that users override foreground and background colors and may use a different viewport that results in text in front of a lighter/darker part of the background image. Contrast issues with images are nearly impossible to automatically detect with popular tools.
• Focus indicators that are invisible or barely-visible, or rely solely on hue changes.
• Fancy bespoke hidden/toggle-able menus whose hidden items are still accessible via keyboard navigation, making me tab through items I can’t see.
• Interactive items using font icons whose accessible names are unicode code-points, even if the author clearly tried to give them readable names.
• Really unhelpful alt text like “diagram of X” without actually explaining the things being diagrammed, whether in alt-text or a caption.
• Animations that don’t respect prefers-reduced-motion.

Link imperceptibility, missing landmarks, and heading misuse are really common.

A common nit-pick: lists of links (e.g. in nav) would benefit from ul or ol parents.

A common issue that isn’t exactly an accessibility issue: toggles like hamburger menus that require JS don’t work in the Tor Browser’s “safest” mode. I’m looking at simple websites that have no need to exclude anonymous visitors.

@toastal AT users are used to list navigation. Screen readers also do neat things like announce the number of items. “list with 136 items” may not be worth hearing all the way through, but “list with eight items” might be different.

If something semantically makes sense, it should receive the appropriate semantic markup even if the presentation is visually worse in a given browser. Presentation should not be a major concern of the markup.