Overriding env(safe-area-inset-*) in a WebView: Android and iOS

How do you make a WebView report safe-area insets the device doesn't have? Android overrides onApplyWindowInsets; iOS overrides the safeAreaInsets getter. Both work, both are silent when they fail, both can be changed while the page is loaded, and iOS has a WebKit timing bug that will convince you it doesn't work at all. With before/after screenshots on both platforms, plus the second inset channel, the keyboard, and the double-count it causes in a host that pads for the system bars.

Sep 30, 2026

Why USD123.45 becomes “US dollars” but SGD123.45 gets spelled out

The speech engine's text normalizer decides whether a currency code becomes “U S dollars and forty five cents” or gets spelled out as letters. This traces the string from the DOM to the voice.

Sep 19, 2026

Locating elements in a WebView: a pattern-by-pattern playbook

Fourteen UI patterns, including labelled text fields, checkboxes, comboboxes, tabs, dialogs, toasts, tables, virtualised lists, and canvas. For each one: the HTML that makes it locatable, what the accessibility tree exposes, the Appium and Playwright locators, and the trap underneath. Every pattern has a live page you can open, click, and dump.

Sep 14, 2026

WebView in uiautomator dump: what your HTML actually turns into

Why does adb shell uiautomator dump sometimes show an empty WebView, and what do your HTML elements actually become in the accessibility XML? An empirically-verified map of text, aria-label, roles, id and data-testid — plus the lazy accessibility tree, the two myths, and how automation really reads your app.

Sep 10, 2026

HTTP ETags and content-encoding: how Apache's gzip breaks revalidation (a hands-on study)

Why does enabling gzip/brotli in Apache silently break ETag revalidation? The tag you're given never matches the one Apache compares, and the 304 it does send is malformed. A diagram-first walkthrough of the three RFC 9110 violations, with before/after HAR files you can import into your own Network tab, and the one-line config that fixes it.

Aug 27, 2026

HTTP cache validators: ETag vs Last-Modified (a hands-on study)

How Apache generates ETag and Last-Modified, how it evaluates If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since (the RFC 9110 rule vs Apache's actual AND logic), what happens when the two validators disagree, and the CDN mystery where If-None-Match unexpectedly did nothing.

Aug 18, 2026

A visual guide of Node.js module resolution

Node.js resolves modules by walking up the directory tree looking for node_modules/package folder. This post illustrates the different folder structure influence module resolution, why symlinks (npm link, pnpm) can flip the result.

Jul 21, 2025

ES Module Import Syntax Change: From assert to with

If you've been using import ... assert { type: "json" } in Node.js, it's time to update! This blog post explains the transition from Import Assertions (assert) to Import Attributes (with).

Jul 18, 2025