I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
In the past few years, there’s been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization. Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
Simon summarises the year in large language models. Level-headed as always, and wisely avoiding predictions.
- Large Language Models
- They’re actually quite easy to build
- You can run LLMs on your own devices
- Hobbyists can build their own fine-tuned models
- We don’t yet know how to build GPT-4
- Vibes Based Development
- LLMs are really smart, and also really, really dumb
- Gullibility is the biggest unsolved problem
- Code may be the best application
- The ethics of this space remain diabolically complex
- My blog in 2023
🎶 What a good year for the style sheets! 🎶
I love these black and white photos from the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg!
This is design engineering.
A look at back at what wasn’t in the headlines this year.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Web Dev Conf in Bristol recently. I think you can tell that I had fun—it was a good audience!
Prompted by the rhetorical question at the end of my post Today, the distant future, Jim casts his gaze into a crystal ball. I like what he sees.
It’s possible the behemoth that is JavaScript in 2022 continues to metastasize as we move towards 2036, especially with technologies like WASM. I wouldn’t rule out the lordship of JavaScript as a possibility of the future.
However, I also think it’s possible—and dare I predict—to say we are peaking in our divergence and are now facing a convergence back towards building with the grain of the web and its native primitives.
Why do I say that? In our quest for progress, we explored so far beyond the standards-based platform that we came to appreciate the modesty of the approach “use the platform”.
He also makes one prediction that lies within his control:
This blog post will still be accessible via its originally published URL in 2036.
192 more stories of progress from 2021.
Some welcome perspective on healthcare, conservation, human rights, and energy.
All the talks from this year’s State Of The Browser event are online, and they’re all worth watching.
I laughed out loud at multiple points during Heydon’s talk.
Twelve short stories of solarpunk cli-fi “envisioning the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.”
Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
The transcript from the latest episode of the HTTP 203 podcast is well worth perusing.
- Internet Explorer halted development, no innovation. Would you say Safari is the new IE?
- There was loads of stuff missing. Is Safari the new IE?
- My early career was built on knowing the bugs in IE6 and how to solve them. Is Safari the new IE?
- Internet Explorer 6, it had a really slow JavaScript engine, performance was bad in that browser. Is Safari the new IE?
- Internet Explorer had a fairly cavalier attitude towards web standards. Is Safari the new IE?
- Back in the day that we had almost no communication whatsoever. Is Safari the new IE?
- Slow-release cycle. Is Safari the new IE?
Here’s a great write-up (with sketch notes) of last week’s conference portion of UX Fest:
There was a through-line of ethics through the whole conference that I enjoyed. The “design is the underdog” is tired and no longer true. I think that asking ourselves “now that we are here, how do we avoid causing harm?” is a much more mature conversation.
Good to see Google, Mozilla, and Apple collaborating on fixing cross-browser CSS compatability issues:
You can track progress here.
First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.
I spent most of the weekend reading through this and I’ve still barely scratched the surface—a lot of work has gone to the analyses and write-ups!
The sections on accessibility and performance get grimmer each year but the raw numbers on framework adaption are refreshingly perspective-setting.
Chris is gathering end-of-year thoughts from people in response to the question:
What is one thing you learned about building websites this year?
Here’s mine.
In 2020, I rediscovered the enjoyment of building a website with plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no transpilin’, no compilin’, no build tools other than my hands on the keyboard.
These survey results show that creating and maintaining an impactful design system comes with challenges such as planning a clear strategy, managing changes to the system, and fostering design system adoption across the organization. Yet the long-lasting value of a mature design system—like collaboration and better communication—awaits after the hard work of overcoming these challenges is done.