Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.

Public Domain Image Archive

Explore our hand-picked collection of 10,046 out-of-copyright works, free for all to browse, download, and reuse. This is a living database with new images added every week.

una.im | Updates to the customizable select API

It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!

You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Hyper-responsive web components | Trys Mudford

Trys describes exactly the situation where you really do need to use the Shadow DOM in a web component—as opposed to just sticking to HTML web components—, and that’s when the component is going to be distributed and you have no idea where:

This component needed to be incredibly portable, looking great on any third-party website, in any position, at any viewport, with any amount of content. It had to be a “hyper-responsive” component.

The Value Of Science by Richard P. Feynman [PDF]

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

Liskov’s Gun: The parallel evolution of React and Web Components – Baldur Bjarnason

React has become a bloated carcass of false promises, misleading claims, and unending layers of backwards compatibility – the wrong kind of backwards compatibility, as they still occasionally break your fucking code when updating.

Pretty much anything else is a better tool for pretty much any web development task.

Kardashev Street

Matt has made a new website for tracking our collective progress levelling up the Kardashev scale:

Maximising energy generation, distribution and usage at street level, for as many people as possible, everyday.

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A library of CC-licensed photos.

Next time you’re tempted to use a generative “AI” tool to make an image for a slide deck, use this instead.

Dogs of Dev

They’re good dogs, Brent.

HTML Web Components Can Have a Little Shadow DOM, As A Treat | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer

This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:

providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.

Get the screen width & height without JavaScript

Clever!

Pivoting From React to Native DOM APIs: A Real World Example - The New Stack

One dev team made the shift from React’s “overwhelming VDOM” to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.

Yay! But:

…finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an “unexpected difficulty.”

Boo!

Also, if you have a similar story to tell about going cold turkey on React, you should share it with Richard:

If you or your company has also transitioned away from React and into a more web-native, HTML-first approach, please tag me on Mastodon or Threads. We’d love to share further case studies of these modern, dare I say post-React, approaches.

Blocking bots – Manu

Blocking the bots is step one.

Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent • Robb Knight

See, this is exactly why we need to poison these bots.

Is Microsoft trying to commit suicide? - Charlie’s Diary

Trust:

Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it’s really hard to regain it.

IndieWeb principles · Paul Robert Lloyd

I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:

1. Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
2. Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
3. Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.

But what about the shadow DOM? | Go Make Things

So many of the problems and challenges of working with Web Components just fall away when you ditch the shadow DOM and use them as a light wrapper for progressive enhancement.

What would HTML do? - The Cascade

Whenever I confront a design system problem, I ask myself this one question that guides the way: “What would HTML do?”

HTML is the ultimate composable language. With just a few elements shuffled together you can create wildly different interfaces. And that’s really where all the power from HTML comes up: everything has one job, does it really well (ideally), which makes the possible options almost infinite.

Design systems should hope for the same.