dialog, details, datalist, progress, optgroup, and more:
If this article helps just a single developer avoid an unnecessary Javascript dependency, I’ll be happy. Native HTML can handle plenty of features that people typically jump straight to JS for (or otherwise over-complicate).
Practice Progressive Enhancement.
Build first and foremost with forgiving technologies, declarative technologies, and forward and backward compatible coding techniques.
All content should be readable without scripting.
If it’s worth building on the web, it’s worth building it robustly, and building it to last.
We’re at a point in the most ecosystems where pulling in libraries is not just the default action, it’s seen positively: “Look how modular and composable my code is!” Actually, it might just be a symptom of never wanting to type out more than a few lines.
It always amazes me when people don’t view dependencies as liabilities. To me it feels like the coding equivalent of going to a loan shark. You are asking for technical debt.
There are entire companies who are making a living of supplying you with the tools needed to deal with your dependency mess. In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.
But there is a simpler path. You write code yourself. Sure, it’s more work up front, but once it’s written, it’s done.
I like the look of this proposal that would allow authors to have more control over network priorities for third-party iframes—I’ve already documented how I had to use a third-party library to fix this problem on the Salter Cane site.
This was a day of big conversations, but also one of connection, curiosity, and optimism.
Seeing it all laid out like this really drives home just how much was packed into Research By The Sea.
Throughout the day, speakers shared personal reflections, bold ideas, and practical insights, touching on themes of community, resilience, ethics, and the evolving role of technology.
Some talks brought hard truths about the impact of AI, the complexity of organisational change, and the ethical dilemmas researchers face. Others offered hope and direction, reminding us of the power of community, the importance of accessibility, and the need to listen to nature, to each other, and to the wider world.
This looks like a really interesting proposal for allowing developers more control over styling inputs. Based on the work being done the customisable select element, it starts with a declaration of appearance: base.
And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).
I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.
I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.
The tech bros advocating for generative AI to take over art are at the same level of cultural refinement as the characters in Severance. They’re creating apps to summarize books to people, tweeting from accounts with Greek statue profile pictures.
GenAI would automate Lumon’s cultural mission, allowing humans to sever themselves from the production of art and culture.
Research by the Sea was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected. None of the ‘utopian bullshit’ you usually get at a product or digital conference, to quote one of the speakers!
This is a great little helper in understanding anchor positioning in CSS.
Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.
Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.
This is very nice HTML web component by Miriam, progressively enhancing an ordered list of audio elements.
This describes how I like to work too.
If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.
I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.
Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.
Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…
Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)
Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.
Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.
A handy one-pager for front-end web developers:
Here are ways to keep track of what you can use, of what’s new in web browsers, and ways you can influence the development of the platform by making your voice heard.
About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:
I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.
What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.
If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.
If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.
Working on this project is great but ten minutes into it and I already miss the resilience of the web. I miss how you have to really fuck things up to make a browser yell at you or implode.
If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it.
Works for me!
You’re also expanding your ability to act in the presence of feelings of displeasure, worry and uncertainty, so that you can take more actions, and more ambitious actions, later on.
Crucially, you’ll also be creating a body of evidence to prove to yourself that when you move forward at 70%, the sky stubbornly fails to fall in. People don’t heap scorn on you or punish you.