Links

Styling the Navigation: Declarative Route and Navigation Matching in CSS – Bram.us

I really, really, really like this proposal! This would absolutely turbo-charge cross-document view transitions with nary a line of JavaScript in sight.

Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?

An excellent interview!

From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.

From human hands. · Mass-Driver

This is beautifully written.

Your ‘App’ Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you…) – Dan Q

I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!

HTMX and Web Components Instead of React

So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.

Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:

Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.

The Descent — What Happened to the Frontend While You Weren’t Watching

A history of front-end development that culminates here:

The frontier of 2026, the stuff the sharpest people are most excited about, is render the HTML on the server, ship almost no JavaScript, and use the web platform instead of fighting it.

Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.

Abject Praise - Infrequently Noted

Alex takes issue with my post giving kudos to Apple for concentrating on bugfixes in the latest version of Safari, and he brings receipts. He makes a very compelling case, backed up with data.

But when it comes to Chrome’s shipping of the half-baked prompt API, I’m not sure he gets just how badly it has soured the developer community’s feelings towards Google. This isn’t something to be countered with data; it’s much more visceral than that. Alex says:

So if Jeremy has a problem with specific features, I hope he’ll come to us with a critique of their qualities, rather than their optics.

In this case though, the optics are really, really, really bad.

Talk: Let’s fix the web’s text size - Josh Tumath

I saw Josh give this talk at CSS Day. It’s a very useful explanation of the forthcoming text-scale addition to the meta element, and what you can do to prepare your site now.

The AI Resist List

Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally.

Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you – Aresluna

Put the kettle on. Marcin has another magnum opus on interaction design for you to read …and interact with.

Notes and Narratives on Vimeo

Here’s the talk I gave yesterday at Na Píobairí Uilleann in Dublin all about The Session. True to the title, I played some notes on my mandolin to accompany the narrative.

The golden rule of Customizable Select | WebKit

This is excellent advice and I’m glad to see this getting addressed nice and early in the era of customisable select elements:

always provide text content or accessible text attributes for your option elements.

Storied Colors

Storied Colors is a catalogue of named colors — pigments, dyes, lakes, glazes, and a small number of digital hues — each accompanied by the documentary evidence required to call it by its name. The launch corpus opens at two hundred and fifty entries. It is maintained as a single-author project.

How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

This is a great case study featuring a really useful HTML web component called validation-enhancer.

The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood!

The Field Guide to CSS Grid Lanes

This is a very handy playground for exploring the brand new masonry grid lanes layout.

Piccia Neri’s post on LinkedIn

What a slap in the face of every tech conference that claims it is simply not possible to have a truly representative line-up: multiple perspectives, multiple faces, multiple experiences, rather than the same default one we’ve all been staring at for decades (that’s a white middle aged man in case you’re wondering. I do love you, white middle aged man, but we’ve heard from you, and keep hearing from you. Time to hear from others, too).

Yes, my friend. It is possible. UX London has done it. The Clearleft team has done it. Go look for yourself.

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity

Simply put: AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.

AI will fill the world with grindingly average texts, passable but derivative illustration and video, and unoriginal but functional new product designs.

What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.

Three things about data

1. Data is a risk.
2. Data is distracting.
3. It becomes a job.

Netizen | Derek Sivers

1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.

Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.