Jeremy Keith

mirisuzanne/track-list: Enhance a list of audio tracks with playlist controls

This is very nice HTML web component by Miriam, progressively enhancing an ordered list of audio elements.

Why I Like Designing in the Browser – Cloud Four

This describes how I like to work too.

The web on mobile (a response) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Rich suggests another reason why the UX of websites on mobile is so shit these days:

The path to installing a native app is well trodden. We search the App Store (or ironically follow a link from a website), hit ‘Get’ and the app is downloaded to our phone’s home screen, ready to use any time with a simple tap.

A PWA can also live on your home screen, nicely indistinguishable from a native app. But the journey to getting a PWA – or indeed any web app – onto your home screen remains convoluted to say the least. This is the lack of equivalence I’m driving at. I wonder if the mobile web experience would suck as badly if web apps could be installed just as easily as native apps?

5 Questions for Jeremy Keith · Frontend Dogma

If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.

This page is under construction - localghost

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.

The Shape of a Mars Mission (Idle Words)

You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.

Generative AI use and human agency

You do not have to use generative AI.

AI itself cannot be held to account.

If you use AI, you are the one who is accountable for whatever you produce with it.

There are contexts in which it is immoral to use generative AI.

Correcting or fact checking generative AI may take longer than just doing a task yourself, or with conventional AI tools.

You do not have to use generative AI.

The Gist: AI, a talking dog for the 21st Century.

My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too).

No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog.

Also, trust:

They’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?

Citywide – Jason Santa Maria

A fun new font from Jason:

Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

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.

Monzo tone of voice

Some good—if overlong—writing advice.

• Focus on what matters to readers
• Be welcoming to everyone
• Swap formal words for normal ones
• When we have to say sorry, say it sincerely
• Watch out for jargon
• Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice
• Use vivid words & delightful wordplay
• Make references most people would understand
• Avoid empty adjectives & marketing cliches
• Make people feel they’re in on the joke – don’t punch down
• Add a pinch of humour, not a dollop
• Smart asides, not cheap puns and cliches
• Be self-assured, but never arrogant

Here’s a post outlining all the great things you can do in mobile web browsers today: Your App Should Have Been A Website (And Probably Your Game Too):

Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there.

This is all true. But this post from John Gruber is equally true: One Bit of Anecdata That the Web Is Languishing Vis-à-Vis Native Mobile Apps:

I won’t hold up this one experience as a sign that the web is dying, but it sure seems to be languishing, especially for mobile devices.

As John points out, the problems aren’t technical:

There’s absolutely no reason the mobile web experience shouldn’t be fast, reliable, well-designed, and keep you logged in. If one of the two should suck, it should be the app that sucks and the website that works well. You shouldn’t be expected to carry around a bundle of software from your utility company in your pocket. But it’s the other way around.

He’s right. It makes no sense, but this is the reality.

Ten or fifteen years ago, the gap between the web and native apps on mobile was entirely technical. There were certain things that you just couldn’t do in web browsers. That’s no longer the case now. The web caught up quite a while back.

But the experience of using websites on a mobile device is awful. Never mind the terrible performance penalties incurred by unnecessary frameworks and libraries like React and its ilk, there’s the constant game of whack-a-mole with banners and overlays. What’s just about bearable in a large desktop viewport becomes intolerable on a small screen.

This is not a technical problem. This doesn’t get solved by web standards. This is a cultural problem.

First of all, there’s the business culture. If your business model depends on tracking people or pushing newsletter sign-ups, then it’s inevitable that your website will be shite on mobile.

Mind you, if your business model depends on tracking people, you’re more likely to try push people to download your native app. Like Cory Doctorow says:

50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that’s a felony (Jay Freeman calls this ‘felony contempt of business-model’).

Matt May brings up the same point in his guide, How to grey-rock Meta:

Remove Meta apps from your devices and use only the mobile web versions. Mobile apps have greater access to your personal data, provided the app requests those privileges, and Facebook and Instagram in particular (more so than WhatsApp, another Meta property) request the vast majority of those privileges. This includes precise GPS data on where you are, whether or not you are using the app.

Ironically, it’s the strength of the web—and web browsers—that has led to such shitty mobile web experiences. The pretty decent security model on the web means that sites have to pester you.

Part of the reason why you don’t see the same egregious over-use of pop-ups and overlays in native apps is that they aren’t needed. If you’ve installed the app, you’re already being tracked.

But when I describe the dreadful UX of most websites on mobile as a cultural problem, I don’t just mean business culture.

Us, the people who make websites, designers and developers, we’re responsible for this too.

For all our talk of mobile-first design for the last fifteen years, we never really meant it, did we? Sure, we use media queries and other responsive techniques, but all we’ve really done is make sure that a terrible experience fits on the screen.

As developers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why it’s perfectly justified to make users on mobile networks download React, Tailwind, and megabytes more of third-party code.

As designers, I’m sure we can tell ourselves all sorts of fairy tales about why intrusive pop-ups and overlays are the responsibility of some other department (as though users make any sort of distinction).

Worst of all, we’ve spent the last fifteen years teaching users that if they want a good experience on their mobile device, they should look in an app store, not on the web.

Ask anyone about their experience of using websites on their mobile device. They’ll tell you plenty of stories of how badly it sucks.

It doesn’t matter that the web is the perfect medium for just-in-time delivery of information. It doesn’t matter that web browsers can now do just about everything that native apps can do.

In many ways, I wish this were a technical problem. At least then we could lobby for some technical advancement that would fix this situation.

But this is not a technical problem. This is a people problem. Specifically, the people who make websites.

We fucked up. Badly. And I don’t see any signs that things are going to change anytime soon.

But hey, websites on desktop are just great!

Navigating the Web Platform Cheatsheet

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.

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

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.