Links

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

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

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.

CCC | Ban tracking and personalised advertising

YES! THIS!!!

A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).

MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia

Technology doesn’t have to be terrible. Here’s an absolutely wonderful use of an e-ink display:

I made as much use of vanilla HTML and CSS as possible. I used a small amount of JavaScript but no framework or other libraries.

I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

React is a non-transferable skill.

React proponents might claim that React will teach you modern UI, but from what I’ve seen it barely copes with modern UI. autofocus is broken, custom elements don’t work in all but the experimental version, using any “modern” features like dialog or popovers requires useEffect, and the synthetic event system teaches you so little about how DOM actually works. This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.

When I mentor early career developers and they ask me what they should learn, I can’t say React, they don’t have time. I mean sure, pick up enough React to land you the inevitable job doing it, but it’s not going to level up your career.

1 dataset. 100 visualizations.

The same small dataset visualised in a hundred different ways, with notes on the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

Creativity cannot be computed

The slides from Hidde’s presentation at Beyond Tellerrand.

Information literacy and chatbots as search • Buttondown

If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous tthan one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.

Daring Fireball: Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing

Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

My IndieWeb Journey

The slides from a lovely talk by Ana with an important message:

By having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets. That’s right. Whether you participate in the IndieWeb community or not: by having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets.

JavaScript dos and donts @ Mu-An Chiou

Straightforward smart sensible advice that you can apply to any feature on a website.

Your CSS reset should be layered

This makes sense:

Wrap everything in your CSS reset with a @layer rule.

When you place any styles inside a layer, these styles automatically have lower priority compared to all unlayered styles on the page. Think of it like an !unimportant block. You don’t need to worry about specificity or order of stylesheets at all.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

New CSS that can actually be used in 2024 | Thomasorus

Logical properties, container queries, :has, :is, :where, min(), max(), clamp(), nesting, cascade layers, subgrid, and more.

My Modern CSS Reset | jakelazaroff.com

I like the approach here: logical properties and sensible default type and spacing.

W3C@30: W3C and me - YouTube

This is a lovely, lovely talk from Léonie!

The Weather Out There - Long Now

I really liked this short story.

In 1979, two books shaped my formative years • Supernatural Detective’s Field Guide

This is such a great project from Jon—a mashup of two books from his childhood!

Put that RSS feed in your feed reader.

Help us choose the final syntax for Masonry in CSS | WebKit

I really like the way that the thinking here is tied back to Bert Bos’s original design principles for CSS.

This is a deep dive into the future of CSS layout—make a cup of tea and settle in for some good nerdiness!