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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
frontendmasters.com/blog/performance-optimized-video-embeds-with-zero-javascript/
This is a clever technique for a CSS/HTML only way of just-in-time loading of iframes using details and summary.
It’s wild to me that we parent our children to fit into society, then get together with our friends and talk about how broken society is. I’ve seen people rail against our broken educational system, then demand their children get straight As in school. I’ve seen people complain about not having any time to themselves and then schedule every minute of their kid’s life.
There is more we can learn from children than they can learn from us.
Mostly we need to support children and let them know that they are loved.
I’ve had a lot of people recently tell me AI is “inevitable.” That this is “the future” and “we all better get used to it.”
For the last decade, I’ve had a lot of people tell me the same thing about React.
And over that decade of React being “the future” and “inevitable,” I worked on many, many projects without it. I’ve built a thriving career.
AI feels like that in many ways. It also feels different in that non-technical people also won’t shut the fuck about it.
Here are some design princples I can get behind: long-term thinking, resilience, flexibility and seamfulness.
Thursday session
clearleft.com/thinking/a-considered-use-of-generative-ai-in-front-end-development
A thoughtful approach from Sam:
- Use AI only for tasks you already know how to do, on occasions when the time that would be spent completing the task can be better spent on other problems.
- When using AI, provide the chosen tool with something you’ve made as an input along with a specific prompt.
- Always comprehensively review the output from an AI tool for quality.
piccalil.li/blog/an-in-depth-guide-to-customising-lists-with-css/
Think you know about styling lists with CSS? Think again!
This is just a taste of the kind of in-depth knowledge that Rich will be beaming directly into our brains at Web Day Out…
Wednesday session
My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:
…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.
My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:
…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.
The issue isn’t with the code itself, but with the understanding of the code.
That’s the difference between technical debt and cognitive debt.
whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/14/10-thoughts-on-ai-february-2026-edition/
Marcin’s history of “molly guards” in hardware and software:
Old-school computing has a term “molly guard”: it’s the little plastic safety cover you have to move out of the way before you press some button of significance.
sgom.es/posts/2026-02-13-js-heavy-approaches-are-not-compatible-with-long-term-performance-goals/
Looking forward to going to State Of The Browser in ten days.
I spoke at it eight years ago and I still like what I said then:
This is an excellent one-stop shop of interface patterns:
This is an organic collection of common JS patterns that can be replaced with just HTML, CSS, and no, or very low, JS. As HTML and CSS continue to mature, this collection should expand.
There are two wolves inside you…
My Builder side won’t let me just sit and think about unsolved problems, and my Thinker side is starving while I vibe-code. I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both needs can be met at once.
Sunday session
Knitting is the future of coding. Nobody knits because they want a quick or cheap jumper, they knit because they love the craft. This is the future of writing code by hand.
We’ve been taught that technological change must be chaotic, uncontrolled, and socially destructive — that anything less isn’t real innovation.
The conflation of progress with disruption serves specific interests. It benefits those who profit from rapid, uncontrolled deployment. “You can’t stop progress” is a very convenient argument when you’re the one profiting from the chaos, when your business model depends on moving fast and breaking things before anyone can evaluate whether those things should be broken.
We’ve internalized technological determinism so completely that choosing not to adopt something — or choosing to adopt it slowly, carefully, with conditions — feels like naive resistance to inevitable progress. But “inevitable” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inevitable for whom? Inevitable according to whom?
Reading Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood.
I’ve been using (and enjoying) NetNewsWire for quite a while now…
There have been so many advances in HTML, CSS and browser support over the past few years. These are enabling phenomenal creativity and refinement in web typography, and I’ve got a mere 28 minutes to tell you all about it.
I’ve been talking to Rich about his Web Day Out talk, and let me tell you, you don’t want to miss it!
It’s gonna be a wild ride! Join me at Web Day Out in Brighton on 12 March 2026. Use JOIN_RICH to get 10% off and you’ll also get a free online ticket for State of the Browser.
In an age of abundance, restraint becomes the only scarce thing left, which means saying “no” is more valuable than ever.
I’m as proud of the things I haven’t generated as the things I have.
Generated code is rather a lot like fast fashion: it looks all right at first glance but it doesn’t hold up over time, and when you look closer it’s full of holes. Just like fast fashion, it’s often ripped off other people’s designs. And it’s a scourge on the environment.
