Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.
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The Jeopardy Phenomenon – Chris Coyier
AI has the Jeopardy Phenomenon too.
If you use it to generate code that is outside your expertise, you are likely to think it’s all well and good, especially if it seems to work at first pop. But if you’re intimately familiar with the technology or the code around t...
Thursday session
Thursday session
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
The only winning move is not to play
My mind boggles at the thought of using a generative tool based on a large language model to do any kind of qualatitive user research, so every single thing that Gregg says here makes complete sense to me.
Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
Tuesday session
Tuesday session
Fiddlers three
Fiddlers three
On not choosing nice versions of AI – This day’s portion
Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.
Web development tip: disable pointer events on link images
Here’s a little snippet of CSS that solves a problem I’ve never considered:
The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.
Installing web apps
Safari, Chrome, and Edge all allow you to install websites as though they’re apps.
On mobile Safari, this is done with the “Add to home screen” option that’s buried deep in the “share” menu, making it all but useless.
On the desktop, this is “Add to dock” in Safari, or “In...
CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack
thenewstack.io/css-in-js-the-great-betrayal-of-frontend-sanity/
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
The Instagram Mothers - The Offing
A short piece of speculative fiction.
Belfast TradFest | Traditional Music Belfast
Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!
Belfast TradFest back in July.
Belfast TradFest back in July.
Today was my last working day for 2025. I’m off until January. Christmas starts now!
Today was my last working day for 2025. I’m off until January. Christmas starts now!
Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell
denodell.com/blog/escape-velocity-break-free-from-framework-gravity
React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.
Real talk!
Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but m...
The line and the stream. — Ethan Marcotte
I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes
somethingto you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that thissomethingwill be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?
The schedule for Web Day Out
Here’s the schedule for Web Day Out—what a fantastic collection of talks!
Web Day Out
10:00 – 10:30
I can’t believe it’s not JavaScript
Jemima Abu
10:30 – 11:00
A pragmatic guide to browser support
Rachel Andrew
11:30 – 12:00
Progressive web apps from the trenches
...
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog
Ah, the circle of life!
Why use React?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. I genuinely want to know why developers choose to build websites using React.
There are many possible reasons. Alas, none of them relate directly to user experience, other than a trickle-down justification: happy productive developers will ...
The only frontend stack we should talk about
Explore the platform. Challenge yourself to discover what the modern web can do natively. Pure HTML, CSS, and a bit of vanilla JS…
Responsive Letter Spacing – Cloud Four
Another clever use of clamp() and calc() for web typography, but this time it’s adjusting letter-spacing.
Reading The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories by Angela Carter.
Reading The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories by Angela Carter.
A child’s Halloween in Ireland
As part of their on-stage banter, The Dubliners used to quip that “All the books that are banned in Ireland should be published in Irish, to encourage more people to learn their native tongue.”
There was no shortage of banned books back in the day. I’m reading one of them now. The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien.
About halfway through the book, I read this passage:
The parcels for the Halloween party were coming every day. I couldn’t ask my father for one because a man is not able to do these things, so I wrote to him for money instead and a day girl brought me a barmbrack, apples, and monkey-nuts.
Emphasis mine, because that little list sounded so familiar to me.
Back in 2011, I wrote a candygram for Jason. It was called Monkey nuts, barmbrack and apples.
It’s not exactly Edna O’Brien, but looking back at it fifteen years on, I think it turned out okay.
Thursday session
Thursday session
Manuel Matuzovič is speaking at Web Day Out
The line-up for Web Day Out is now complete! The final speaker to be added to the line-up is the one and only Manuel Matuzovič.
You may know Manuel from his superb Web Accessibility Cookbook (full disclosure: I had the honour of writing the foreword to that book). Or perhap...
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*): “I think this needs to be repeated…”
Machine learning is amazing if … the value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer.
Related to Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt:
And that’s where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It’s pushing machine-learning appro...