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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
plainvanillaweb.com/blog/articles/2024-09-30-lived-experience/
I hold this truth to be self-evident: the larger the abstraction layer a web developer uses on top of web standards, the shorter the shelf life of their codebase becomes, and the more they will feel the churn.
helloanselm.com/writings/knowing-css-is-mastery-to-frontend-development
Anselm isn’t talking about becoming a CSS wizard, but simply having an understanding of what CSS can do. I have had similar experiences to this:
In the past years I had various situations where TypeScript developers (they called themselves) approached me and asked whether I could help them out with CSS. I expected to solve a complex problem but for me — knowing CSS very well — it was always a simple, straightforward solution or code snippet.
Let’s face it, “full stack” usually means “JavaScript”—HTML and CSS aren’t considered worthy of consideration. Their loss.
I miss A Book Apart, and I really miss An Event Apart—I made so many friends and memories through that conference. I admire Jeffrey’s honest account of how much it sucks when something so good comes to an end.
A complete digital archive of the famous typography from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
The lettering really is lovely!
In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.
…now including Going Offline.
A shame that this must-read book won’t be out in time for Christmas—’twould make a great stocking filler for a lot of people I know.
A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.
Feature suggestion: an end-of-year Spotify Unwrapped thingy but for Wikipedia contributions (maybe it would encourage me to contribute more).
Tuesday session
Monday session
Reading Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson.
Thursday session
Wednesday session
I’m suscribing to this RSS feed.
I’m quitting while I’m ahead: https://adactio.com/journal/21585
Tabloid is a turing-complete programming language for writing programs in the style of clickbait news headlines.
This tracks (ahem) with my experience of coding on trains.
Hidde lists the potentially flaky connectivity as a downside, but for many kinds of deep work I’d say it’s very much a feature, not a bug.
Sunday session
Spent the morning rocking out with Salter Cane.
chromamine.com/2024/10/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?
- Obvious Markup
- Instantiation is More Consistent
- They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly
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.
Wednesday session
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.
Reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
Monday session
