Sunday session

Speaking of serendipity, not long after I wrote about making a static archive of The Session for people to download and share, I came across a piece by Alex Chan about using static websites for tiny archives. The use-case is slightly different—this is about personal archive...

I described using my feed reader like this: I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email. Instead it’s like this: When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels...

I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…

Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!

adactio.com/links/21504

This is a neat project form Dries:

This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.

At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.

adactio.com/links/21503

Friday session

Reading Atalanta by Jennifer Saint.

Wednesday session

It’s pretty easy to write bad HTML, because for most developers there are no consequences. If you write some bad Javascript, your application will probably crash and you or your users will get a horrible error message. It’s like a flashing light above your head telling the world you’ve done something bad. At the very least you’ll feel like a prize chump. HTML fails silently. Write bad HTML and maybe it means someone who doesn’t browse the web in exactly the same way as you do doesn’t get access to the information they need. But maybe you still get your pay rise and bonus.

So it’s frustrating to see the importance of learning HTML dismissed time and time again.

adactio.com/links/21499

Earlier this year I wrote about some performance improvements to The Session using the content-visibility property in CSS. If you say content-visibility: auto you’re telling the browser not to bother calculating the layout and paint for an element until it needs to. But you...

Back in June I documented a bug on macOS in how Spaces (or whatever they call they’re desktop management thingy now) works with websites added to the dock. I’m happy to report that after upgrading to Sequoia, the latest version of macOS, the bug has been fixed! Excellent! ...

Firefox users: are you able to reproduce this doozy of a bug I’ve found in the latest version?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1924798

Wondering if this is the responsible way to enable view transitions on websites:

@media (prefers-reduced-motion: no-preference) {
  @view-transition {
    navigation: auto;
  }
}

People posting screenshots of their chats with large language model tools, like it’s cute, like each one of those queries didn’t use exorbitant amounts of carbon, like those tools aren’t all built on masses of unpaid labour.

The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.

adactio.com/links/21493

Monday session

Trys describes exactly the situation where you really do need to use the Shadow DOM in a web component—as opposed to just sticking to HTML web components—, and that’s when the component is going to be distributed and you have no idea where:

This component needed to be incredibly portable, looking great on any third-party website, in any position, at any viewport, with any amount of content. It had to be a “hyper-responsive” component.

adactio.com/links/21491

“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”

Why were they slow? The answer: React.

“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”

adactio.com/links/21490

When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy. I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, ...

This short essay by Richard Feynman is quite a dose of perspective on a Monday morning

adactio.com/links/21488

Sunday session

Spent the day making pumpkin ravioli from scratch. Turned out pretty good!

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

adactio.com/links/21485

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

adactio.com/links/21484

Coco is having a snoozy #caturday on my lap. #notmycat

Pondering pace layers.

adactio.com/links/21482

One of the perks of speaking at conferences is that I get to travel to new and interesting places. I’d say that most of my travel over the past couple of decades was thanks to conferences. Recently though, I’ve been going places for non-work related reasons. A couple of wee...

This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:

I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.

👏

adactio.com/links/21480

They say they’re building the thing that will build the thing that will solve all of our problems, while they destroy the planet and run on data theft and labor exploitation, and they get Nobel prizes.

— Timnit Gebru

Reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ.