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The online home of Jeremy Keith, an author and web developer living and working in Brighton, England.
IndieWeb
currentaffairs.org/news/who-will-save-the-internet-from-disappearing
An excellent interview!
From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.
This is beautifully written.
Today we’re at T+57 years from the launch of Apollo 11:
Remembering when England played Argentina 24 years ago and Channel 4 let the side down…
I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!
kore-nordmann.de/blog/htmx-and-web-components-instead-of-react.html
So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.
Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:
Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.
We’re well into the hype cycle and so far the only clearly-measurable changes we’ve seen are that laptops and gaming consoles now cost considerably more.
Truly a transformative technology!
A history of front-end development that culminates here:
The frontier of 2026, the stuff the sharpest people are most excited about, is render the HTML on the server, ship almost no JavaScript, and use the web platform instead of fighting it.
zeldman.com/2026/07/06/memories-cant-wait-or-how-i-learned-to-keep-worrying-about-the-web/
Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.
From the erratic behaviour of the seagulls on my street, I was able to deduce that it was Flying Ant Day.
In preparation for my jaunt to a Greek island, I figured it would be good to have some Greek-adjacent reading material with me to peruse on the beach. So I scoured the shelves of my local library to find a modern retelling of a Greek myth that I hadn’t already read. That’s where I found Medea by Rosie Hewlett.
The book attempts to rehabilitate—or at least give context to—one of the women of Greek legends who has been cast as a villain. See also Clytemnestra, Elektra, and more.
On the face of it, the book succeeds. We get to see how Medea’s actions were driven by her circumstances. But while it’s entirely believable that that Medea was manipulated by a conniving Jason, this framing takes away her agency somewhat.
The writing is perfectly fine if a little bodice-rippy at times. It was a perfectly good beach read.
Alex takes issue with my post giving kudos to Apple for concentrating on bugfixes in the latest version of Safari, and he brings receipts. He makes a very compelling case, backed up with data.
But when it comes to Chrome’s shipping of the half-baked prompt API, I’m not sure he gets just how badly it has soured the developer community’s feelings towards Google. This isn’t something to be countered with data; it’s much more visceral than that. Alex says:
So if Jeremy has a problem with specific features, I hope he’ll come to us with a critique of their qualities, rather than their optics.
In this case though, the optics are really, really, really bad.
I saw Josh give this talk at CSS Day. It’s a very useful explanation of the forthcoming text-scale addition to the meta element, and what you can do to prepare your site now.
Tuesday session
Reading Radiant Star by Ann Leckie.
Bidding farewell to Paxos!
My tuna brings all the cats to the yard 🐟🐈
On Paxos
Going to Corfu. brb
Thursday session
Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally.
Put the kettle on. Marcin has another magnum opus on interaction design for you to read …and interact with.
Reading Medea by Rosie Hewlett.
Mandolinists assemble!
Maestros of Irish mandolin: Macdara, Marla, and Sean.
