Is breá leat é a fheiceáil.

Last year Jeremy Keith blogged about completing Duolingo Irish, and I’ve added that as a goal for myself. I found myself in London with him in February at State of the Browser. It’s probably the last place you’d expect to hear Irish spoken, yet we had an earnest conversation over lunch, using as much as we could.

Having a proper conversation as Gaeilge with Paul was an absolute highlight for me!

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When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said: After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending ...

The browser is the security boundary. Websites operate within it. Native apps bypass it.

Like I said last year:

But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore to install their app from the app store.

This piece goes into the details:

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt.

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AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more

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Handy! I’ve added this header to The Session.

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You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.

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Fixed an issue on iOS and iPadOS where datalist suggestions were presented directly over the associated input, obscuring it.

Phew!

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Hanging out with Sandy in the sunshine.

Lesbian necromancers in space. That’s the usual pitch for Gideon The Ninth and it’s not wrong. Though there’s a lot more necromancy than space or lesbianism. The book begins in an environment fairly dripping with death, all bones and darkness. It sounds like it should be gr...

Reading Brigid by Kim Curran.

Going to San Diego. brb

If you’re voting in local elections in England today, don’t forget to bring your photo ID. And when you get to the polling station, don’t forget to make a formal complaint about having to bring your photo ID.

No web standard should require you to agree to an advertising company’s “terms of use.”

I’m genuinely disheartened and angry that the Google Chrome team have done this. Never assume good faith from them again.

This is, hands-down, the most insultingly transparent attempt at web standards bullying I’ve ever seen, including past ones from Google, which is — and I cannot stress this point enough — a company that sells advertisements. This is miles more eyeroll-worthy than AMP, where you’ll recall that a legion of tight-smiling dorks wearing Alphabet lanyards tried to assure us that the only means of survival for the web itself was to funnel all of it through Google’s servers, and only use their very good advertisements instead of those bad other ones.

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I really like the thinking that goes into this approach. It seems so counter-intuitive at first, but there’s no arguing with the snappy resilient results.

Turns out, if you have a website and you think of the browser as a way to navigate documents — rather than a runtime to execute arbitrary code and fetch, compile, and present them — things can be a lot simpler than our tools often prime us to make them.

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There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting! You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each ...

Thursday session

Wednesday session

But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.

I concur.

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The link rot is a symptom of the larger rot that is taking place on the web. This intentional hiding of our world’s past is intended to disorient us. If the big tech internet places are continuing to exert their control over us by making their online spaces more and more oppressive, by hiding history they can trick us into believing that what we’re experiencing now is Just How Things Have Always Been.

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Eight years ago, I asked some questions. Here are some answers.

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This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.

The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.

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Monday session

Taytos with Jack at Cork airport

I know people joke about everyone in Ireland knowing everyone else, but I just got off the plane in Cork and the customs officer is my cousin.

Going to Cork. brb

Friday session

Afternoon tea and tunes

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme.

It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with zero employees!) or leave you hopelessly destitute (part of the looming “permanent underclass”). Which one do you want to be? Smash that like button, sign up for my online course, and use my new AI-powered business platform!

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In the latest issue of Matthias’s excellent Own Your Web series, he describes the recent betrayal by Google: The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken. He’s absolute...