Links

Piccia Neri’s post on LinkedIn

What a slap in the face of every tech conference that claims it is simply not possible to have a truly representative line-up: multiple perspectives, multiple faces, multiple experiences, rather than the same default one we’ve all been staring at for decades (that’s a white middle aged man in case you’re wondering. I do love you, white middle aged man, but we’ve heard from you, and keep hearing from you. Time to hear from others, too).

Yes, my friend. It is possible. UX London has done it. The Clearleft team has done it. Go look for yourself.

AI and the Rise of Mediocrity

Simply put: AI thrives when our need for originality is low and our demand for mediocrity is high.

AI will fill the world with grindingly average texts, passable but derivative illustration and video, and unoriginal but functional new product designs.

What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.

Three things about data

1. Data is a risk.
2. Data is distracting.
3. It becomes a job.

Netizen | Derek Sivers

1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.

Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.

The value is in the difficulty - Annotations

We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.

Like Bruce Sterling always says:

Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.

Tito as Gaeilge

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!

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One’s Happy

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.

I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | AI (artificial intelligence) | The Guardian

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

Better Browser Caching with No-Vary-Search – CSS Wizardry

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

The Boring Internet | Terry Godier

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

WebKit Features for Safari 26.5 | WebKit

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

Phew!

Google’s Prompt API

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.

Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

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.

Anti-work | Go Make Things

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.

they told me the internet was forever | sam’s internet house

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.

Let’s Use the Nonexistent ::nth-letter Selector Now | CSS-Tricks

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

Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags | That HTML Blog

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.

It’s Not AI. It’s FOMOnetization.

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!

The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

HTML Video Poster Image: Enable Responsive Images and ALT Text for Poster by allowing a child IMG Element (with an optional Picture Element wrapper) to Control the Video Poster Image · Issue #10378 · whatwg/html

This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?