But perhaps the death of search is good for the future of the web. Perhaps websites can be free of dumb rankings and junky ads that are designed to make fractions of a penny at a time. Perhaps the web needs to be released from the burden of this business model. Perhaps mass readership isn’t possible for the vast majority of websites and was never really sustainable in the first place.
Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
Ah, the circle of life!
I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture.
I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who have found a deep joy in singing with a choir:
Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.
Then there’s the whole Long Now thing, a phrase that originated with him:
I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be passing through. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as “The Short Now”, and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - “The Long Now”.
I was listening to my Huffduffer feed recently, where I had saved yet another interview with Brian Eno. Sure enough, there was plenty of interesting food for thought, but the bit that stood out to me was relevant to, of all things, prototyping:
I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.
You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”
I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.
It meant that what you were thinking about was: How does it work? What do we want it to be like to be in that place? You started asking the important questions again, not: What kind of facing should we have on the building or what color should the stone be?
I keep thinking about that insight: “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”
Substitute the word “buildings” for whatever output is supposedly being revolutionised by generative models today. Websites. Articles. Public policy.
This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
If you’re building software, it’s generally a good idea to avoid the Not-Invented-Here syndrome. This is when you insist on writing absolutely everything from scratch even if it would make more sense to use a third-party provider.
Need your app to take payments? Don’t try to become your own payment provider—use an existing provider instead.
Need your app to send email? Don’t try to code all that up yourself—just use an existing service.
This same thinking seems to apply to JavaScript libraries too. If you don’t use a library or framework, you’ll just end up writing your own library or framework instead, right?
Except that’s not the way that JavaScript frameworks work. At least not any more.
There was a time when JavaScript libraries really did abstract away browser differences that you probably didn’t want to deal with yourself. In the early days of jQuery—before querySelector existed—trying to work with the DOM could be a real pain. Libraries like jQuery helped avoid that pain.
Maybe it was even true in the early days of Angular and React. If you were trying to handle navigations yourself, it probably made sense to use a framework.
But that’s not the case any more, and hasn’t been for quite a while.
These days, client-side JavaScript frameworks don’t abstract away the underlying platform, they instead try to be an alternative. In fact, if you attempt to use web platform features, your JavaScript framework will often get in the way. You have to wait until your framework of choice supports a feature like view transitions before you get to use it.
This is nuts. Developers are choosing to use tools that actively get in the way of the web platform.
I think that most developers have the mental model of JavaScript frameworks completely backwards. They believe that the framework saves them time and effort (just like a payment provider or an email service). Instead these frameworks are simply limiting the possibility space of what you can do in web browsers today.
When you use a JavaScript framework, that isn’t the end of your work, it’s just the beginning. You still have to write your own code that makes use of that framework. Except now your code is restricted to only what the framework can do.
And yet most developers still believe that using a JavaScript framework somehow enables them to do more.
Jim Nielsen has a great framing on this. JavaScript libraries aren’t like payment providers or email services. Rather, it’s the features built into web browsers today that are like these third-party providers. When you use these features, you’re benefiting from all the work that the browser makers have put into making them as efficient as possible:
Browser makers have teams of people who, day-in and day-out, are spending lots of time developing and optimizing new their offerings.
So if you leverage what they offer you, that gives you an advantage because you don’t have to build it yourself.
Want to do nifty page transitions? Don’t use a library. Use view transitions.
Want to animate parts of the page as the user scrolls? Don’t use a library. Use scroll-driven animations.
Want to make something happen when the user clicks? Don’t use a library. For the love of all that is holy, just use a button.
If you agree that using a button makes more sense than using a div, then I encourage you to apply the same thinking to everything else your app needs to do.
Take advantage of all the wonderful things you can do in web browsers today. If instead you decide to use a JavaScript framework, you’re basically inventing from scratch.
Except now all of your users pay the price because they’re the ones who have to download the JavaScript framework when they use your app.
An excellent example of an HTML web component from Eric:
Extend HTML to do things automatically!
He layers on the functionality and styling, considering potential gotchas at every stage. This is resilient web design in action.
This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.
Grrr… it turns out that browsers exhibit some very frustrating behaviour when it comes to the video element. Rob has the details…
If you need to convince someone – your boss, your team, your family, or also yourself – then explain that going to a conference isn’t just another trip away from “real work.” No, this is the real work: investing in your craft, your connections, your growth.
Matthias nails why should go to events …like, say, Web Day Out.
There’s something magical about walking into a conference venue in the morning. The hum of first conversations, the smell of coffee, the anticipation, and the smiling faces. And the unspoken feeling that we all belong here, that we are here for the same reason: because we care about the same things and we all have, in some way or another, built our lives around the Web.
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
An excellent appraisal of the importance of the rule of least power.
Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
👏👏👏
Nice to see Clearleft’s browser support policy get a shoutout from Rachel during her Google IO talk.
A great talk by Matthias on what you can do with web standards today!
Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.
“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.
This is a great new musical project from Brad:
Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?
I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.
A fun new font from Jason:
Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.