Tags: web

Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson

Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.

So Many Websites

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.

Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost

See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

The Web Runs On Tolerance – Terence Eden’s Blog

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.

I’m speaking at Web Day Out 2026 - Manuel Matuzovic

The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.

Can’t wait!

Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia

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.

Safari, Chrome, and Edge all allow you to install websites as though they’re apps.

On mobile Safari, this is done with the “Add to home screen” option that’s buried deep in the “share” menu, making it all but useless.

On the desktop, this is “Add to dock” in Safari, or “Install” in Chrome or Edge.

Firefox doesn’t offer this functionality, which as a shame. Firefox is my browser of choice but they decided a while back to completely abandon progressive web apps (though they might reverse that decision soon).

Anyway, being able to install websites as apps is fantastic! I’ve got a number of these “apps” in my dock: Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, The Session, Google Calendar, Google Meet. They all behave just like native apps. I can’t even tell which browser I used to initially install them.

If you’d like to prompt users to install your website as an app, there’s not much you can do other than show them how to do it. But that might be about to change…

I’ve been eagerly watching the proposal for a Web Install API. This would allow authors to put a button on a page that, when clicked, would trigger the installation process (the user would still need to confirm this, of course).

Right now it’s a JavaScript API called navigator.install, but there’s talk of having a declarative version too. Personally, I think this would be an ideal job for an invoker command. Making a whole new install element seems ludicrously over-engineered to me when button invoketarget="share" is right there.

Microsoft recently announced that they’d be testing the JavaScript API in an origin trial. I immediately signed up The Session for the trial. Then I updated the site to output the appropriate HTTP header.

You still need to mess around in the browser configs to test this locally. Go to edge://flags or chrome://flags/ and search for ‘Web App Installation API’, enable it and restart.

I’m now using this API on the homepage of The Session. Unsurprisingly, I’ve wrapped up the functionality into an HTML web component that I call button-install.

Here’s the code. You use it like this:

<button-install>
  <button>Install the app</button>
</button-install>

Use whatever text you like inside the button.

I wasn’t sure whether to keep the button element in the regular DOM or generate it in the Shadow DOM of the custom element. Seeing as the button requires JavaScript to do anything, the Shadow DOM option would make sense. As Tess put it, Shadow DOM is for hiding your shame—the bits of your interface that depend on JavaScript.

In the end I decided to stick with a regular button element within the custom element, but I take steps to remove it when it’s not necessary.

There’s a potential issue in having an element that could self-destruct if the browser doesn’t cut the mustard. There might be a flash of seeing the button before it gets removed. That could even cause a nasty layout shift.

So far I haven’t seen this problem myself but I should probably use something like Scott’s CSS in reverse: fade in the button with a little delay (during which time the button might end up getting removed anyway).

My connectedCallback method starts by finding the button nested in the custom element:

class ButtonInstall extends HTMLElement {
  connectedCallback () {
    this.button = this.querySelector('button');
    …
  }
customElements.define('button-install', ButtonInstall);

If the navigator.install method doesn’t exist, remove the button.

if (!navigator.install) {
  this.button.remove();
  return;
}

If the current display-mode is standalone, then the site has already been installed, so remove the button.

if (window.matchMedia('(display-mode: standalone)').matches) {
  this.button.remove();
  return;
}

As an extra measure, I could also use the display-mode media query in CSS to hide the button:

@media (display-mode: standalone) {
  button-install button {
    display: none;
  }
}

If the button has survived these tests, I can wire it up to the navigator.install method:

this.button.addEventListener('click', async (ev) => {
  await navigator.install();
});

That’s all I’m doing for now. I’m not doing any try/catch stuff to handle all the permutations of what might happen next. I just hand it over to the browser from there.

Feel free to use this code if you want. Adjust the code as needed. If your manifest file says display: fullscreen you’ll need to change the test in the JavaScript accordingly.

Oh, and make sure your site already has a manifest file that has an id field in it. That’s required for navigator.install to work.

Here’s the schedule for Web Day Out—what a fantastic collection of talks!

Web Day Out

10:00 – 10:30	I can’t believe it’s not JavaScript	Jemima Abu
10:30 – 11:00	A pragmatic guide to browser support	Rachel Andrew
11:30 – 12:00	Progressive web apps from the trenches	Aleth Gueguen
12:00 – 12:30	Build for the web, build on the web, build with the web	Harry Roberts
14:00 – 14:30	Breaking with habits	Manuel Matuzovič
14:30 – 15:00	What’s new in web typography?	Richard Rutter
15:30 – 16:00	Customisable <select> and the friends we made along the way	Jake Archibald
16:00 – 16:30	The browser is the playground	Lola Odelola

Seeing all of those talk titles in a row is getting me very, very excited for this day!

I hope that you’re excited too, and I hope you’ve got your ticket already.

If you need to convince your boss to send you (and your team) to Web Day Out I’ve put together some reasons to attend along with an email template that you can use as a starting point.

Also, if your company is sending a group of people anyway, consider sponsoring Web Day Out. You get a bunch of conference tickets as part of the sponsorship deal.

Hope to see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!

Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog

Ah, the circle of life!

The line-up for Web Day Out is now complete! The final speaker to be added to the line-up is the one and only Manuel Matuzovič.

You may know Manuel from his superb Web Accessibility Cookbook (full disclosure: I had the honour of writing the foreword to that book). Or perhaps you’re familiar with the crimes against markup that he documents at HTMHell. But at Web Day Out, he’s going to be talking about CSS.

The past few years have seen a veritable explosion in CSS capabilities. It’s one thing to hear about all the new stuff in CSS, but how do you actually start using it?

You may need to unlearn what you have previously learned. That’s what Manuel’s talk will be covering:

Manuel built a new project from scratch with modern CSS and questioned every line of code he wrote.

In this talk, he presents what he has learned and encourages you to review your best practices.

You can see why I’m so excited about this—it’s perfect for the agenda of Web Day Out:

Do you feel like you’re missing out on some of the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs? Web Day Out is your chance to get up to speed on what matters.

There’ll be eight brilliant speakers for your entertainment:

1. Jemima Abu
2. Rachel Andrew
3. Jake Archibald
4. Aleth Gueguen
5. Manuel Matuzovič
6. Lola Odelola
7. Harry Roberts
8. Richard Rutter

You won’t want to miss this, so get your ticket now for the ludicrously reasonable price of just £225+VAT!

See you in Brighton on 12 March 2026!

What happened to the comment section? - The History of the Web

I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.

There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:

A blog without comments is not a blog.

That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:

Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.

That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.

I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.

Custom Asidenotes – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

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.

Almost two months ago, I put out the call for speaker suggestions for Web Day Out. I got some good responses—thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch.

The response that really piqued my interest was from Aleth Gueguen. She proposed a talk on progressive web apps, backed up with plenty of experience. The more I thought about it, the more I realised how perfect it would be for Web Day Out.

So I’m very pleased to announce that Aleth will be speaking at Web Day Out about progressive web apps from the trenches:

Find out about the most important capabilities in progressive web apps and how to put them to work.

I’m really excited about this line-up! This is going to be a day out that you won’t want to miss. Get your ticket for a mere £225+VAT if you haven’t already!

See you in Brighton on 12 March, 2026!

Echoes of Connection · Matthias Ott

Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:

I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.

I had a very pleasant experience last week while I was reading through the RSS feeds I’m subscribed to. I came across two blog posts that were responding to blog posts of my own.

Robin Sloan wrote a post clarifying his position after I linked to him in my post about the slipperiness of the term “AI”.

Then Jim Nielsen wrote a deliciously satirical piece in response to my pithy little parable about research.

I love it when this happens!

Elizabeth Spiers recently wrote a piece called What Made Blogging Different?:

And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through.

It’s so true. I feel like a response from someone’s own website is exponentially more valuable than a response on Bluesky, Mastodon, Instagram, or any other social media platform.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love the way that Brid.gy will send those social-media responses right back here to my own site in the form of webmentions. It also pings me whenever someone likes or shares a post of mine. But I’ve noticed that I’m not that interested in those anymore.

Maybe those low-investment actions were carried over from the old days of Twitter just because that’s the way things were always done, without us really asking whether they serve much purpose.

Right now I accept these likes and shares as webmentions. I display a tally of each kind of response under my posts. But I’m not sure why I’m doing it. I don’t particularly care about these numbers. I’m pretty sure no one else cares either.

If I cared, then they’d be vanity metrics. As it is they’re more like zombie metrics. I should probably just put them out of their misery.

I’m very happy to announce that the one and only Jake Jaffa-The-Cake Archibald will be speaking at Web Day Out!

Given the agenda for this event, I think you’ll agree that Jake is a perfect fit. He’s been at the forefront of championing user-centred web standards, writing specs and shipping features in browsers.

Along the way he’s also created two valuable performance tools that I use all the time: SVGOMG and Squoosh, which has a permanent place in my dock—if you need to compress images, I highly recommend adding this progressive web app to your desktop.

He’s the man behind service workers and view transitions—two of the most important features for making websites first-class citizens on any device.

So what will he talk about at Web Day Out? Image formats? Offline functionality? Smooth animations? Something else entirely?

All will be revealed soon. In the meantime, grab yourself a ticket to Web Day Out—it’s just £225+VAT—and I’ll see you in Brighton on Thursday, 12 March 2026!

My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)

This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.

The Lifeblood of the Web · Matthias Ott

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.

Tim recently gave a talk at Smashing Conference in New York called One Step Ahead. Based on the slides, it looks like it was an excellent talk.

Towards the end, there’s a slide that could be the tagline for Web Day Out:

Betting on the browser is our best chance at long-term success.

Most of the talk focuses on two technologies that you can add to any website with just a couple of lines of code: view transitions and speculation rules.

I’m using both of them on The Session and I can testify to their superpowers—super-snappy navigations with smooth animations.

Honestly, that takes care of 95% of the reasons for building a single-page app (the other 5% would be around managing state, which most sites—e-commerce, publishing, whatever—don’t need to bother with). Instead build a good ol’-fashioned website with pages of HTML linked together, then apply view transitions and speculation rules.

I mean, why wouldn’t you do that?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely interested in the reasons why people would reject a simple declarative solution in favour of the complexity of doing everything with a big JavaScript framework.

One reason might be browser support. After all, both view transitions and speculation rules are designed to be used as progressive enhancements, regardless of how many browsers happen to support them right now. If you want to attempt to have complete control, I understand why you might reach for the single-page app model, even if it means bloating the initial payload.

But think about that mindset for a second. Rather than reward the browsers that support modern features, you would instead be punishing them. You’d be treating every browser the same. Instead of taking advantage of the amazing features that some browsers have, you’d rather act as though they’re no different to legacy browsers.

I kind of understand the thinking behind that. You assume a level playing field by treating every browser as though they’re Internet Explorer. But what a waste! You ship tons of uneccesary code to perfectly capable browsers.

That could be the tagline for React.

I was messing about with some images on a website recently and while I was happy enough with the arrangement on large screens, I thought it would be better to have the images in a kind of carousel on smaller screens—a swipable gallery.

My old brain immediately thought this would be fairly complicated to do, but actually it’s ludicrously straightforward. Just stick this bit of CSS on the containing element inside a media query (or better yet, a container query):

display: flex;
overflow-x: auto;

That’s it.

Oh, and you can swap out overflow-x for overflow-inline if, like me, you’re a fan of logical properties. But support for that only just landed in Safari so I’d probably wait a little while before removing the old syntax.

Here’s an example using pictures of some of the lovely people who will be speaking at Web Day Out:

While you’re at it, add this:

overscroll-behavior-inline: contain;

Thats prevents the user accidentally triggering a backwards/forwards navigation when they’re swiping.

You could add some more little niceties like this, but you don’t have to:

scroll-snap-type: inline mandatory;
scroll-behavior: smooth;

And maybe this on the individual items:

scroll-snap-align: center;

You could progressively enhance even more with the new pseudo-elements like ::scroll-button() and ::scroll-marker for Chromium browsers.

Apart from that last bit, none of this is particularly new or groundbreaking. But it was a pleasant reminder for me that interactions that used to be complicated to implement are now very straightforward indeed.

Here’s another example that Ana Tudor brought up yesterday:

You have a section with a p on the left & an img on the right. How do you make the img height always be determined by the p with the tiniest bit of CSS? 😼

No changing the HTML structure in any way, no pseudos, no background declarations, no JS. Just a tiny bit of #CSS.

Old me would’ve said it can’t be done. But with a little bit of investigating, I found a nice straightforward solution:

section >  img {
  contain: size;
  place-self: stretch;
  object-fit: cover;
}

That’ll work whether the section has its display set to flex or grid.

There’s something very, very satisfying in finding a simple solution to something you thought would be complicated.

Honestly, I feel like web developers are constantly being gaslit into thinking that complex over-engineered solutions are the only option. When the discourse is being dominated by people invested in frameworks and libraries, all our default thinking will involve frameworks and libraries. That’s not good for users, and I don’t think it’s good for us either.

Of course, the trick is knowing that the simpler solution exists. The information probably isn’t going to fall in your lap—especially when the discourse is dominated by overly-complex JavaScript.

So get yourself a ticket for Web Day Out. It’s on Thursday, March 12th, 2026 right here in Brighton.

I guarantee you’ll hear about some magnificent techniques that will allow you to rip out plenty of complex code in favour of letting the browser do the work.