Tags: us

“Radharc álainn” I said. Beautiful view.

“Nach ea!” he replied. Isn’t it?

He sounded surprised to be addressed in Irish. We were, after all, very far from Erin’s shores. The beautiful view in question was of the bay of Loggos on the Greek island of Paxos. But I knew that this person was a fluent Irish speaker. That’s why I figured he wouldn’t mind a chat as Gaeilge while we were both strolling along.

I was talking with Liam Ó Maonlaí. We were both on Paxos for the same reason; the annual Irish Wings festival, a small gathering of Irish and Greek musicians. Liam was there to play. Myself and Jessica were there to listen.

Of course we were also there to soak up the sun, swim in the crystal clear water, eat Greek food, and savour the very relaxed pace of life.

We had a lovely chat with Liam and his partner Marion. I didn’t tell him that I went to see Hothouse Flowers on multiple occasions in Cork city in the 1980s. I’m sure he gets plenty of that. But I probably should’ve mentioned how much I really enjoy his programme Cuan an Cheoil. There’s nothing I like better on a Sunday afternoon than to relax with one of the black and white videos on YouTube, listening to music and conversation in Irish.

The island of Paxos is small and the village of Loggos is really small, so it wasn’t all that surprising that we’d bump into the Irish musicians there for the festival. We met Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh on the beach and again, she seemed really pleased that we spoke Irish with her. And it was also lovely to see our friend Dónal O’Connor who we’ll be seeing again very soon at his excellent Belfast Tradfest.

It was really nice to have the opportunity to speak Irish with three excellent musicians, all from different Irish-speaking regions; Liam from Dublin, Muireann from the Aran Islands and West Kerry, and Donal from the Oriel region of county Louth.

We also saw Neil Finn. I didn’t say anything to him. I don’t know if he speaks any Irish.

It started in Dublin. Myself and Jessica got there in the afternoon and I went straight to The Cobblestone in Smithfield for some tunes.

Then I went up the street to the headquarters of Na Píobairí Uilleann, a beautiful Georgian building on Henrietta Street.

I was there to deliver my talk on the making of The Session. There weren’t that many people there in person but quite a few people watched it live online. You can watch the video of the talk if you want. I’m pretty pleased with it. The few times I played some tunes on my mandolin, the acoustics were lovely!

The next day we took the train down to Cork and onwards to my home town of Cobh. The town was looking its best. The weather was nice and the Queen Anne was docked at the deep water quay.

We spent a lovely weekend hanging out with my mother, including a trip to Cork to see Michael Keegan Dolan’s latest dance piece, Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig. It was joyous! Normally I’d get irrated by someone in the seat behind me tapping their foot, but everyone was tapping along to the classic first album by The Bothy Band.

On Monday morning Jessica flew back to Brighton, leaving me to spend the week at the inaugural Irish Mandolin Gathering.

When I saw that this event was going to be happening, I thought “I’m going! Wherever it’s going to be, I’ll make my way there.” Then I saw it was happening in Little Island and I couldn’t believe my luck! Little Island is halfway between Cobh and Cork, easily reachable on the local trainline.

So I spent the week having a very pleasant commute. This was when the temperatures were getting dangerously high in England, but remained within reason in Ireland. Whenever anyone at the Mandolin gathering complained about the heat, I couldn’t help pointing out that we were actually in the coolest place in Europe for that week.

The mandolin nerdery was excellent. Lots of deep dives into technique, lots of trying out other people’s instruments, and of course, lots of playing tunes. Seán, Macdara, and Marla did a fantastic job, especially considering that this was the very first one!

The inaugural Irish Mandolin Gathering culminated with a concert at The White Horse in Ballincollig, which was excellent but every time it was mentioned, I had that John Spillane song in my head.

Now I’m back home and feeling recharged from a thoroughly enjoyable week in Ireland. Next time I’ll be there will be for a week of learning Irish at Oideas Gael in Donegal—táim ar bís!

Notes and Narratives on Vimeo

Here’s the talk I gave yesterday at Na Píobairí Uilleann in Dublin all about The Session. True to the title, I played some notes on my mandolin to accompany the narrative.

CSS Grid Lanes has started to ship in browsers. It’s in Safari and behind a flag in Chrome and Edge.

It enables masonry layouts, where items get packed together in the most efficient way possible.

Unsurprisingly, I’m a fan of a layout tool where the browser does all the hard work. It very much aligns with the idea of declarative design; you specify the boundary conditions, and then browser does the maths and heavy lifting.

There’s a handy website called The Field Guide to Grid Lanes where you can play around with possibilities.

At the most recent CSS Day, Patrick Brosset gave a great talk showing what you could do with Grid Lanes. I immediately started playing around with it, and I spotted what I think could be a useful pattern…

Over on The Session, I added a little enhancement to the events and sessions listings recently. I make a call to the Google Places API to see if I can find a match for the venue, and if I do, pull in some photos.

Sidenote: right now there’s a major issue with this. None of the photos come with text descriptions. This is something I need to fix, and I’ve got some ideas on how to do that.

Anyway, these photos are just nice-to-haves so I’ve tucked them away into a details element with a simple summary like “Ten photos” or “Twenty photos”. If you open up that details element you get the photos in a horizontal swipable row. A carousel, if you will.

This works fine, but on larger screens I think it would be okay to show all the photos at once. That’s where Grid Lanes comes in.

Take a look at an event or a session in Safari to see what I mean.

Here’s the CSS that creates a carousel:

.gallery {
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
    inline-size: fit-content;
    max-inline-size: 100%;
    overflow-inline: auto;
    scroll-snap-type: inline mandatory;
    overscroll-behavior-inline: contain;
    scroll-behavior: smooth;
    scrollbar-gutter: stable;
}
.gallery > * {
    flex-shrink: 0;
    scroll-snap-align: center;
}

And here’s the media query that turns it into a masonry layout:

@supports (display: grid-lanes) {
    @media all and (min-width: 56em) {
        .gallery {
            all: initial;
            display: grid-lanes;
            grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(280px, 1fr));
            gap: 0.5em;
        }
        .gallery > * {
            inline-size: 100%;
        }
    }
}

I’m using all: initial to unset the previous styles, which is a bit of a sledgehammer but it works.

I think this could be a useful responsive design pattern. Masonry layouts are great for large screens but kind of rubbish for small screens where you end up with just a single column. Carousels aren’t much cop on large screens but maybe have their place on small screens where real estate is at a premium.

Oh, and needless to say, this is a progressive enhancement. If a browser doesn’t yet understand display: grid-lanes it continues to get the carousel layout.

I few weeks back, I got an email with the subject line, Screenshot in an Exhibition:

I am currently developing an exhibition celebrating the thriving folk musics of these islands for the Royal College of Music Museum and one of the showcases looks at the Sharing of folk music and collections. As an incredible and heavily used repository of tune collections, I would like to print a graphic screenshot of a page from The Session to demonstrate digital dissemination, sharing and preservation of tune collections. Are you happy for me to do so?

I replied that I’d be honoured!

The exhibition opened on May 19th. I just happened to be in London a few days after that for the Gaeltacht cois Tamaise. So I arranged to have a little tour of the exhibition from its curator, Jennifer Brian.

It’s a really nice collection, and it was kind of surreal to see my website in amongst esteemed artifacts of folk music history.

I’m not used to The Session getting recognition from a museum, but I am used to getting kudos when I tell fellow trad musicians that I made the website. I joke that it’s my passport to free pints anywhere there’s a session happening, but it’s true.

The next night when I was playing in the session in the pub, Brendan The Navigator, I outed myself about halfway through the evening when I handed out some stickers for the website. Sure enough, someone immediately asked if they could buy me a pint.

I must admit it’s very gratifying when people appreciate the work that’s gone into building and maintaining The Session.

The exhibition at The Royal College of Music Museum is free and runs until October. If you’re in the neighbourhood, you should drop in and check it out.

Three things about data

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

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.

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.

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!

delphitools

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.

No logins, no registration, no data collection.

Four years ago I wrote about something that has long puzzled me in the world of front-end development. Trust:

The mindset I’ve noticed is that many developers are suspicious of browser features but trusting of third-party libraries.

Developers are more likely to trust, say, Bootstrap than they are to trust CSS grid or custom properties. Developers are more likely to trust React than they are to trust web components.

That post got some thoughtful responses but I never really understood the imbalance of trust and suspicion:

I’m kind of confused by this prevalent mindset of trusting third-party code more than built-in browser features.

But something happened recently that helped me understand that mindset better.

I wrote a while back about how the datalist element on iOS has been completely fucked up. It’s worse than if Safari simply didn’t support it.

Breaking the web like that should be a five-alarm fire, but nobody is in any rush to fix it. I recall a similar lackadaisical attitude when Safari completely broke their implentation of IndexedDB.

I had it in my head that browser features followed a forward path generally. They’d be iterated on and improved on to iron out any glitches, but it was reasonable to expect things to get better with each new version of a browser.

Now I see that’s not necessarily the case.

Had I used an over-engineered JavaScript library instead of the datalist element, I wouldn’t be facing the current situation of having to use browser-sniffing to avoid sending a standard HTML element to any browser on iOS.

Sure, that third-party JavaScript would mean that users are downloading more code, and it probably wouldn’t work well with assistive technology, but as long as I didn’t touch it, it would continue to work. That should be true of web standards—I should be able to use them secure in the knowledge that they won’t suddenly shit the bed.

Perhaps I should be grateful to Apple for dispelling my naïveté. I now have much more empathy and understanding for web developers who are suspicious of web standards and prefer to use third-party libraries instead.

Good job, Apple. Happy anniversary.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Apple at 50: my top five Apple moments

Never forget:

• The time Apple lied to the UK regulator
• The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers
• When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down
• When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath
• When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps

Progressive Web Components | Ariel Salminen

I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

People of Brighton, mark your calendars: Saturday, April 4th. That’s when Salter Cane will be playing in The Hope And Ruin.

It’s not just Salter Cane though. We’ll be joined by Skyscrapers from Lewes, and The Equatorial Group from Eastbourne. We’ve played with them before, and they’re superb!

Tickets are available now. They’re £8 in advance. It’ll be £10 on the door. So please get your ticket in advance!

Doors are at 7:30pm. Skyscrapers will be on stage at 8pm, The Equatorial group at 9pm, and Salter Cane at 10pm.

I’m really, really looking forward to rocking out playing songs from our newest album and I would love it if you could make it.

See you there!

I am in an abusive relationship with the technology industry

The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve used the web install API in production. Specifically, I’ve used it on The Session. In order to do that, I had to register for the origin trial.

I’ve just signed up for another origin trial. This time it’s for the proposed focusgroup attribute:

The focusgroup HTML attribute is a proposed declarative way to add keyboard arrow-key navigation to composite widgets such as toolbars, tablists, menus, listboxes, etc. without writing any roving-tabindex JavaScript. One attribute replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate.

I’ve got an HTML web component on The Session called tab-controls. And yes, there’s a bunch of code in there to listen for keyboard events and respond appropriately. I would very much like to rip that code out.

So now that I’ve opted into the origin trial, I’ve added this to my HTML:

<tab-controls role="tablist" focusgroup="tablist">

If this focusgroup attribute takes off, I’ll be able to remove the role attribute but for now, it’s very much needed.

In the JavaScript for my tab-controls custom element, I need to be able to detect support for focusgroup. Here’s how I’m doing it:

if (!this.focusgroup) {
// do all my key handling stuff here
}

Here’s the important thing: don’t use getAttribute('focusgroup') to test for browser support. That will return true if the attribute is in the HTML. But the attribute will only get converted into a property if the browser understands it.

Jake has a lot more detail on the differences between attributes and properties.

Anyway, I figured I’d share that little snippet in case you too were interested in trying out the focusgroup proposal using progressive enhancement.

The Artisanal Web | Another Rodeo

I feel very seen here. This describes how I built The Session:

There are still people building the web by hand, very much like we did it in the early days. They know all about what’s possible using modern tooling, yet they choose to expend their time and attention to the craft of doing it by hand. They care about the craft, and they care about what they’re making. They believe in their unique skill and vision over engagement strategies and analytics and content algorithms. They don’t need a platform, or they’ll build their own.

Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This knocked me for six when I read it back in 2022:

It’s like a slow-building sucker punch.

Like my other favourite book of that year—A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—it’s hard to classify. I think it’s autofiction. Not quite autobiography. Not quite fiction.

Will There Ever Be Another You is also autofiction. I think. It might also be poetry (which shouldn’t be surprising as Patricia Lockwood is a poet after all).

I can’t say that this one had the same emotional impact of No One Is Talking About This for me but then again, very little could.

The writing feels very impressionistic, with each chapter trying on a different mode. It’s kinda Joycean …if James Joyce was stuck indoors during a global pandemic.

The narrative—such as it is—revolves around The Situation from 2020 onwards. That was a surreal bizarre time so it makes sense that this is a surreal bizarre book.

I think I liked it. I can’t quite tell. I just let the language wash over me.

It’s the 25th of February and it’s a beautiful day here in Brighton. I had lunch sitting outside—that’s how unseasonably warm it is. Like a little whiff of Summer to remind us of what’s yet to come.

It’s also my birthday. The beautiful weather is an auspicious augery.

Mozilla also released a new version of Firefox. I was hoping for cross-document view transitions and scroll-driven animations for my birthday, but alas I may have to wait another year.

Later, Jessica is going to take me out for some excellent Japanese food before we head on to a session in a cosy pub. I can think of no better way to celebrate my birthday than playing a rake of jigs and reels.

I’m 55 now. It feels like a meaningful number. I think I’ve moved down an option in the select menus that ask for your age range.

I got letters in the post from my pension provider reminding me that 55 is the age when you can technically start taking money out of your pension. Something that retired people do.

I have to admit, this birthday has me entertaining retirement options. I’m already down to just three days a week. It wouldn’t take much to wind that down over the next few years. There’d be even more opportunities to savour the sunshine on a sunny day.

Anyway. Just pondering. You know, the kind of thoughts a 55-year old has.