Archive: April, 2026

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!

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 absolutely right.

But…

Have you ever clicked on a result from a search engine? Unless you’re lucky enough to land on a nice personal website, you’re more than likely to be confronted with pop-ups to allow tracking, or a desparate plea to subscribe to a newsletter, or just rubbish ads all accompanied by a slow page loading somewhere in the mix.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that what Google is doing is okay. But let’s not pretend that everything indexed by Google is just fine and dandy for people to visit.

And of course the main reason why websites are so terrible is because they’ve tied their business model to heaps of behavioral advertising driven by invasive tracking courtesy of …Google.

This reminds me of AMP. Remember Google AMP? It was a terrible solution to a real problem. Web pages were (and still are) bloated and slow. The correct solution would be to encourage people to fix that, but instead Google mandated a proprietary format for your content that had to be hosted on their servers.

AMP was a disaster, both in practical terms and in the reputational damage it did to Google’s developer relations.

Now they’re doing it again, powerwashing away any goodwill they ever had with site owners. Now Google doesn’t even send search engine traffic to the websites that host the ads that Google encouraged people to put on every page.

It’s almost as if Google is a company so large and with so many competing interests that it now suffers from an incurable split personality disorder.

Personally I think they’re missing a trick. They should be using “AI” summaries as a stick.

If your site is slow, or filled with user-hostile annoyances then it should be cockblocked by a hallucinated summary. But a nice fast respectful website? Send the traffic their way! Everyone wins—users, site owners, Google, the World Wide Web.

Could you imagine how quickly this would revolutionise the world of search engine optimisation? They’ve always told us that we should make websites for humans in order to get good Google juice. This would be a way of making it come true, without any of the over-engineered woefulness of AMP.

It’ll never happen of course. But I can dream.

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?

Alistair Davidson / validation-enhancer · GitLab

Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.

Expansion artifacts || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.

Never Lose Form Progress Again :: Aaron Gustafson

Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:

At its core, form-saver is a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values in localStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.

Nothing can travel faster than light. And if you manage to travel close to the speed of light, things get weird.

Technically, we all experience time differently depending on how fast or slow we’re moving. But the differences are so imperceptible as to be non-existent. That’s how we can describe events as being “simultaneous”, even though according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, there’s no such thing.

It’s thanks to these small relativistic effects that GPS works. But when you approach the speed of light—or get close to something very massive—then the large-scale relativistic effects kick in.

If you travel close to the speed of light for a short time, it will seem like a much longer time to everyone you left behind. This is the twin paradox, which isn’t really a parodox at all, just time dilation in action.

There are some coincidental parallels to this kind of time dilation in old folk tales.

The Japanese tale of Urashima Tarō tells of a fisherman who rescues a sea turtle and is rewarded with a relaxing few days in an underwater kingdom, only to find that when he returns home to his village, 300 years have passed.

The Irish tale of Oisín describes the warrior’s journey to Tir na nÓg, the land of youth. He spends three years there but when he returns to Éire to see his old fighting comrades from the Fianna, 300 years have passed.

This story gives us a wonderfully poetic turn of phrase that’s still used today. The closest English equivalent is “Billy no mates”, a rather cruel term to describe someone with no friends. In Irish, we say:

Mar Oisín i ndiadh na Fianna

Like Oisín after the Fianna.

After reading The Morrigan I was hungry for more retellings of Irish myths and legends. I tracked down the 1994 novel Finn Mac Cool by Morgan Llywelyn.

When I was devouring modern retellings of Greek myths, I commented on an interesting difference in the tellings:

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

The Morrigan was dripping in magic. Finn Mac Cool is a more down-to-earth affair.

That’s not to say that magic doesn’t matter. For the characters in this book, their belief in magic is as real as their belief in the weather. But there are no supernatural powers here. If anything, Finn’s superpower is his ability to tell—and believe—tall tales involving supernatural intervention.

All the usual accounts of Finn Mac Cool’s prowess are retold as deeds that may have a basis in reality but then get exaggerated almost immediately.

It’s a framing device that works well. It’s all too easy to believe in the rise to power of a charismatic man skilled in controlling the narrative.

There’s plenty of Machievellian politics at play. There are no outright villains, or even heroes. There’s a pleasing messiness to the forces at work.

Sometimes the author’s research shows a bit too much. There are digressions into explanations of Brehon law that threaten to derail the narrative.

Overall though, this is an engaging and vivid retelling that just makes me want to spend more time in this world.

People talk about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of large language models as though all tasks are comparable. But it strikes me that there are three broad categories of work that large language models are applied to:

1. Compression.
2. Transformation.
3. Expansion.

Compression is when you feed a large language model something big that you want to make small. Summarise this book. Give me the gist of this meeting. Large language models are generally pretty good at this, which makes sense given that they themselves are kind of like compressed artifacts.

Transformation is when large language models convert from one format into another. Turn this audio into text. Turn this jumble of data into structured JSON. A large language model can handle these tasks pretty well. There’ll probably be a few errors so make sure that’s not a deal-breaker.

Expansion is when you give a large language model a prompt to generate something from scratch. An image. A presentation. An email. A poem. This is where slop lives. The output inevitably betrays its origins, glistening with a sheen of mediocrity.

Laurie spotted this three-way split a while back:

Is what you’re doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it’s probably going to be great at it. If you’re asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you’re asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.

I hope that when the bubble finally bursts, we’ll see the surviving large language models put to work on the first two categories. The boring stuff. The work that’s tedious for humans.

But tedious is as tedious does. Something I consider drudgery might be the very thing that gives you life. Like Giles says:

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.

The big exception seems to be programming. Apparently there are plenty of coders who never before expressed an interest in being managers who are now happily hanging up their coding spurs in favour being the overseer of non-human workers.

It’s a reasonable outlook. It could even be considered a user-centred approach. Users don’t care about the elegance of your code; they care about accomplishing their tasks.

Programming is something of an exception to the efficacy of large language models in general. Instead of relying on the subjectivity of painting, poetry, or prose, programming can be objectively tested. Throw enough money at the worst people in the world and they’ll give you tokens you can use to get the machines to test their own output. So you can get a large language model to create something reasonably good from scratch as long as that something is code.

If you had asked me about the threat model of large language models two years ago, I probably would’ve been worried for artists, writers, and musicians. I thought that software had enough inherent complexity to be relatively safe.

Now my opinion has completely reversed. Software is almost certainly the killer app for large language models.

I think the artists, writers, and musicians will be okay, or at least as okay as they ever were. It turns out that humans like things made by other humans.

And y’know what? If I had to choose which endeavour I’d rather see automated away—programming or art—it’s no competition.

Don’t get me wrong—it would be nice if everyone got paid for doing what they enjoy. It’s just that I’m okay with software engineers not being at the front of that line.

I remember when I first started getting paid money to make websites. “Really?” I thought, “Someone is willing to pay me to do something I’d do anyway?” I kept waiting for the jig to be up. Instead I saw my profession grow and expand.

Perhaps there’s a long-overdue compression happening.

Or maybe it’s more like a transformation.

Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott

A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.

No-stack web development – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

A stack is also technical debt, non-transferable knowledge, accelerated obsolescence, and vendor lock-in. That means fragility and overall unnecessary complication. Popular stacks inevitably turn into cargo cults that build in spite of the web, not for it.

The web platform does not require build toolchains. Always default to, and regress to, the fundamentals of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Those core standards are the web stack.

delphitools

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

No logins, no registration, no data collection.

The AI Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved.

In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation.

Same energy.

Times are tough out there. I know that a lot of people are looking for work, which can be a very stressful experience.

One of the things that can make the job search stressful is uncertainty. There’s a real taboo around talking about salaries. This taboo ends up benefiting employers and punishing potential employees. There’s an information gap that can be exploited (see also: job postings that don’t list salary ranges).

That’s why I’m always pleased when people voluntarily share their income. Here are some of the people who have done this over the years:

• Dan Mall (US)
• Alistair Hey (UK)
• Jamie Tanna (UK)
• Tom Withers (UK)
• Matt Brunt (UK)
• Carolina Gilabert (UK)
• Xe Iaso (Canada)
• Kristófer Reykjalín (Canada/US/Iceland)

Because the jobs are generally in software or design, you can sort of make apples-to-apples comparisons. You can definitely get the general gist of what kind of salary to expect for certain roles.

In the interest of full transparency, I figured I’d share my own income numbers, though as you’ll see, they’re not very representative of a normal career:

• 2003: £15,434 (freelance)
• 2004: £15,900 (freelance)
• 2005: £14,125 (freelance)
• 2006: £43,009 (freelance/Clearleft)
• 2007: £34,900 (Clearleft)
• 2008: £33,833 (Clearleft)
• 2009: £35,549 (Clearleft)
• 2010: £37,174 (Clearleft)
• 2011: £40,666 (Clearleft)
• 2012: £39,750 (Clearleft)
• 2013: £39,500 (Clearleft)
• 2014: £48,655 (Clearleft)
• 2015: £46,499 (Clearleft)
• 2016: £52,106 (Clearleft)
• 2017: £56,492 (Clearleft)
• 2018: £59,498 (Clearleft)
• 2019: £59,670 (Clearleft)
• 2020: £43,807 (Clearleft)
• 2021: £48,344 (Clearleft)
• 2022: £60,446 (Clearleft)
• 2023: £55,721 (Clearleft)
• 2024: £47,104 (Clearleft)
• 2025: £42,133 (Clearleft)

The first thing you’ll notice is that agency work isn’t nearly as well paid as in-house work at a technology company. So don’t embrace agency life for the money. Speaking personally, the benefits are in autonomy and variety. Those are things I value highly.

Also, I haven’t put any job titles or levels on there because they’ve never really been codified for me. I just made up my own job titles as I went along. Again, this is not very helpful to you if you’re looking for a job at a typical company.

You’ll see that things got weird in 2020, which is to be expected because things did get weird in 2020. I was furloughed, and I also took some more time off. I got a taste for it, which is why I went down to a four-day week and later a three-day week, which is what I’m doing now. So those last five years of numbers are loopy—I’m making less than before, but if you were to adjust it for a five-day week, I’m still getting paid more than before …if that makes sense.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about my career trajectory is that I’ve been at the same place for twenty years now. That’s pretty much unheard of in tech. It’s far more usual to see people switch companies—and get a salary bump—every couple of years.

So I’m not sure if there’s any value in me sharing my numbers like this. But like I said, I admire when other people do it so I figured I’d throw mine out there.

Perhaps you’d like to share your numbers too.

Conference organising in 2026 - QuirksBlog

The conference circuit is in a slump these days. That won’t change as long as people don’t buy tickets. And a good conference circuit is typically something that you start to miss only when it’s too late.

Sometimes I look back through my blogging archives and notice what’s changed over time.

For example, I used to write quite enthusiastically about the arrival of a new operating system from Apple. That is no longer the case, to put it mildly. I’m currently holed up on Sequioa, trying to resist all the nudgings to “upgrade” to the tacky design nightmare that is Tahoe. I feel like the protagonist of Pluribus.

I used to write about software I really liked. Sometimes it was software made by Apple. More often it was from some independent developer.

Like, I remember how much I loved a little application called Quicksilver. It just did one thing. You pressed control and space and then started typing the name of any programme installed on your computer. After a few characters Quicksilver would show you the match, you hit enter and the programme launched.

If that process sounds familiar, it’s because Apple ended up incorporating it into their own Spotlight feature. Quicksilver got sherlocked (ask your parents).

Recently though, Spotlight got worse and worse at doing its one job. It’s been laggy and inaccurate, even though I set my Spotlight indexing options to only index the Applications folder.

Then I found TinyStart. It’s like Quicksilver reborn!

A tiny launcher for macOS, fast and focused on the essentials.

Actually, it does double duty. As well as being an application launcher, it’s also an emoji picker. 👍

Best of all, not only is TinyStart a return to the focus and quality of software of yore, it’s also a return to the pricing model. You buy the software—for a measly €5—and that’s it. You own it now. There’s no subscription you have to pay every month.

I love everything about this.

AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web | Techdirt

Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience:

But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember quite clearly an “issue” of Fray that used frames to create some kind of “doors” you could slide open to reveal an article inside.

Fray was what made me want to make websites:

I distinctly remember sites like prehensile tales, 0sil8 and the inimitable Fray triggering something in my brain that made me realise what it was I wanted to do with my life.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.: Taggart Tech

There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if their day-to-day work is nothing but the babysitting of models? How will they gain the hard-won experience that allows a human in the loop to be a useful safeguard?

These models alter cognition in ways deleterious to human prosperity. In other words, for as much output as they provide, they take something important from us.

Web Day Out - 12 March 2026 — Polytechnic

This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.

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.

ByeDoom — Give a Link → Get a Feed

This looks very handy!

Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed for your favorite reader.

Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well.

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

[css-forms-1] Include fieldset and legend · Issue #11983 · w3c/csswg-drafts

My wish is coming true!

CSS or BS?

We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it’s real or if we made it up. That’s it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy.