An excellent interview!
From deleted government records to disappearing music, our digital culture can be erased overnight. The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham and Chris Freeland explain what it will take to save it.
This is beautifully written.
I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!
So instead of asking “why not React?” we asked: Which of our actual problems would React solve? We went through the list. There were none.
Also, this is good advice when you’re about to make a web component:
Every component starts with the question “does a semantic element already exist for this?”, and remarkably often the answer is yes.
A history of front-end development that culminates here:
The frontier of 2026, the stuff the sharpest people are most excited about, is render the HTML on the server, ship almost no JavaScript, and use the web platform instead of fighting it.
Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.
Alex takes issue with my post giving kudos to Apple for concentrating on bugfixes in the latest version of Safari, and he brings receipts. He makes a very compelling case, backed up with data.
But when it comes to Chrome’s shipping of the half-baked prompt API, I’m not sure he gets just how badly it has soured the developer community’s feelings towards Google. This isn’t something to be countered with data; it’s much more visceral than that. Alex says:
So if Jeremy has a problem with specific features, I hope he’ll come to us with a critique of their qualities, rather than their optics.
In this case though, the optics are really, really, really bad.
I saw Josh give this talk at CSS Day. It’s a very useful explanation of the forthcoming text-scale addition to the meta element, and what you can do to prepare your site now.
Nothing about the current trajectory of AI development is inevitable. It was shaped by the thousands of subjective decisions of a tiny elite, and continues its march based on the active participation and tacit consent of people globally.
Put the kettle on. Marcin has another magnum opus on interaction design for you to read …and interact with.
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.
This is excellent advice and I’m glad to see this getting addressed nice and early in the era of customisable select elements:
always provide text content or accessible text attributes for your option elements.
Storied Colors is a catalogue of named colors — pigments, dyes, lakes, glazes, and a small number of digital hues — each accompanied by the documentary evidence required to call it by its name. The launch corpus opens at two hundred and fifty entries. It is maintained as a single-author project.
This is a great case study featuring a really useful HTML web component called validation-enhancer.
The results? When we launched, the number of people completing the form doubled. The analytics people didn’t even know where these users were coming from. Of course, your javascript-based analytics package doesn’t see the users you are bouncing because of javascript failures. It was a flood!
This is a very handy playground for exploring the brand new masonry grid lanes layout.
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.
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.
- Data is a risk.
- Data is distracting.
- It becomes a job.
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.
We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy.
Like Bruce Sterling always says:
Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.