So keep things simple. Build to standards. Use progressive enhancement. Don’t try to send wheelbarrows full of JavaScript down the pipes unless you have to. Don’t make assumptions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Safari 27 and Chrome 148.
How Apple’s penchant for breaking the web has given me more empathy towards developers who are suspicious of the web platform.
An excellent day of talks in Brighton exactly 37 years after the birth of the World Wide Web.
The line-up is now complete and you don’t want to miss this!
Web browsers provide you with great features for free. Why would you choose to use tools that stop you taking advantage of that?