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.
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!
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!
This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.
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
sectionwith apon the left & animgon the right. How do you make theimgheight always be determined by thepwith 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.
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
If you work at a clever company, then you should let them know about sponsoring Web Day Out.
All the details are in this PDF sponsorship pack. Basically there are three (and only three) spots available, at three different levels of sponsorship.
One of the best things about the venue for Web Day Out is that always having an excellent auditorium, the Studio Theatre has a really nice space for the breaks. It would be the perfect spot to set up a stand and chat with all the smart attendees.
All the attendees will, by definition, be smart because they got tickets for Web Day Out—a steal at just £225+VAT.
I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out!
Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already.
There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that Harry is going to give…
Earlier this year, Harry posted a most excellent screed in which he said:
The web as a platform is a safe bet. It’s un-versioned by design. That’s the commitment the web makes to you—take advantage of it.
- Opt into web platform features incrementally;
- Embrace progressive enhancement to build fast, reliable applications that adapt to your customers’ context;
- Write code that leans into the browser, not away from it.
Yes! Exactly!
Thing is, Harry posted this on LinkedIn. My indieweb sensibilities were affronted. So I harangued him:
You should blog this, Harry
My pestering paid off with an excellent blog post on Harry’s own site called Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web:
The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.
That’s a pretty neat summation of the agenda for Web Day Out. So I thought, “Hmm …if I was able to pester Harry to turn a LinkedIn post into a really good blog post, I wonder if I could pester him to turn that blog post into a talk?”
I threw down the gauntlet. Harry accepted the challenge.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Harry’s excellent work, but if you’re not, he’s basically Mr. Web Performance. That’s why I’m so excited to have him speak at Web Day Out—I want to hear the business case for leaning into what web browsers can do today, and he is most certainly the best person to bring receipts.
You won’t want to miss this, so be sure to get your ticket now; it’s only £225+VAT.
If you’re not ready to commit just yet, but you want to hear about more speaker announcements like this, you can sign up to the mailing list.
Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking gorgeous.
I really like the categories he’s got for his blog.
Half of the line-up of speakers for Web Day Out is already on the site. One more is already confirmed.
I’m ridiculously excited about the way the line-up is taking shape, and judging by the zippiness of ticket sales, so are lots of my peers. Seriously, don’t wait to get your ticket or you might end up missing out completely.
I’ve already got a shortlist of other people I could imagine on the line-up, but I’m open to more suggestions. If you’d like to speak at Web Day Out—or you know someone you think would be great—send an email to jeremy@clearleft.com
I won’t be checking my work email while I’m away on holiday next week but it would be lovely to come back to an inbox of exciting suggestions.
A couple of pointers…
I’d rather not have too many people like me on the line-up. White dudes are already over-represented in this industry, especially at conferences.
If you’ve never given a talk before, don’t worry. I’d love to help you put your talk together and coach you in presenting it. I have some experience in this area.
No product pitches. That includes JavaScript frameworks and CSS libraries.
If I get even a whiff of “AI”, your proposal doesn’t stand a chance. There are many, many, many other events that are only too happy to have wall-to-wall talks about …that sort of thing.
If you end up speaking at Web Day Out you will, of course, be paid. We will, of course, cover travel and accommodation too. We can’t afford the travel costs of bringing anyone in from outside Europe though (and we’d like to keep the carbon footprint of the event as small as possible).
Web Day Out has an opinionated agenda all about showing what’s possible in web browsers today. Some potential topics include:
The emphasis should be on using stuff in production rather than theoretical demos.
If you’ve got a case study about using the web platform—perhaps migrating away from a framework-driven approach—that would fit the bill perfectly.
How’s all that sounding? Know someone who could deliver the goods? Let me know!
I’m going to cut right to the chase: Clearleft is putting on a brand new conference in 2026. It’s called Web Day Out. It’ll be on Thursday, March 12th right here in Brighton. Tickets are just £225+VAT. You should be there!
If you’ve ever been to Responsive Day Out or Patterns Day, the format will be familiar to you. There’s going to be eight 30 minute talks. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Like those other one-day conferences, this one has a laser-sharp focus.
Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There will be no talks about libraries, frameworks or build tools, and I can guarantee there will be absolutely no so-called “AI”.
As you might have gathered, this is an opinionated conference.
If you care about performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, Web Day Out is the event for you.
Or if you’ve been living in React-land but starting to feel that maybe you’re missing out on what’s been shipping in web browsers, Web Day Out is the event for you too. And I’m not talking about cute demos here. This is very much about shipping to production.
I’ve got half of the line-up assembled already:
Jemima’s talk gives you a flavour of what to expect at Web Day Out:
In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.
Web Day Out will be in The Studio Theatre of the Brighton Dome, which is a fantastic intimate venue. That means that places are limited, so get your ticket now!
There’s really good browser support for display-mode media queries and this article does a really good job of running through some of the use cases for your progressive web app.
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.
There was a time when you needed to make a native app in order to take advantage of specific technologies. That time has passed.
Now you can do all of these things on the web:
Take a look at the home screen on your phone. Looking at the apps you’ve downloaded from an app store, ask yourself how many of them could’ve been web apps.
Social media apps, airline apps, shopping apps …none of them are using technologies that aren’t widely available on the web.
“But”, you might be thinking, “it feels different having a nice icon on my homescreen that launches a standalone app compared to navigating to a bookmark in my web browser.”
I agree! And you can do that with a web app. All it takes the addition of one manifest file that lists which icons and colours to use.
If that file exists for a website, then once the user adds the website to their homescreen it will behave just like native app.
Try it for yourself. Go to instagram.com in your mobile browser and it to your homescreen (on the iPhone, you get to the “add to home screen” option from the sharing icon—scroll down the list of options to find it).
See how it’s now an icon on your home screen just like all your other apps? Tap that icon to see how it launches just like a native app with no browser chrome around it.
This doesn’t just work on mobile. Desktop browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Safari also allow you to install web apps straight from the browser and into your dock.
About half of the icons in my dock are actually web apps and I honestly can’t tell which is which. Mastodon, Instagram, Google Calendar, Google Docs …I’m sure most of those services are available as downloadable desktop apps, but why would I bother doing that when I get exactly the same experience by adding the sites to my dock?
From a business perspective, it makes so much sense to build a web app (or simply turn your existing website into a web app with the addition of a manifest file). No need for separate iOS or Android developer teams. No need to play the waiting game with updates to your app in the app store—on the web, updates are instant.
You can even use an impressive-sounding marketing term for this approach: progressive web apps:
A Progressive Web App (PWA) is a web app that uses progressive enhancement to provide users with a more reliable experience, uses new capabilities to provide a more integrated experience, and can be installed. And, because it’s a web app, it can reach anyone, anywhere, on any device, all with a single codebase. Once installed, a PWA looks like any other app, specifically:
- It has an icon on the home screen, app launcher, launchpad, or start menu.
- It appears when you search for apps on the device.
- It opens in a standalone window, wholly separated from a browser’s user interface.
- It has access to higher levels of integration with the OS, for example, URL handling or title bar customization.
- It works offline.
But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore to install their app from the app store.
If that’s not a priority for you, then you can differentiate yourself from your competitors by offering your users a progressive web app. Instead of having links to Apple and Google’s app stores, you can link to a page on your own site with installation instructions.
I can guarantee you that users won’t be able to tell the difference between a native app they installed from an app store and a web app they’ve added to their home screen.