article vs. section: How To Choose The Right One — Smashing Magazine

I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium

I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.

And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:

At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.

The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.

This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.

Page Embedded Permission Control (` permission ` element)

This is an interesting proposal for a declarative way of triggering permission dialogs, although it seems to overlap with the work being done on invokers (command and commandfor).

What really disgusts me is to see Google referring to this element as though it’s a done deal. It’s not. It’s a proposal …a proposal that Apple rejects and Mozilla rejects.

Words matter. Call your proposal a proposal, Google.

Update: They fixed it!

Cool native HTML elements you should already be using · Harrison Broadbent

dialog, details, datalist, progress, optgroup, and more:

If this article helps just a single developer avoid an unnecessary Javascript dependency, I’ll be happy. Native HTML can handle plenty of features that people typically jump straight to JS for (or otherwise over-complicate).

Building WebSites With LLMS - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S).

I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

una.im | Updates to the customizable select API

It’s great to see the evolution of HTML happening in response to real use-cases—the turbo-charging of the select element just gets better and better!