Links

Why we teach our students progressive enhancement | Blog Cyd Stumpel

Progressive enhancement is about building something robust, that works everywhere, and then making it better where possible.

NoLoJS: Reducing the JS Workload with HTML and CSS - Web Performance Calendar

You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.

While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.

Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.

Blog Alarm Clock | Brad Frost

See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.

Coming Soon · Gaeltacht Type

👀

Tá sceitimíní orm!

Dissent | blarg

I suppose it’s not clear to me what a ‘good’ window into unreliable, systemically toxic systems accomplishes, or how it changes anything that matters for the better, or what that idea even means at all. I don’t understand how “ethical AI” isn’t just “clean coal” or “natural gas.” The power of normalization as four generations are raised breathing low doses of aerosolized neurotoxins; the alternative was called “unleaded”, but the poison was called “regular gas”.

There’s a real technology here, somewhere. Stochastic pattern recognition seems like a powerful tool for solving some problems. But solving a problem starts at the problem, not working backwards from the tools.

AI CEO – Replace Your Boss Before They Replace You

Delivering total nonsense, with complete confidence.

Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That’s it.

That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.

The Jeopardy Phenomenon – Chris Coyier

AI has the Jeopardy Phenomenon too.

If you use it to generate code that is outside your expertise, you are likely to think it’s all well and good, especially if it seems to work at first pop. But if you’re intimately familiar with the technology or the code around the code it’s generating, there is a good chance you’ll be like hey! that’s not quite right!

Not just code. I’m astounded by the cognitive dissonance displayed by people who say “I asked an LLM about {topic I’m familiar with}, and here’s all the things it got wrong” who then proceed to say “It was really useful when I asked an LLM for advice on {topic I’m not familiar with, hence why I’m asking an LLM for advice}.”

Like, if you know that the results are super dodgy for your own area of expertise, why would you think they’d be any better for, I don’t know, restaurant recommendations in a city you’ve never been to?

The Web Runs On Tolerance – Terence Eden’s Blog

Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.

I’m speaking at Web Day Out 2026 - Manuel Matuzovic

The core idea of the event is to get you up to speed on the most powerful web platform features that you can use right now. I love that because it aligns perfectly with what I’ve been working on over the last couple of years: finding ways to break old habits to get the most out of CSS.

Can’t wait!

The only winning move is not to play

My mind boggles at the thought of using a generative tool based on a large language model to do any kind of qualatitive user research, so every single thing that Gregg says here makes complete sense to me.

Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia

Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins

I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.

On not choosing nice versions of AI – This day’s portion

Whenever anyone states that “AI is the future, so…” or “many people are using AI anyway, so…” they are not only expressing an opinion — they‘re shaping that future.

Web development tip: disable pointer events on link images

Here’s a little snippet of CSS that solves a problem I’ve never considered:

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

The Instagram Mothers - The Offing

A short piece of speculative fiction.

CSS-in-JS: The Great Betrayal of Frontend Sanity - The New Stack

This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:

CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.

Belfast TradFest | Traditional Music Belfast

Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!

The line and the stream. — Ethan Marcotte

I’ve come to realize that statements about the future aren’t predictions: they’re more like spells. When someone describes something to you as the future, they’re sharing a heartfelt belief that this something will be part of whatever comes next. “Artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere” quite literally involves casting a technology forward into time. How could that be anything else but a kind of magic?

Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity — Den Odell

React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.

Real talk!

Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.

Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.

Zing!

The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.

If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.

Resonance | James’ Coffee Blog

Ah, the circle of life!