Adactio

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of…

A fascinating essay by Celine Nguyen on the history of taste; not changing tastes but the very concept of taste throughout history. adactio.com/links/22748

Seams! Mark Weiser, the person who framed ubiquitous computing, never said the goal was seamless. He warned that making everything seamless is the same as making everything uniform, and he argued for seamful systems, ones that let each part remain itself. Chalmers and MacColl turned this into a full design position: questioning the assumption that seamlessness is a requirement, and arguing that visible seams can be useful, even appropriated by people for their own ends. adactio.com/links/22746

Amid the dying embers, a resilient cohort of indie web bloggers, artists and creators will keep going, keep on talking to each other through their blogs, without tracking, pop-ups or invasive ads. Making fun websites, helpful websites, pointless websites (the best kind) that serve no purpose other than to manifest someone’s spark of creativity. Ignored by the lumbering giants that have gorged themselves into a stupor, keeping low under the radar of the hungry LLM crawlers eager to voraciously…

CSS finally gave the web its own grain. And the real crazy part is that my bad decades-old code still renders fine in today’s latest web browsers! I would be sad if it didn’t, but I also wouldn’t be surprised. How is this stuff still backwards compatible!? How much of your software from 20 years ago runs on your devices today adactio.com/links/22742

I try to keep on doing what I do in order to stay sane. I keep on teaching about the wonderful web to my students, even if nobody will ever hire a talented, creative, junior developer again. I keep on teaching about the consequences of the open web, even if it’s harder and harder to find anything open in this monopolised web anymore. And I do that because I still care. adactio.com/links/22737

Ag fanacht… adactio.com/links/22735

For me, libraries are about books. Worlds undiscovered, ideas to devour. But they are so much more. For others they offer a lifeline. A place to learn, to connect with the community, to access vital resources. They have meant all these things to me over the years. adactio.com/links/22733

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML. adactio.com/links/22726

The story of Fray: In the earliest days of the web, Derek Powazek set out to create a website meant for sharing. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; this was the website that made me want to make websites. adactio.com/links/22723

The unveiling ceremony is scheduled for September 29th: The Milestone plaque recognizing Colossus is to be displayed outside Block H at Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, England. The plaque is to read: Six Colossus codebreaking computers operated in this building in 1944–1945. Designed by Thomas H. Flowers of the British Post Office, they enabled deciphering of encrypted radio messages transmitted between German commands across occupied Europe, North Africa, and the Soviet Union. The…

Exactly one of these ridiculously deep holes in the Earth is dug by hand. It’s about 2 miles from my house. adactio.com/links/22710

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. adactio.com/links/22660

This is beautifully written. adactio.com/links/22659

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. adactio.com/links/22652

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. adactio.com/links/22650

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. adactio.com/links/22644

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. adactio.com/links/22635

Put the kettle on. Marcin has another magnum opus on interaction design for you to read …and interact with. adactio.com/links/22633

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. adactio.com/links/22625

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. adactio.com/links/22620

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. adactio.com/links/22618

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! adactio.com/links/22612

This is a very handy playground for exploring the brand new masonry grid lanes layout. adactio.com/links/22606

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…

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. adactio.com/links/22589

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. adactio.com/links/22572

We’ve seen this arc before, and music is the richest analogy. Like Bruce Sterling always says: Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody. adactio.com/links/22571

Last year Jeremy Keith blogged about completing Duolingo Irish, and I’ve added that as a goal for myself. I found myself in London with him in February at State of the Browser. It’s probably the last place you’d expect to hear Irish spoken, yet we had an earnest conversation over lunch, using as much as we could. Having a proper conversation as Gaeilge with Paul was an absolute highlight for me! adactio.com/links/22568

The browser is the security boundary. Websites operate within it. Native apps bypass it. Like I said last year: 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. This piece goes into the details: Most native apps collect far more…