Adactio

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…

AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem: Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly nullDead perfection; no more adactio.com/links/22565

You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company. adactio.com/links/22563

Fixed an issue on iOS and iPadOS where datalist suggestions were presented directly over the associated input, obscuring it. Phew! adactio.com/links/22562

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…

Eight years ago, I asked some questions. Here are some answers. adactio.com/links/22549

This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do. The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways. adactio.com/links/22548

FOMO is a feeling. But it’s also a business model—and increasingly, one of the more successful ones. Fear, in general, makes people much easier to separate from their money. It’s perfectly suited to this moment of ubiquitous grift, where everything feels like a lottery ticket or a multi-level marketing scheme. It’s even more perfectly suited for “the age of AI,” which squeezes economic FOMO from both sides. AI could make you wildly rich (the first person to start a billion-dollar company with…

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be! adactio.com/links/22539

This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image? adactio.com/links/22538

Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages. adactio.com/links/22537

Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go: At its core, form-saver is a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values in localStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by. adactio.com/links/22535

In 1958, Mao ordered every village in China to produce steel. Farmers melted down their cooking pots in backyard furnaces and reported spectacular numbers. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Thirty million people starved. In 2026, every other company is having top down mandate on AI transformation. Same energy. adactio.com/links/22520