Adactio

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

The conference circuit is in a slump these days. That won’t change as long as people don’t buy tickets. And a good conference circuit is typically something that you start to miss only when it’s too late. adactio.com/links/22518

Not sure I buy the argument here, though I do very much look forward to local language models getting better so we can ditch the predatory peddlars of today’s slop. But this trip down memory lane to the early web of the 1990s could’ve been describing my own experience: But the thing I do remember was the first time I came across Derek Powazek’s Fray online magazine. It was the first time I had seen a website look beautiful. This was without CSS and without Javascript. I still remember qu...

There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules. But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if ...

This looks very handy! Add any public account from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, X, TikTok or YouTube to quickly get a feed for your favorite reader. Bonus: Add any website to quickly grab its existing feed as well. adactio.com/links/22506

Never forget: The time Apple lied to the UK regulator The time when Apple told the EU that Safari is 3 different browsers When Apple tried to shut the UK investigation down When Apple’s VP of Finance got caught lying under oath When Apple tried to wreck all EU Web Apps adactio.com/links/22505

My wish is coming true! adactio.com/links/22504