Adactio

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

We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it’s real or if we made it up. That’s it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy. adactio.com/links/22501

Web development follows a familiar cycle. First we glue together a solution with whatever we have — JavaScript, image hacks, Flash, anything. Then the platform matures, and CSS or HTML eventually makes that same workaround native. Rounded corners, custom fonts, smooth scrolling, sticky positioning: all of these started as JavaScript-heavy hacks before CSS turned them into a single declaration. We are in another one of those transition moments. A new wave of long-requested CSS feature...

I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that? A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating. adactio.com/links/22491

I can’t remember the last time a blog post resonated with me this much. Craig’s criteria on his job search: One: fuck offices Two: fuck AI Three: fuck React And his conclusion: Fuck work adactio.com/links/22490

This is a guide to how to be a web developer. Really good advice from Laurie. What this site is not is a tutorial. Tutorials are very specific to a time and a technology. This is intended to be a guide to tell you all the things you can learn, so you can then go off and learn them. adactio.com/links/22485

The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention. adactio.com/links/22484

Eleven years ago, I wrote: Sometimes I consider the explosive growth of computation and think that strong AI is a near-term inevitability. Then I remember printers. That was just a brainfart, but Robin tackles it seriously in his thoughtful essay. A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way. Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; mor...

I mean, I would ask for the country first (because not all countries have zip/postal codes), but the point stands… adactio.com/links/22475

A lovely post from Remy about State Of The Browser and Web Day Out. adactio.com/links/22474

Related to Matt’s thoughts: …working with agents feels much less like classic deep work, and much more like playing a game. Not to say the work is frivolous—it’s just because it feels like I’m in a game loop. Flow, at least in the usual sense for me, feels smooth and continuous. The work and your attention starts to line up so cleanly that the experience becomes frictionless. You disappear into the work and meld with it. One notable aspect of flow has been I lose track of time. Work...

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice. It’s maintenance. adactio.com/links/22472

Brian takes us back twenty years (which is when we first met): To gather so many like-minded, energetic people in once place and not have it ruined by corporate greed felt unique. adactio.com/links/22463