Michelle Barker | In Praise of Libraries

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.

HTML Can Do That · Chris Burnell

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.

Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

Instead of chasing an ever-changing number of fixed breakpoints, utopian or intrinsic design follows the web’s intrinsic ebbs and flows via fluid type scales that are always in tune with the screen on which they’re viewed

A website for everyone - The History of the Web

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.

Ordinary Abundance

All the items in this room were once out of reach; some not yet invented, others too rare or costly for the vast majority of people. Today, most of us lucky enough to live with them walk past without a second thought.

The Computer That Helped Win World War II - IEEE Spectrum

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 resulting military intelligence saved countless lives and helped shorten World War II. As the first successful large-scale application of digital electronics to computing, Colossus anticipated subsequent computer developments.

Oh Hello Ana - Towards a personal online third-space

I’m quite touched that I make an appearance in this great talk from Ana.

Against Doomerism – Terence Eden’s Blog

Doomerism always feels to me like a psyop designed to keep people dispirited.

Styling the Navigation: Declarative Route and Navigation Matching in CSS – Bram.us

I really, really, really like this proposal! This would absolutely turbo-charge cross-document view transitions with nary a line of JavaScript in sight.

Who Will Save the Internet From Disappearing?

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.

Your ‘App’ Could Have Been a Webpage (so I fixed it for you…) – Dan Q

I can’t understand how we got to this place with “app culture”! Software companies are happy to make their lives harder (and more expensive: deploying to the big app stores isn’t free!), in order to deliver HTML content to fewer people and with fewer features than if they just published directly to the Web in the first place!

HTMX and Web Components Instead of React

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.

The Descent — What Happened to the Frontend While You Weren’t Watching

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.

Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents

Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.

Abject Praise - Infrequently Noted

Alex takes issue with my post giving kudos to Apple for concentrating on bugfixes in the latest version of Safari, and he brings receipts. He makes a very compelling case, backed up with data.

But when it comes to Chrome’s shipping of the half-baked prompt API, I’m not sure he gets just how badly it has soured the developer community’s feelings towards Google. This isn’t something to be countered with data; it’s much more visceral than that. Alex says:

So if Jeremy has a problem with specific features, I hope he’ll come to us with a critique of their qualities, rather than their optics.

In this case though, the optics are really, really, really bad.

Talk: Let’s fix the web’s text size - Josh Tumath

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.

The AI Resist List

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.