Notes

But there’s a user-centric point to be made here too: when you re-invent the look, appearance, and functionality of basic form inputs for every website you’re in charge of, that means every user is forced to encounter inconsistent form controls across the plethora of websites they visit.

This is one of the many reasons it is useful to stick with more standard controls. Between accessibility and everything else, knowing and recognizing standard controls can make it easier for users everywhere to fill out forms.

Even the most motivated person engaging with an interface is more distracted than they realize and has less cognitive bandwidth available than they’re aware of. We’re designing for humans who are juggling multiple tabs, notifications, and interruptions — even while actively trying to focus on our application.

I like to think I normally do a good job focusing on what I’m working on, but we all get distracted or pulled away by some random thought or tangent. Simplifying controls and user experience, while not always easy, can be so beneficial to us all.

A great piece by Cory Doctorow and his conclusion is damning.

Trump and his fascist movement wont't let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.

This is outrageous regardless of criminality. Even if any of these people have committed some as-yet-unknown, as-yet-unproven crime, covertly whisking them away to another country's torture chambers without due process is the kind of lawless cruelty that makes me want to believe in a retributive hell. Coupled with this administration's targeting of trans people, its antisemitism, its incarceration of Mahmoud Khalil for his support of Palestine, its insistence that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" are four-letter words, and its decimation of a federal workforce that has been a pillar of the black middle class, it's easy to see what the Trump administration is trying to build: a country where everyone outside the umbrella of Christian nationalist white supremacy is not only a potential target of the state, but also has no legal recourse to protect themselves.

We all need to stick up for each other. The 2024 election results damaged my belief that it's possible to score political wins by appealing to empathy, and it's clear that the ruling class has none, but it remains important to me that we do not lose our own.

The Declaration wasn’t the end of America’s moral journey but its beginning. It established a standard against which we could measure our failures and toward which we could direct our aspirations. It created a language of liberty that marginalized people would later use to demand their rightful place in the American project.

This document, this Declaration of Independence was the beginning of a radical idea that human civilization had never seen before: that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from divine right or brute force or inherited privilege. That all people are created equal—a claim that would repeatedly challenge America to expand its understanding of who counts as “all.”

That it now sits in the office of a man who has no appreciation for any of this is quite frankly hard to take. A man who has explicitly called for the “termination” of constitutional rules, who has claimed “absolute immunity” from prosecution, who has said “I am your retribution”—phrases that echo precisely the kind of monarchical authority the Declaration was written to reject.

Carr, again, could be doing any number of things to actually help markets function or improve consumer welfare. Instead he’s harassing a streaming TV provider he has no authority over for not carrying a religious channel not all that many people watched in the first place. This again aligns pretty well with the MAGA mantra that they believe in “free speech,” but only if they agree with what’s being said.

This is what gets me the most about this. Carr and company could be working to make sure every American has access to high speed internet, but instead they’re attacking first amendment rights.

The web will suffer should Google be forced to sell Chrome. I think a fair assumption that overall investment and contribution to the open web will take a dive.

Sure, there will be some canonical fork of Chromium that keeps the sure-to-be-shunned buyer company out of it. Sure, the Linux Foundation is getting their ducks in a row to have contributors ready. But I can’t see it going well.

It won’t happen overnight, but stagnation will set in. A stagnated web is incentive for the operating system makers of the world to invest in pulling developers toward those proprietary systems. The browser wars sucked but at least we were still making websites. Being forced to make proprietary apps to reach people is an expensive prospect for the rest of us companies of the world, it will probably be done poorly, and we’ll all suffer for it. Heck, those operating systems aren’t required to ship a web browser at all.

I don’t use Chrome and don’t trust Google to save my life, but you can’t ignore all they’re doing for the browser web development.

The world economy is at a dangerous moment. Having defied reality (and the constitution) after he lost the election in 2020, only to be triumphantly re-elected in 2024, Mr Trump has no patience for being told that he is wrong. The fact that his belief in protectionism is fundamentally flawed may not sink in for some time, if it ever does. As the message that Mr Trump is harming the economy grows louder, he could lash out at the messengers, including his advisers, the Fed or the media. The president is likely to inhabit his protectionist fantasy for some time. The real world will pay the price.

The nation is desperate for its elected officials tasked with protecting our democracy to finally get busy doing it, and if it won’t be Republicans then it must be Democrats who rise to the occasion. Yet here are Democrats not only persisting with normal order in the face of an imminent and unprecedented threat against our democracy but using it to increase the danger. Even if prioritizing collegiality over the direct action Trump and DOGE’s assault on our democratic institutions calls for could be justified as a means of dulling the edge of the worst through back channels, it is a shocking betrayal of public trust to use their position to sharpen it.

Because instead of leading the way to save our nation far too many Democrats are using the power and privilege they were entrusted with to undermine free speech, the last tool that the people themselves have to wield against tyranny. It makes these Democrats worse than useless in the fight to save our Constitutional order; it makes them accomplices in its dismantling.

It is almost difficult to believe this is a real thing that happened with the President of the United States, but here’s what actually happened on Tuesday. In the morning, Donald Trump threatened to imprison protesters and defund any university that allows certain protests. Then, that same evening, he stood before Congress and declared — with apparently zero irony — that he had “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”

You might think this whiplash-inducing contrast is just standard political hypocrisy. But it’s actually something much more terrifying: it’s part of a calculated strategy to redefine “free speech” as “speech I like” while using government power to punish speech I don’t like. The crazy part isn’t just that he’s doing it — it’s that he’s doing it so blatantly, while the very same backers who claimed they supported him for his views on “free speech” cheer this on.

If anyone things Trump, Carr, or Musk are proponents of free speech, I got a bridge to sell you. This is just absolutely beyond the pale and scary.

If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can’t put it any clearer than that.

This isn’t about politics — it’s about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more “business friendly” policies: you’ve catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let’s face it, we didn’t really have) can be bad, it’s nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place.

I couldn’t agree more with what Mike Masnick lays out here.

Ideally, NASA should be able to buy heavy lift services to send payloads to the Moon—up to about 45 metric tons to 'trans-lunar injection' which is about the same performance as the SLS Block 2," Pace wrote. "I was a supporter of SLS when it was created as NASA required heavy-lift vehicles to send humans to the Moon and Mars. At the time, it did not appear (to me) that a private sector heavy-lift vehicle would be feasible within two decades. Today, the situation is different, with heavy-lift options from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance.

The cynic in me is he’s trying to cozy up to Elon Musk to give SpaceX more business. Even still, the cost of Artemis and the SLS is absolute insanity.

Most design tools only approximate how the end result will look and feel. Will typography render as intended? Is that animation smooth or kinda janky? Does that toolbar feel weird when the virtual keyboard is visible? Is this idea even feasible?

When I’m already working in HTML and CSS, there’s no guessing. I immediately experience the strengths and weaknesses of the medium firsthand, and I can adapt to that reality in the moment instead of having to compromise much later in the process.

While I’m not always thinking about the design aspect as much in my day-to-day work, the idea reminds me very much of how I prototype. Often I am tasked with spikes at work to figure out how to do something or if it can be done. All the documentation in the world doesn’t beat using the documentation to build and experiment with a small proof of concept to get your hands dirty and to see what can be done.

I also don't want to be prescriptive about what this website should be. It's your space, and you can do with it whatever you want – whether that's a maximalist extravaganza, or plain text on a plain background. You might spent hours hand-crafting your HTML, or use a drag-and-drop builder. You may host it on someone else's platform, or on a box in your bedroom. All of these things are valid, as long as you build it for you.

I love tweaking my site and love seeing what others come up with. Keep on buildin’!

Native apps are a pain for everyone involved. Developers pay hefty app store fees, jump through approval hoops, and juggle multiple platform versions. Users? We’re stuck with constant updates, wasted storage space, and apps that don’t even work on all our devices.

Web apps can easily adapt to whatever device you’re on. A single responsive website can run on your desktop, phone, tablet, or even a VR headset. What’s even more, they can be updated on all of them simultaneously. That’s a level of flexibility that native apps can’t match.

Today’s browsers are powerhouses. Notifications? Check. Offline mode? Check. Secure payments? Yep, they’ve got that too. And with technologies like WebAssembly and WebGPU, web games are catching up to native-level performance. In some cases, they’re already there.

Let’s cut through the bullshit: This isn’t just policy disagreement or political maneuvering. It’s the complete collapse of the post-war security architecture that has prevented great power war for three generations. And our political class is responding with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning.

The reason for their silence? Fear of mean tweets—many generated by bot networks. Fear of being primaried. Fear of the digital mob that Elon Musk can direct with a few keystrokes—a mob increasingly composed of artificial accounts and coordinated influence operations. These aren’t just personal failures of courage—they represent something far more dangerous: the complete surrender of democratic institutions to manufactured technological intimidation.

I wish I could say I was surprised by their lack of spine, but alas it's what I expect of the Republican party nowadays.

Ryssdal: So here comes the more subjective question, what is the risk for this economy if government economic data becomes unreliable or something short of unreliable, just gets called into question?

Sinclair: Right, That is really, really scary, because that’s something that I think the statistical agencies have worked very hard to get that credibility. It may be the case that the typical American household isn’t looking up what’s going on with inflation from month to month, or GDP from quarter to quarter, but it is the case that it’s affecting them because it’s affecting decisions that are being made on their behalf, by their employers, by their local and state governments, and without that clear information, we’re going to be in the dark making our decisions. Forward-looking decisions are just already hard enough.

It's important for governments, companies, and people to make decisions based on data. Not having reliable data is damning.

As codebases grow and blocks of CSS get unwieldy — making them more complicated — the nesting selector — & — becomes harder and harder to keep track of.

I know I’m not going to convert nesting fans today. What I hope to send you away with is at least a more cautious approach. Consider keeping your nesting shallow

This is generally my approach. Keep it simple for things like hover states and whatnot. Anything much more than 1-2 levels deep and it becomes unwieldy.

The path to becoming a truly great developer is down to more than just coding. It comes down to how you approach everything else, like communication, giving and receiving feedback, finding a pragmatic solution, planning — and even thinking like a web developer.

So much of working in the real world involves trade-offs between the various departments. Being able to communicate well is so important to be able to work with the other teams so you can get the best solution deployed while keeping everyone (mostly) happy.

Boring tech behaves in predictable ways. It’s a well trodden path others have evaluated, optimised, troubleshooted, and understood. Using tech that has been subjected to all those people hours of use means you’re less likely to run into edge cases, unexpected behaviour, or attributes and features that lack documentation or community knowledge. In other words, when something goes wrong, can you turn to someone or something?

There's sometimes something to be said about using technology that's been around for a while. Chances are, someone has run into the same problem you're facing and knows a solution or work-around.

This isn’t to say there isn’t room for innovation, or that staying put is a guaranteed recipe for success. What it does teach is that it pays to make informed decisions, and that often times the understood, reliable, boring tech will get you there over something new, shiny or propped up with marketing spin.

Also true, be mindful of the choices you make. New isn't necessarily bad, but it isn't always better.