Dispatches From The Internets

The Market for Lemons

So much of this piece resonates with me. I’ve been there, alongside Alex, since the early days of JavaScript libraries and borne witness to the deception and misdirection from those in the “JavaScript all the things” camp.

[W]e need to move our attention back to the folks that have been right all along. The people who never gave up on semantic markup, CSS, and progressive enhancement for most sites. The people who, when slinging JS, have treated it as special occasion food. The tools and communities whose culture puts the user ahead of the developer and hold evidence of doing better for users in the highest regard.

See also:

On Dependency

Nearly three years on, this piece from Rob still resonates deeply with me.

I have no illusions about being some kind of lone wolf. All the stuff I’m making “by hand”—the way it approaches form, function, and materials—has been informed by philosophies and techniques developed by an amorphous community that spans generations. This work proliferates through byzantine open source projects, yes, but it also proliferates through books, blog posts, and videos with titles like “Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features.” When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.

Rebuilding a PHP App using Isomorphic JavaScript with Eleventy & Netlify

Painting of a cute red robot looking at itself in a full-body mirror.

Back in the early days of the iPhone, I created Tipr, a tip calculator that always produces a palindrome total. This is an overview of the minimal work I did to make it a modern web app that can run without a traditional back-end.

ChatGPT is great – you’re just using it wrong

Setting aside it’s current issues with facts, the idea of using ChatGPT as an improv partner is interesting. Could work well for brainstorming and getting your own creative juices flowing.

Use the dialog element (reasonably)

The dialog element is ready for prime time:

IMO, the dialog element has reached the tipping point of being the better option for web developers who need to implement dialogs in their web pages. The number of accessibility requirements a developer needs to be aware of, and the level of effort to implement custom ARIA dialogs is now largely taken care of by browsers.

Use it, don’t abuse it.

Screen Readers support for text level HTML semantics

Steve Faulkner updated his assessment of support for text-level semantics in screen readers and accessibility APIs. He discusses what’s changed in the last 15 years (since his last assessment) and what it means in terms of conformance with respect to accessibility guidelines.