Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

The web historically moves in waves.

Libraries are created to push complex features in an easier way. Then the libraries themselves get complicated, often more so than the benefits they provide.

Eventually, (some of) the core features of those libraries make their way into the browser itself, but the libraries linger like water on the shore, slowly receding.

And before the sand has a chance to fully dry, a new set of libraries washes in to push the web even further.

Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

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Google’s Prompt API

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 that a legion of tight-smiling dorks wearing Alphabet lanyards tried to assure us that the only means of survival for the web itself was to funnel all of it through Google’s servers, and only use their very good advertisements instead of those bad other ones.

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The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

Hallelujah! Support for sizes="auto" is finally landing in Firefox and Safari! Praise be!

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Web Day Out - 12 March 2026 — Polytechnic

This was another fantastic conference from the Clearleft team, and one that I hope is repeated next year. It is absolutely incredible what you can do in the browser these days, and even though I thought I was keeping up with the latest developments, it astounded me how far things have come.

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The Great CSS Expansion | Butler’s Log

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 features is finally landing, and many of them are explicitly designed to replace patterns that used to require JavaScript. Not as approximations — as first-class platform primitives that handle the edge cases, run in the right thread, and need zero dependencies.

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That was Web Day Out

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Installing web apps

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