Link tags: city

125

sparkline

Reminder: You Can Stitch Together Lots of Little HTML Pages With Navigations For Interactions - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

I really like the thinking that goes into this approach. It seems so counter-intuitive at first, but there’s no arguing with the snappy resilient results.

Turns out, if you have a website and you think of the browser as a way to navigate documents — rather than a runtime to execute arbitrary code and fetch, compile, and present them — things can be a lot simpler than our tools often prime us to make them.

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity – Terrible Software

You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Anyone can add complexity. It takes experience and confidence to leave it out.

Lowering the specificity of multiple rules at once - Manuel Matuzovic

This is clever, and seems obvious in hindsight: use an anonymous @layer for your CSS reset rules!

Who needs a flying car when you have display: grid

I’m not the only one who’s amazed by how much you can do with just a little CSS these days.

Why I’m Writing Pure HTML & CSS in 2025

  • Building HTML pages is easy
  • Pure HTML is evergreen
  • Bloated web pages are too slow
  • I can host it anywhere, often for free
  • Accessibility and SEO benefits are automatic
  • It won’t need security patches
  • There are no build steps

Close to the metal: web design and the browser

It seems like the misguided perception of needing to use complex tools and frameworks to build a website comes from a thinking that web browsers are inherently limited. When, in fact, browsers have evolved to a tremendous degree

Citywide – Jason Santa Maria

A fun new font from Jason:

Citywide is a sans serif family inspired by mid-1900s bus and train destination roll signs.

[this is aaronland] a tale of gummy snakes (and spunk)

About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:

I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.

What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.

If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.

If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.

CSS wants to be a system - daverupert.com

CSS wants you to build a system with it. It wants styles to build up, not flatten down.

Truth!

Your CSS reset should be layered

This makes sense:

Wrap everything in your CSS reset with a @layer rule.

When you place any styles inside a layer, these styles automatically have lower priority compared to all unlayered styles on the page. Think of it like an !unimportant block. You don’t need to worry about specificity or order of stylesheets at all.

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’ - The New Stack

Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.

Lessons learned in 35 years of making software – Jim Grey

Number one:

Do things in the most straightforward way possible. It’s easy to fall into the trap of clever solutions, or clever applications of technology, or overbuilding something because you’re anticipating the future. Don’t do it. You will hate yourself for it later when you have to maintain it.

A Rant about Front-end Development – Frank M Taylor

Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.

You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.

Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence

It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.

This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.

Faster Connectivity !== Faster Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.

Amen!

12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades | Modern CSS Solutions

I love how straightforward these bits of CSS are—time to rip out some of those old complicated hacks and workarounds!

AI Art is The New Stock Image

While some executives in Davos may get excited about its infinite possibilities this week, to a younger consumer AI Art is already ‘a bit cringe’.

build a world, not an audience — kening zhu

I didn’t want to play the game of striving to be seen.

I just wanted to be.

Why multi-page apps? | Go Make Things

There are absolutely use-cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band-aid over the real underlying issues without addressing them.

AI Hype-Driven Development - Parallels in History -

Simulmatics as a company was established in 1959 and declared bankruptcy in 1970. The founders picked this name as a mash of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, hoping to coin a new term that would live for decades, which apparently didn’t happen! They worked on building what they called the People Machine to simulate and predict human behavior. It was marketed as a revolutionary technology that would completely change business, politics, warfare and more. Doesn’t this sound familiar?!