Link tags: pr

Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible — No One’s Happy

The browser is the security boundary. Websites operate within it. Native apps bypass it.

Like I said last year:

But there’s still one thing that native apps do better than the web. If you want to be able to monitor and track users to an invasive degree, the web can’t compete with the capabilities of native apps. That’s why you’ll see so many websites on your mobile device that implore to install their app from the app store.

This piece goes into the details:

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt.

The Boring Internet | Terry Godier

You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company.

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.

Anti-work | Go Make Things

But this obsession with hard work as a virtue, as a good and righteous thing to do, the glorification of toil and sweat and labor… that’s a tool the wealthy who don’t work for a living use to oppress those who do.

I concur.

they told me the internet was forever | sam’s internet house

The link rot is a symptom of the larger rot that is taking place on the web. This intentional hiding of our world’s past is intended to disorient us. If the big tech internet places are continuing to exert their control over us by making their online spaces more and more oppressive, by hiding history they can trick us into believing that what we’re experiencing now is Just How Things Have Always Been.

Two Paradigms for Enhancing HTML Tags | That HTML Blog

This really gets to the heart of one of the biggest benefits of HTML web components: composability. You can nest your regular markup inside multiple custom elements; something that is can’t do.

The other exciting approach doesn’t exist yet: custom attributes. Again, they’d be a great way of using composability to turbo-charge your existing HTML in all sorts of ways.

The end of responsive images - Piccalilli

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

HTML Video Poster Image: Enable Responsive Images and ALT Text for Poster by allowing a child IMG Element (with an optional Picture Element wrapper) to Control the Video Poster Image · Issue #10378 · whatwg/html

This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?

Alistair Davidson / validation-enhancer · GitLab

Here’s another nice progressive web component for your forms, this time for showing error messages.

Expansion artifacts || Matt Ström-Awn, designer-leader

Compression made the information age possible by stripping things down to fit the pipes. Expansion made the AI age possible by blowing data back up again. Both operations leave marks; we’ve learned to spot compression artifacts, but we’ve only just begun to reckon with expansion artifacts. Until we do, there’s a lot of risk to manage.

Never Lose Form Progress Again :: Aaron Gustafson

Here’s an excellent progressive web component from Aaron—wrap a custom element around your exising form and your good to go:

At its core, form-saver is a small web component that wraps a form, keeps an eye on it, stores values in localStorage, and restores them when the page loads again. Better yet, it clears out saved data after a successful submission so you’re not accidentally resurrecting stale information the next time someone stops by.

Design and Engineering, As One · Matthias Ott

A thoughtful piece by Matthias that’s a must-read for both designers and developers.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it.: Taggart Tech

There’s a fundamental problem with these tools beyond the capacity of any deployment strategy to solve: the tool requires expertise to validate, but its use diminishes expertise and stunts its growth. How does one become an expert? There are no shortcuts; there is only continuous hard work and dedication. I was once told of writing, great writers learn how to break the rules in new and ingenious ways by first learning the rules.

But how is a new developer meant to learn the rules if their day-to-day work is nothing but the babysitting of models? How will they gain the hard-won experience that allows a human in the loop to be a useful safeguard?

These models alter cognition in ways deleterious to human prosperity. In other words, for as much output as they provide, they take something important from us.

[css-forms-1] Include fieldset and legend · Issue #11983 · w3c/csswg-drafts

My wish is coming true!

CSS or BS?

We show you a CSS property name. You tell us if it’s real or if we made it up. That’s it. It starts easy. It does not stay easy.

Progressive Web Components | Ariel Salminen

I’m slapping my forehead—progressive web components is a perfect name for what I’ve been calling HTML web components. Why didn’t I think of that?

A Progressive Web Component is a native Custom Element designed in two layers: a base layer of HTML and CSS that renders immediately, without JavaScript, and an enhancement layer of JavaScript that adds reactivity, event handling, and more advanced templating.

Flood fill vs. the magic circle

Eleven years ago, I wrote:

Sometimes I consider the explosive growth of computation and think that strong AI is a near-term inevitability.

Then I remember printers.

That was just a brainfart, but Robin tackles it seriously in his thoughtful essay.

A pleasing image: if indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.

Software cannot, in fact, eat this world. Software can reflect it; encroach upon it; more than anything, distract us from it. But the real physical world is indigestible.

Web of State of the Browser Day Out

A lovely post from Remy about State Of The Browser and Web Day Out.

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier

Most of your screen time isn’t leisure. It isn’t addiction. It isn’t even a choice.

It’s maintenance.

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.