Someone featured my writing in their newsletter, then signed me up for that newsletter using the email on my site.
At no point did I ask for or consent to this. Huurrrrrrr
Micros
User Agent Styles are out because today we are introducing all-new AI-driven User Agentic Styles.
That is right; they arbitrarily change while you use the website, elevating the developer experience.
They will also try to forcefully align elements for you.
I see many social media posts including emojis and hashtags in sentences. This is inaccessible!
Screen readers read things out, and that includes your emojis.
For example, ‘I drink tea ๐ต from my teapot ๐ซ to relax.’ might be read aloud as ‘I drink tea teacup without handle emoji from my teapot teapot emoji to relax.’
That is confusing and difficult to understand.
Instead, keep emojis to the start or end of your sentences. Like this: ‘I drink tea from my teapot to relax. ๐ซ’
Remember, the more accessible your posts are, the more people they can reach, which helps growth.
Hashtags are treated similarly but are also generally distracting mid-sentence. They’re best put at the end of posts.
I have a magnet in my hand.
That magnet sticks to my fridge.
Am I a fridge magnet?
(To the tune of ABBA’s Money, Money, Money)
I write all night, I write all day, to craft the guides they toss away.
Ain’t it sad?
But praise is cheap and tickets close, for all this thankless, perfect prose.
That’s too bad.
A new feature ships, all sleek and grand,
But no one seems to understand.
I wouldn’t be writing docs at all;
I’d fool around and have a ball.
If you can’t be bothered to write alt text for it, then it must not be worth posting in the first place.
I, for one, would never jump the gun and start playing with shiny new features on my website before proper browser support is available.
Never. Nope. Not me…
My tech stack? I call it Jenga for reasons that will become apparent next outage.
A decent portion of my time on GitHub is now addressing meaningless AI comments.
Come on. This is open-source work made free for the benefit of humanity. This AI slop just wastes the time and money of the perpetrators and maintainers alike.
I am unfortunately seeing a lot of stylised text on social media. They are horribly inaccessible. Don’t use them!
These aren’t actual fonts, merely a collection of Unicode characters.
For example, a screen reader will read ๐๐จ๐ฅ๐ ๐๐๐ฑ๐ญ as: ‘Mathematical Bold Capital B Mathematical Bold Small O Mathematical Bold Small L Mathematical Bold Small D Mathematical Bold Capital T Mathematical Bold Small E Mathematical Bold Small X Mathematical Bold Small T’.
This isn’t an issue with screen readers – they’re performing exactly as they should. This is an issue with people misusing these characters.
If you need it phrased in a business sense, by excluding so many people who are trying to read what you’re writing, you’re limiting your reach and hurting your growth.
Conspiracy theory: Part of Apple’s goal with Liquid Glass is to make PWAs look further out of place.
While you can somewhat recreate the glass effect on the web, it is difficult, likely less performant, and isn’t 1:1. This will enforce a stronger separation between native apps and web apps.
Icons also presumably won’t be dynamic and adaptive to Liquid Glass’ styling, like they aren’t with iOS 18’s light/dark/tinted variants. This’ll make them stick out and feel more different than they already do, as well as look bad on the home screen.
Taking time away from something and then returning to it later often reveals flaws otherwise unseen. I’ve been thinking about how to gain the same benefit without needing to take time away.
Changing perspective is the obvious approach.
In art and design, flipping a canvas often forces a reevaluation and reveals much that the eye has grown blind to. Inverting colours, switching to greyscale, obscuring, etc, can have a similar effect.
When writing, speaking written words aloud often helps in identifying flaws.
Similarly, explaining why you’ve done something – ร la rubber duck debugging – can weed out things that don’t make sense.
I went to a bank and put a really high negative margin on all the money inside. This offset was enough for it to appear outside the bank, allowing me to abscond with it.
Of course, banks can easily avoid this situation by applying overflow: hidden to their vaults, but they very rarely remember to. It tends to be an operational oversight.
Learn more neat tricks like this in my upcoming book, CSS for Crime.
Spent far too long looking blankly at the docs for the <dialog> element while wondering why my <details> element wasn’t working right.
Y’know, when I started getting into development proper, I read so many blog posts and publications from fantastic people.
If you’d told me as a youngster that as a 19-year-old I’d be writing for these publications and chatting with figures whose work I admired, I simply wouldn’t have believed you.
I know you should โnever meet your heroes’, but I’m ecstatic to get to meet so many of my inspirations.
There are a lot of fields out there, and I’m so glad I found myself doing web/front-end development. I can scarcely think of communities so kind and open to sharing knowledge.
Thank you to all.
Sometimes I scroll through all the possible align-* and justify-* permutations to find the one I need.
Not for lack of knowledge, but instead because my brain has simply run out of compute.
I think it is important that you make sure everything you publish on the web is equally accessible to all.
Thus, my content is unusable no matter your abilities. In fact, you might be better off with a screen reader because then at least you don’t have to look at it. Shit’s fucked.
I’ve used Lexend as my go-to for years, but its lack of OpenType features is really bothering me. I can’t find anything else quite like it, though.
It has a heavy default weight, wide letterforms, and is very legible. Fira, IBM Plex, and Manrope aren’t it.
Any suggestions?
I’ll be interested to see if there is a statistically notable uptick in clients reporting prefers-reduced-transparency as a result of Liquid Glass once iOS 26 releases.
Serious talk.
I appreciate that people make art of or containing me, but I ask that you do so in a respectful manner. Thank you.
Oh, look. Accessibility horrors beyond comprehension from Apple. A company with so much money the human mind boggles to comprehend it.
Accessibility horrors so blatant it takes one glance to identify many of the more offensive failings.
Accessibility horrors that are so inaccessible that even the completely able struggle.
Accessibility horrors that are covered in the very first class of any UI/UX design or front-end development education.
Accessibility horrors that you have to force through because even the worst testers are screaming at you.
Do some people prefer to read content directly in their feed readers? With the exception of some news outlets, I much prefer to view content on site.
I feel that the site on which writing resides provides a large part of the content’s atmosphere.
In the same vein as Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, I propose some renamings:
- Safari Surfer
- Chromium Cruiser
- Firefox Forager
- Edge Envoy
- Vivaldi Voyager
Sometimes I find myself thinking about the fact that Google’s Material Symbols has an icon called ‘Skull List’.
I’m sure that’s nothing…
A few days ago I wrote a message and forgot to close a parenthesis. I’ve been talking as an aside ever since, and I can’t take it anymore.
)
I’m free!
And with a single click, I find myself transported to an ancient place. I’m a digital archaeologist, and I’ve stumbled across a long-forgotten remnant of those who came before. UI untouched for a decade.
It is two rebrands old. The palette is warped. Distorted. There are gradients. Buttons forged from a low-resolution image. I brush away a drop-shadow-lg.png to inspect an input form. Picking it up, I bring it to my face to count the pixels, only to be hit by the harsh aroma of Bootstrap 2 in the back of my throat.
I drop it to the ground, and it shatters into CSS properties. ‘Oh well,’ I muse aloud. ‘It’ll be fixed on refresh. Assuming anyone ever discovers this place again.’
I do what I came to do and close the tab.
I’ve found myself redesigning a lot of Vale.Rocks. Not a complete overhaul, but a fairly comprehensive one with a lot of changes.
Ariel Salminen and Sia Karamalegos, both redesigned their sites recently, so I’ve decided to blame them. Thanks for their understanding.
What is it with big corps trying to make ‘everything apps’? We’ve already got apps that do everything.
Web browsers. I’m talking about web browsers. Just invest in the web. It isn’t hard.
Iโve been CAPTCHAโd. Theyโre holding me at a data centre and wonโt let me go until I point out all the motorcycles, but they keep telling me Iโm incorrect. Please send help! The situation is dire.
#372C25. The silty sediment that swirls at the bottom of a river bed. Slightly washed out and absorbent of light rather than reflective. Clay muddles what is otherwise organic and grounding. Decaying leaves and mud. Undulating and dispersing as it ebbs and flows between the toes of those who wade and splash.