I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
So much truth in one story:
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.
Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.
The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.
And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.
The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.
Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.
Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.
The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!
Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.
If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.
The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:
Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.
The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
A short piece of speculative fiction.
I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.
There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:
A blog without comments is not a blog.
That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:
Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.
That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.
I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.
England is criss-crossed by routes that were originally laid down by the Romans. When it came time to construct modern roads, it often made sense to use these existing routes rather than trying to designate entirely new ones. So some of the roads in England are like an early kind of desire path.
Desire paths are something of a cliché in the UX world. They’re the perfect metaphor for user-centred design; instead of trying to make people take a pre-defined route, let them take the route that’s easiest for them and then codify that route.
This idea was enshrined into the very design principles of HTML as “pave the cowpaths”:
When a practice is already widespread among authors, consider adopting it rather than forbidding it or inventing something new.
Ireland never had any Roman roads. But it’s always had plenty of cowpaths.
The Irish word for cow is bó.
The Irish word for road is bóthar, which literally means “cowpath”.
The cowpaths were paved in both the landscape and the language.
This is a wonderfully evocative description of what it was like to go online 30 years ago.
I’ve personally struggled to implement a decentralized approach to quality in many of my teams. I believe in it from an academic standpoint, but in practice it works against the grain of every traditional management structure. Managers want ‘one neck to wring’ when things go wrong. Decentralized quality makes that impossible. So I’ve compromised, centralized, become the bottleneck I know slows things down. It’s easier to defend in meetings. But when I’ve managed to decentralize quality — most memorably when I was running a small agency and could write the org chart myself — I’ve been able to do some of the best work of my career.
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
Put the kettle on. This is a long one!
Matt takes a trip down memory lane and looks at all the frontend tools, technologies, and techniques that have come and gone over the years.
But this isn’t about nostalgia (although it does make you appreciate how far we’ve come). He’s looking at whether anything from the past is worth keeping today.
Studying past best practices and legacy systems is crucial for understanding the evolution of technology and making informed decisions today.
There’s only one technique that makes the cut:
After discussing countless legacy approaches and techniques best left in the past, you’ve finally arrived at a truly timeless and Incredibly important methodology.
The web is just people. Lots of people, connected across global networks. In 2005, it was the audience that made the web. In 2025, it will be the audience again.
CSI London, York, and Oxford:
Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.
A curated selection of visually interesting datasets collected by local, state and federal government agencies.
This site must’ve started as a way of showcasing really interesting collections, but now it’s turning into an archive of what’s being systematically destroyed by the current US regime.
Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!
While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.
Bravo!
I love the interactive illustrations in this article filled with type and architecture nerdery!
Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
👏👏👏
Search has bent in quality towards its earliest days, difficult to navigate and often unhelpful. And the remedy may be the same as it was a quarter century ago.
An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Let’s go back to a website!
Matt’s beach thoughts are like a satisfying susurrus in my RSS reader.