- 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
SPAs were a clever solution to a temporary limitation. But that limitation no longer exists.
Use modern server rendering. Use actual pages. Animate with CSS. Preload with intent. Ship less JavaScript.
- Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
- Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
- Always, Always Require a Compilation Step
People advancing an inevitabilist world view state that the future they perceive will inevitably come to pass. It follows, relatively straightforwardly, that the only sensible way to respond to this is to prepare as best you can for that future.
This is a fantastic framing method. Anyone who sees the future differently to you can be brushed aside as “ignoring reality”, and the only conversations worth engaging are those that already accept your premise.
CSI London, York, and Oxford:
Discover the murders, sudden deaths, sanctuary churches, and prisons of three thriving medieval cities.
Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:
The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.
I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.
And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!
A fantastic explanation of the building blocks of SVG, illustrated—as always—with Josh’s interactive examples.
I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.
And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:
At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.
The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.
This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.
This is a really thoughtful look at the evolution of CSS and the ever-present need to balance power with learnability.
A UI library for people who love HTML, powered by modern CSS and Web Components.
Grrr…
Chrome, Edge and Firefox updates usually reach 95% of users within three months. But Safari updates are tied to a new release of the underlying operating system, so they take around 19 months to reach the same usage, and some updates may even need a new device.
This is so shameful. And glad as I am to see new features landing in Safari, as long as they hobble updates like this it’s all just pissing in the wind.
Semantic HTML? Optional. Server-side rendering? Rebuilt from scratch. Accessibility? Maybe, if there’s time. Performance? Who cares, when you can save costs by putting loading burdens onto the user’s device, instead of your server?
So gradually, the web became something you had to compile before you could publish. Not because users needed it. But because developers wanted it to feel modern.
Everything’s optimised for developers – and hostile to everyone else.
This isn’t accidental. It’s cultural. We’ve created an industry where complexity is celebrated. Where cleverness is rewarded. Where engineering sophistication is valued more than clarity, usability, or commercial effectiveness.
Here’s what the “AI will replace developers” crowd fundamentally misunderstands: code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.
If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.
This is particularly true because AI excels at local optimization but fails at global design. It can optimize individual functions but can’t determine whether a service should exist in the first place, or how it should interact with the broader system. When implementation speed increases dramatically, architectural mistakes get baked in before you realize they’re mistakes.
“We’ve stripped React out of our highest-traffic user flows and replaced it with vanilla JavaScript using small, focused libraries for specific needs,” said the CTO of a streaming service. “Our page load times dropped by 60% and our conversion rates improved by 14%.”
The joy came flooding back to me! It turns out browser APIs are really good now.
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
I heard you like divs…
Why single-page apps are just not worth it:
Here’s the problem: your team almost certainly doesn’t have what it takes to out-engineer the browser. The browser will continuously improve the experience of plain HTML, at no cost to you, using a rendering engine that is orders of magnitude more efficient than JavaScript.
Meanwhile, the browser marches on, improving the UX of every website that uses basic HTML semantics. For instance: browsers often don’t repaint full pages anymore.
A great talk by Matthias on what you can do with web standards today!
I should be using the lh and rlh units more enough—they’re supported across the board!