Links

Typewalk – Lettering in public spaces

Capture lettering on signs, shop windows, and façades, then explore walks to the best finds in your city.

CSS-Tricks has a new owner! | CSS-Tricks

This is very good news!

An Cábla agus an t-Amhrán - YouTube

Well, this short film by the Irish Traditional Music Archive is right up my alley! It looks at the first transatlantic telegraph cable and the traditional music of West Kerry, particularly the song Ámhrán na Leabhar:

From the naomhóg, which for centuries connected the islands, peninsulas and coastal communities of Uíbh Ráthach, to the arrival of the world’s first successful transatlantic telegraph cable at Valentia, An Cábla agus an tAmhrán reveals a remarkable continuity: while technologies evolve, humanity’s desire to communicate, remember and pass stories from one generation to the next remains unchanged.

Introducing the Accessible Components Library - TetraLogical

A great little collection of accessible interactive components: dialogs, tabs, accordions, stuff like that.

Best of all, the components come with documentation: what problem is solves; when to use it; when not to use it; where to use it, and more.

I am afraid my stuffed dinosaur will eat us all. He must be stopped

My computed probability of the risk that Chomp will eat me, or in statistical terms, P(CHOMP), is approximately 95%. This has been a tough realization for me, because I consider Chomp a close friend, and I insist that no harm or regulation should come to him. However, if he should succeed in making me his first human sacrifice, it gives me no joy to inform you that there is nothing to stop him from eating us all.

I know what you’re thinking, because I’ve heard it all before: Aren’t you just making up the words he’s saying? You’re the one who’s saying he wants to eat humans. I have to say, I’m insulted, and kind of sad for you. This kind of ad hominem attack only bolsters my argument. Why won’t you engage with the facts I have presented, namely that a stuffed dinosaur wants to devour all humans and only I can save us from that outcome?

Installing Websites Must Be Easy

A message to Apple from the W3C Technical Architecture Group:

We expect user agents to make installation an obvious affordance to users. Specifically, we expect the install option to clearly name the action, and to be easily reachable from the browser’s UI. An entry inside a menu with an unrelated label (such as Share), or several menu layers deep, does not meet this expectation.

The people holding up the internet | Data Drop

Bringing receipts for xkcd.com/2347.

A Place Among the Fiddlers - Longreads

An in-depth report from Galax, the Old Time equivalent of the fleadh.

Why don’t more developers “use the platform”? | Read the Tea Leaves

Thought-provoking musings from Nolan.

This hue shall pass | Colour contrast checker by Clearleft

My Clearleft colleagues have made this tool to check if your colour palette has enough contrast to be accessible.

But let’s face it, the best part is the name—chef’s kiss!

This hue shall pass is an accessibility tool that helps you review and refine your brand’s digital colour palette. It shows you a matrix of all possible colour combinations and which ones pass or fail your accessibility criteria. It then helps you make adjustments to unlock more usable combinations.

Commodified Intelligence | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE

We may end up with a full “hidden economy”: People working on their own passion projects, building things for their own sake, and for recognition from their peers. Work done without real compensation, to express personal ideas, moods, and visions, with personal lines drawn on when AI usage is acceptable, and when it isn’t.

This bifurcation would affect everyone. For every single hobby activity in your life you’ll have to make a decision: Do you care about the “outcome”, or do you care about doing it yourself, about going through the steps, learning, and doing it badly?

Say, do you just want to eat something, or do you want to know how to cook?

Do you just want a drawing, or do you want to learn how to express yourself in art, in a way that’s impossible to articulate or explain through a chat interface?

AI is a Boring Technology - Christopher Butler

A thoughtful comparison of “AI” and electricity:

The work is in two places. Regulation, which first requires the political will to want it, and which nobody gets to skip by hoping the technology will mature into fairness on its own. And efficiency — continued ground gained on open models small enough to run on ordinary machines. The future I want is local — off-grid AI. A model on a laptop that belongs to the person using it, the way a lamp belongs to the person who switches it on.

Justice for CSS | WIRED

In defense of the girliest programming language.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a blog post of mine quoted in this article.

The death of web development education – Rescuing a field from disappearing

A grim tally.

Is AI ruining my brain?

I am an AI skeptic/hater/slow adopter, due to a combination of concerns about the ethics and environmental impact of AI and the fact that I like doing things myself. I knit my own socks, I built a swing for my porch this summer, and every Thanksgiving I make pies from scratch — even the crust (do you like my handmade em dash?).

[this is aaronland] it’s a funny way to tell a story

Aaron’s talk at Papercamp opened with this:

Fun fact: Alex and I first met 19 years ago at a conference in Paris where, coincidentally, I was speaking about something I referred to as the “Papernet”. Amazingly there are no photographs, that I could find online, of either of us speaking. This is a nice passage that Jeremy Keith wrote about the event at the time.

How I think Web Apps Should be Installed – Ben Francis

Some good ideas on how browsers could offer the ability to install the current site. Frankly, anything would be better than the current woeful situation!

Native HTML and CSS Features That Replaced JavaScript · Ronalds Vilciņš

Modern HTML and CSS have gained a surprising number of features that cover interactions and layout problems we used to solve with custom scripts or libraries. JavaScript obviously isn’t going anywhere, and there are plenty of things that still require it, but in 2026 I find myself needing it less often for ordinary website interfaces.

On artificial intelligence • Buttondown

I hope you’ll read and understand that for many of us, this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction or a culty, cosmic doomer rant. It’s about money, power, and quality of life for me and the people I share a planet with.

Matt’s position very much mirrors my own.

As long as I have a choice, and the economic means to keep a roof over my head and a set of reasonably firm values, I am opting out of first-person interaction with AI. And if any of my situation changes for the worse, before I accept AI as my lord and master, I will go down swinging.

Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around | Aeon Essays

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted.