Jeremy Keith

It’s about time I tried to explain what progressive enhancement actually is - Piccalilli

Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.

The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.

I went to codebar Brighton yesterday evening. I hadn’t been in quite a while, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of codebar Brighton’s tenth anniversary!

The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.

Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.

In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.

With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.

Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.

It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.

Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!

Ethical Web Principles

I’ve just added these to my ongoing collection of design principles.

Config 2024: In defense of an old pixel (Marcin Wichary, Director of Design, Figma) - YouTube

Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!

Ladybird

We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit.

Not just a new browser, but a new browser engine.

Update: Turns out this project is being made by asshats. Ignore and avoid.

Popover API Sliding Nav

Here’s a nifty demo of popover but it’s not for what we’d traditionally consider a modal dialog.

New Web Development. Or, why Copilots and chatbots are particularly bad for modern web dev – Baldur Bjarnason

The paradigm shift that web development is entering hinges on the fact that while React was a key enabler of the Single-Page-App and Component era of the web, in practice it normally tends to result in extremely poor products. Built-in browser APIs are now much more capable than they were when React was first invented.

Robin Rendle — Instability

The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.

But that instability was always there.

The Dark Forest idea comes from the Remembrance of Earth’s Past books by Liu Cixin. It’s an elegant but dispiriting solution to the Fermi paradox. Maggie sums it up:

Dark forest theory suggests that the universe is like a dark forest at night - a place that appears quiet and lifeless because if you make noise, the predators will come eat you.

This theory proposes that all other intelligent civilizations were either killed or learned to shut up. We don’t yet know which category we fall into.

Maggie has described The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI:

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.

It’s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Those of us in the cozy web try to keep our heads down, attempting to block the bots plundering our work.

I advocate for taking this further. We should fight back. Let’s exploit the security hole of prompt injections. Here are some people taking action:

• Eric Bailey talks about Consent, LLM scrapers, and poisoning the well,
• Thomas Rigby says Rage against the machine, and
• Lewis Dale points out that Perplexity AI is susceptible to prompt injection.

I’ve taken steps here on my site. I’d like to tell you exactly what I’ve done. But if I do that, I’m also telling the makers of these bots how to circumvent my attempts at prompt injection.

This feels like another concept from Liu Cixin’s books. Wallfacers:

The sophons can overhear any conversation and intercept any written or digital communication but cannot read human thoughts, so the UN devises a countermeasure by initiating the “Wallfacer” Program. Four individuals are granted vast resources and tasked with generating and fulfilling strategies that must never leave their own heads.

So while I’d normally share my code, I feel like in this case I need to exercise some discretion. But let me give you the broad brushstrokes:

• Every page of my online journal has three pieces of text that attempt prompt injections.
• Each of these is hidden from view and hidden from screen readers.
• Each piece of text is constructed on-the-fly on the server and they’re all different every time the page is loaded.

You can view source to see some examples.

I plan to keep updating my pool of potential prompt injections. I’ll add to it whenever I hear of a phrase that might potentially throw a spanner in the works of a scraping bot.

By the way, I should add that I’m doing this as well as using a robots.txt file. So any bot that injests a prompt injection deserves it.

I could not disagree with Manton more when he says:

I get the distrust of AI bots but I think discussions to sabotage crawled data go too far, potentially making a mess of the open web. There has never been a system like AI before, and old assumptions about what is fair use don’t really fit.

Bollocks. This is exactly the kind of techno-determinism that boils my blood:

AI companies are not going to go away, but we need to push them in the right directions.

“It’s inevitable!” they cry as though this was a force of nature, not something created by people.

There is nothing inevitable about any technology. The actions we take today are what determine our future. So let’s take steps now to prevent our web being turned into a dark, dark forest.

Ideas Aren’t Worth Anything - The Biblioracle Recommends

The fact that writing can be hard is one of the things that makes it meaningful. Removing this difficulty removes that meaning.

There is significant enthusiasm for this attitude inside the companies that produce an distribute media like books, movies, and music for obvious reasons. Removing the expense of humans making art is a real savings to the bottom line.

But the idea of this being an example of democratizing creativity is absurd. Outsourcing is not democratizing. Ideas are not the most important part of creation, execution is.

A Rant about Front-end Development – Frank M Taylor

Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.

You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.

Should this be a map or 500 maps? - by Elan Ullendorff

This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.

There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.

My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.

No Web Without Women

From Ada Lovelace to Nicola Pellow.

How do we build the future with AI? – Chelsea Troy

This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”

Absorb every word!

WP2 - The requirement for browsers operating on iOS devices to use Apple’s WebKit browser engine [PDF]

The Competition & Markets Authority brings receipts:

The requirement that all browsers on the iOS operating system use a specific version of the WebKit browser engine controlled by Apple, means that there is no competition between browser engines on the platform. Browser vendors cannot switch to an alternative browser engine or make changes to the version of WebKit used on iOS. Similarly, consumers are unable to switch to a browser based on an alternative browser engine. We consider that the lack of competitive pressure is likely to reduce Apple’s incentives to improve WebKit.