Jeremy Keith

The datalist element is all fucked up on iOS. Again.

I haven’t “upgraded” my iPhone to iOS 26 and I have no plans to. The whole Liquid Glass thing is literally offputting. So I wouldn’t have known about the latest regression in Safari if a friend hadn’t texted me about the problem.

He was trying to do a search on The Session. He was looking for the tune, The Road To Town. He started typing this into the form on the home page of the site. He got as far as “The Road To”. That’s when the entire input was obscured by a suggestion from the associated datalist.

This is incredibly annoying and seems to be a pattern of behaviour for Safari. Features are supported …technically. But the implementation is so buggy as to be unusable.

I’ll probably have to do some user-agent sniffing, which I hate. And it won’t be enough to just sniff for Safari on iOS 26. Remember that every browser on iOS is just Webkit in a trenchcoat.

Time to file a bug and then wait God knows how long for an update to get rolled out.

Update: I filed a bug, but in the meantime it looks like user-agent sniffing is going to be impossible.

Update: Never mind! It turns that Google’s issue is with unreachable robots.txt files, not absent robots.txt files. They really need to improve their messaging. Stand down everyone.

A bit has been flipped on Google Search.

Previously, the Googlebot would index any web page it came across, unless a robots.txt file said otherwise.

Now, a robots.txt file is required in order for the Googlebot to index a website.

This puzzles me. Until now, Google was all about “organising the world’s information and making it accessible.” This switch-up will limit “the world’s information” to “the information on websites that have a robots.txt file.”

They’re free to do this. Despite what some people think, Google isn’t a utility. It’s a business. Other search engines are available, with different business models. Kagi. Duck Duck Go. Google != the World Wide Web.

I am curious about this latest move with Google Search though. I’d love to know if it only applies to Google’s search bot. Google has other bots out crawling the web: Adsbot-Google, Google-Extended, Googlebot-Image, GoogleOther, Mediapartners-Google. I’m probably missing a few.

If the new default only applies to the searchbot and doesn’t include say, the crawler that’s fracking the web in order train Google’s large language model, then this is how things work now:

• Your website won’t appear in search results unless you explicitly opt in.
• Your website will be used as training data unless you explicitly opt out.

It would be good to get some clarity on this. Alas, the Google Search team are notoriously tight-lipped so I’m not holding my breath.

Stop me if this sounds familiar to you…

There’s a conference you heard about it. It sounded really good but you never got ’round to getting a ticket. You were too busy thinking about work stuff. It was just one of those things that remained in the idle thought stage.

Then the day of the conference rolls around. You’re sitting in front of your computer seeing the social media posts from people at the event who are having a ball. The talks sound really good and you wish you could be there. You wonder why you never got ’round to getting that ticket.

Maybe you’ve experienced that when FFconf is happening and people like me are in the audience posting about some revelatory insight we’ve just received. Or maybe you see the blog posts and pictures from an event like dConstruct and you realise that you missed your chance to experience something special.

I’ve certainly experienced it when I’m not in Düsseldorf or Berlin for Beyond Tellerrand and all my friends are posting about how excellent it is.

It’s kind of like FOMO but instead of fear of missing out, it’s more like regret at missing out: RAMO.

I’m giving you advance warning. If you have anything at all to do with front-end development and you don’t come to Web Day Out, you are definitely going to experience RAMO.

Seriously, it is shaping up to be something very special indeed. Check out the schedule to see what I mean:

• I can’t believe it’s not JavaScript
• A pragmatic guide to browser support
• Progressive web apps from the trenches
• Build for the web, build on the web, build with the web
• Breaking with habits
• What’s new in web typography?
• Customisable select and the friends we made along the way
• The browser is the playground

Tickets are just £225+VAT. Now is the time to get yours. It’s the second week of the new year. You’ve settled back into work. Now in the depths of Winter, you need something to look forward to, something that’s going to get you excited about making websites. That’s Web Day Out.

And if you need to convince your boss, I’ve got you covered.

Toward the end of 2021, I wrote about working a four-day week. It really suited me. So much so that I’ve gone one further. For the past year or so I’ve been working a three-day week.

I work on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. From Friday to Monday, my days are my own.

This really changes the dynamic of the week. It no longer feels like an extended weekend. What I mean is that usually we think about the working week as the default and the weekend as the exception. That’s been flipped on its head for me. The three days I spend working feel like the exception.

Once again, this decision meant earning less money. But I’ve decided that I value time more than money. I know that’s a privileged position to be in. Many people have to expend all their time in order to make just enough money.

I’ve made some choices along the way that certainly help. I don’t have children. I don’t have a car. I live in a modest flat and I’ve paid off the mortgage. I live in a country where healthcare is free.

So I don’t have too many expenses. My biggest expenses are travel-related; getting to the States to see family, or travelling to Irish music festivals wherever they may be.

But still, working a three-day week means I can make enough to cover my expenses and still put some money aside for the future.

Now, this wouldn’t work for everyone. My work tends to be the kind that doesn’t require much direct collaboration (which is also why I mostly work from home). I imagine it could get frustrating being on a team of people working different numbers of days.

I’m also really lucky to have the choice to do this. I know that many workplaces wouldn’t allow this kind of lifestyle. Clearleft is different.

In my last conference talk, I touched on this:

I think you could you could divide management into two categories like you can do with programming languages. There is a very imperative school of management where it’s all about measurements, it’s all about those performance reports, it’s all about metrics, time tracking. Maybe they install software on your machine to track how long you’ve been working. It’s all about measuring those outputs.

That’s one approach to management. Then there’s a more declarative approach, where you just care about the work getting done and you don’t care how people do it. So if they want to work from home, let them work from home. If they want to work strange hours, let them work strange hours. What do you care as long as the work gets done? This is more about giving people autonomy and trust.

I’m very happy that Clearleft takes the declarative approach.

And I can reiterate what I said when I stopped working on Fridays:

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollary to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

Now that I don’t work on Mondays, bank holiday weekends don’t mean much to me anymore. Or to put it another way, every weekend is like a bank holiday weekend. If I want to travel somewhere on a Friday and come back on a Monday, I don’t need to book any time off. That’s really nice.

I’ve got four days in a row to do with as I wish. I had to fight the urge to immediately launch into some new project or side-hustle to fill the time. I’m savouring it instead.

I’ve got time to take care of The Session. I’ve got time to read. I’ve got time to cook. I’ve got time to spend learning Irish. Mostly I’ve got time to just be.

Blogs Are Back

A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.

dead framework theory | AI Focus

This is depressing.

The Main Thread Is Not Yours — Den Odell

Every millisecond you spend executing JavaScript is a millisecond the browser can’t spend responding to a click, updating a scroll position, or acknowledging that the user did just try to type something. When your code runs long, you’re not causing “jank” in some abstract technical sense; you’re ignoring someone who’s trying to talk to you.

This is a great way to think about client-side JavaScript!

Also:

Before your application code runs a single line, your framework has already spent some of the user’s main thread budget on initialization, hydration, and virtual DOM reconciliation.

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me

I’m avoiding Mac OS Tahoe because of the disgraceful liquid glass debacle, but it looks like the rot goes even deeper. Here’s a detailed look at the sad state of iconography in application menus.

I know that changes in an OS update can take time to get used to, but this isn’t a case of “one step forwards, two steps back”—it’s just a lot of steps back with no forwards.