Without being able to test, I think I like it.

Apple can’t write for developers without their marketing department having the first say. They really want you to know Apple basically invented dark mode. “We did it first!” — be quiet, it’s embarrassing. It only highlights the many times you were last. Developers are calling Safari “the new IE”; leave the fluff for the stage shows.

“Beta” means it’ll launch in the next macOS unchanged.

I can’t find a way to download Safari 27.3 beta. I only see 27.2 beta on the downloads page. Maybe it’ll be out later this week.

Safari will respect websites that use color-scheme in CSS or the HTML meta tag. Safari can algorithmically force a dark mode for websites that are detected as only “light”. Hopefully this logic is part of open source WebKit. If other browsers add adaptive dark mode it would ideally be consistent behaviour.

I can imagine some websites will be detected wrong and adapted poorly. Apple must be adaptive with adaptive dark mode to correct any mistakes in the logic.

This is ultimately a great accessibility feature. Assuming adaptive dark mode is not hidden under accessibility settings but a first class UI feature, that would do wonders to normalise accessibility concerns without pigeonholing them.

Can it be turned on/off as a per-site option? I’d hope so.

color-scheme: light only can allow websites to opt-out for the entire page using the meta tag, or a specific element using CSS selectors. I have a bad feeling about this. Overly protective brands are going to force light mode because adaptive dark mode is “ugly”. It might end up in CSS resets. That would be criminal.

It would’ve been controversial if Apple didn’t allow any opt-out, saying accessibility is the user’s choice. Just like high-contrast or inverted colours in the macOS settings. I’d have respected that bold move. Millions of web users install browser plugins to force dark mode. It seems silly to have a built-in ability that is blocked.

Don’t get me started on Apple’s privacy theatre. Making adaptive dark mode undetectable is probably the right choice though (don’t quote me, I’ve not thought this through).

All in all, I think I like this feature. I would like to test it though.

For my website I’ll never add light only that seems evil. Should I return dark mode to my website? Maybe I’ll add my “choose your own dark mode” experiment. With a two or tri-state toggle? (Good lord that conversation got tedious…)

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For the entireity of November, I will block JavaScript by default in my browser! I will only enabled the permission on a per-website basis. And only if I absolutely need to and want to. I’ll report back on my big blog next month. If you never hear about this experiment again it’s because I crumbled after a few days.

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WCAG 3 is the first ground-up rebuild of the standard since it was first released in 1999. It’s not a point release, it’s an entirely different model. Instead of just asking “Does this page have alt text for images”, it asks “Can a blind person actually consume the image’s content”. That’s a very different question, and it needs a very different standard to answer it.

WCAG 3: a different future for accessibility - Léonie Watson

Léonie Watson’s post about the psychological and legal ramifications behind WCAG 3 is an excellent explainer into the ‘why’ and ‘how’ WCAG plans to change.

WCAG 3 can’t be rushed and it feels years away, but I want it now!

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• Proton To ‘Re-Interview’ Staff About AI To See Who Gets To Keep Their Job (Oct 26, 2026)
• Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning (Oct 29, 2026)

I “defended” Proton back in March because I found Joseph Cox’s reporting to be a bit misleading (at least the clickbait headline). There’s no defending this week’s exposés. CEO Andy Yen and CTO Bart Butler are well and truly AI-pilled. It’s obvious from Butler’s manifesto that developers — the ones actually making the product — are in despair. “Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.” — inspiring stuff, Bart.

I have a year left on my Proton subscription but I plan to cut my losses sooner. Fastmail has been working great for my business email. I’m praying they don’t jump the shark.

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Art is back.

Art is human.

DRAWQUARIUM - Official Release Date Trailer - Kaleb Lechowski (YouTube)

Has there been a better game trailer?

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Yes, I’ve got the keys to the castle, so to speak. And, even after 12 years of working on the site, I’ll admit I’m a little overwhelmed and nervous about that. I mean, it’s an investment for sure, as you can imagine, and I’m making this my full-time job. At least for a while.

CSS-Tricks has a new owner! - Geoff Graham

It’s the win we all needed, as Mat Marquis puts it.

The people who seek to control this industry want to put a subscription service between you and your fundamental ability to do the work that you do — to reduce your value to that of a replaceable slot machine operator, while at the same time renting you the knowledge that might allow you to claw back some of that value.

Taking Back CSS-Tricks, We all needed a win. - Mat Marquis

We have few publications left. It was looking like Piccalilli was the last one standing. I’m delighted CSS-Tricks is back in business.

I was wrong about the Master blog. Along with Smashing Magazine it’s become slopped to the gills. I’d forgotten they’d rebranded away from “Front-end Masters” and it appears they’ve pivoted entirely to “AI”.

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Following my last note I’ve caught up on a few of Seishi Yokomizo’s many translated books. His work is entertaining enough but doesn’t quite hit the mark for me.

I just finished The Master Key (1962) by Masako Togawa which has far better character development than the typical one dimensional roles. I’d put this 3rd in my ranking, behind Suspect X (2005) in 2nd and Zodiac Murders (1981) in 1st.

I’m now on to Death Among the Undead (2017) by Masahiro Imamura. This book adds a modern twist to the genre. I’ve got a feeling it could challenge the top three!

Edit: forgot to mention The Tattoo Murder (1948) by Akimitsu Takagi. It’s a locked-room murder centred around a subculture in post-war Tokyo.

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Long story short: There currently is no Baseline or caniuse for accessibility. The Accessibility Compat Data (ACD) project aims to fix this longstanding platform gap, and you can help fund it.

The Accessibility Compat Data project has a homepage now, and you should support the project - Eric Bailey

Looks like they need funding to make this project happen. So where are the trillion dollar elephants?

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Brennan followed up today with “The Better Web / The Human Web / The Living Web” including a link to Aaron Parecki’s response. And what a disheartening response it is to read. Aaron plays the “it’s just a tool” card citing Linus Torvalds of all people. Torvalds is an arrogant rich white guy not known for moral subtlety. AKA the least qualified person to base your own opinions on. The nonchalance in which some people ignore the real harm “AI” is doing is deeply saddening.

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I have heightened fears about being replaceable or less valuable in my job. If all I’m doing is prompting an AI bot, why am I being paid so much?

The terrifying liminal space between code-writer and bot-prompter - Blake Watson

— and Stefan agrees:

100% this. I’m scared and worried that the skills I put so much time into building are worth nothing. I used to be proud of my deep platform knowledge. Turns out Claude knows more.

Blake Watson on the state of the industry - Stefan Judis

Both remain optimistic that things will work out for the best.

You probably know that I don’t share that feeling. I see an AI industrial complex designed to dehumanise and commoditise labour. If there is no career down that path I must remain optimistic in the opposite direction. Yet I still lay awake some nights.

Funny how neither direction is comfortable. Both career paths remain “viable” for now, in the sense that they’re still paying professions, but I suspect we’ll all lose something in the end. This machine only extracts value from us.

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Rather, I became a physicist to stare at large databases of histograms produced by a Lovecraftian-autocomplete of dubious correctness and say “yeah that’s probably ok I guess” to add to humanity’s knowledge frontier.

Why are we even doing all this? - Rikab Gambhir

This whole satirical piece is excellent.

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For searching the rest of the web I pay for Kagi and disable all the slop (sigh).

I remembered to update the form-action directive in my content security policy. Apparently I have an old article on HTTP security headers.

Speaking of CSP, Google are not content and have invented a new connection allowlists header. I glanced over the spec and it seems reasonable. But this is Google, it’s probably another backdoor for fingerprinting (sigh).

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For every component, we’ve documented the applicable success criteria from the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, at levels A, AA, and AAA. We’ve also added our own recommendations for things WCAG doesn’t cover, such as usability when using high contrast themes.

Introducing the Accessible Components Library - Craig Abbott

There is a lot to learn from this library. I especially like the Tabs web component. I’ve tried to build similar before and have never been sure if I got it right. This reference is reassuring! I look forward to studying new patterns in future updates.

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The Unlicense ‘license’ Dan chose is interesting. It waives copyright putting the work into public domain. Since copyright is not easily shaken off, it falls back to a modified MIT license. Copyright should be unwaivable in my opinion. Human rights are inalienable and this protects people against exploitation. Of course, the entire idea of copyright has been peverted and destroyed beyond meaning. So whatever!

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We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime.

Deno is joining Cloudflare - Ryan Dahl

Deno’s decline didn’t go unnoticed. Following Dahl’s silence after half the team was laid off it became clear that his focus was elsewhere. What was left of Deno Land Inc. has been tweeting AI fantasies and vibe-coding Temu Cloudflare. — now they’re being assimilated into the real Cloudflare collective.

Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model. This will involve merging code and ideas from celld back into workerd.

Deno is joining Cloudflare - Kenton Varda and Ryan Dahl

Cloudflare claims to support open source and that “‘Lock-in’ actually hurts” but evidently they’re not keen on open source competition. So Dahl’s pivot to an acquisition paid off^† and probably just in time. I felt that an acquisition was unlikely. That was before the celld project, which is what Cloudflare are actually buying here to swiftly consume. Celld was a bit of a ‘left field hail mary’, as the Yanks say.

I don’t want to harp on about this but in a Hacker News comment yesterday, Dahl himself now admits:

It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does. Why reimplement Node? It works.

Hacker News: Cloudflare acquires Deno - @rough-sea

I was saying exactly that for years:

Where are those developers? They’re using Node. Maybe Node compatibility is the solution? Nope. It ain’t working. Why would a Node developer move to Deno only to continue using Node APIs and NPM modules?

Something’s off (The Deno Package Paradox)

Venture capital led to bad decisions and killed innovation. Now the corporate machine has come to sweep up what’s left. I have thoughts on Cloudflare but I’ll save those for the big blog one day.

^† At least for Deno’s investors who weren’t seeing any return on the 20-whatever million invested. I bet Cloudflare got 50 cents on the dollar.

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That said, I don’t like pseudo-elements. They’re a dead end for style and content. A failure/abuse of the standardisation process to rush things in via CSS.

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Anyone with a blog and public email address in [current year] can probably attest to that experience. Apparently the audacity to prefer not to fund billionaires really upsets people?

Several of those people were even able to form a coherent sentence. A few latched on to my “Play Synthesised Audio” button as the ultimate “gotcha!”

The Web Speech API and SpeechSynthesis I used have been around since 2018. Back when “machine learning” wasn’t designed to violate humanity. As far as I know these APIs are old school text-to-speech (and sound like it). However, I am no longer confident. I can’t test or trust all browsers & operating systems.

The button was a “nice to have” feature but it’s not worth the hassle.

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“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, [web developers are surveyed,] leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave birth to it comes again.”

The Wheel of Time - Robert Jordan

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