There’s a new term in town: soft navigations. Basically it means “single page app” (SPA) style navigations where page stuff changes, and the URL changes, but the browser didn’t do a traditional full-reload thing. I like the term in the sense that it sounds like a light insult. Whattaya too weak, child, to do a […]

I’d never heard of a CEM before. That’s a “Custom Elements Manifest” or a custom-elements.json file in your project. It’s basically generated documentation about all the web components your project has. Dave calls them the killer feature of web components. With a Custom Element Manifest, community plugins can use that information to generate files, populate dropdowns, add red […]

I’ve been using Kagi for search for the last many months. I just like the really clean search results. Google search results feel all junked up with ads and credit-bereft AI sludge, like the incentives to provide a useful experience have been overpowered by milking profit and a corporate mandates on making sure your eyeballs […]

There was a day not long ago where a Google Chrome browser update left any page with a CodePen Embed on it throwing a whole big pile of red JavaScript errors in the console. Not ideal, obviously. The change was related to how the browser handles allow attributes on iframes (i.e. <iframe allow=”…”>). CodePen was […]

CSS has a bunch of cursors already. Chances are, you’re not using them as much as you should be. Well, should is a strong word. I can’t cite any evidence offhand that special cursors is some absolute boon to user experience or accessibility. But it certainly seems like a nice touch. Like: Or These cursors […]

It’s interesting to me to think about during a lot of the web’s evolution, there were many different browser engines (more than there are now) and they mostly just agreed-on-paper to do the same stuff. We focus on how different things could be cross-browser back then, which is true, but mostly it all worked pretty […]

Shaw and Chris are on the show to talk about the thinking and challenges behind upgrading these rather important bits of technology in our stack. We definitely think of React version upgrades and Next.js version upgrades as different things. Sometimes they are prerequisites. The Next.js ones are a bit more important as 1) the docs […]

We’re definitely in an era where “AI Browsers” have become a whole category. ChatGPT Atlas is the latest drop. Like so many others so far, it’s got a built-in sidebar for AI chat (whoop-de-do). The “agentic” mode is much more interesting, weird sparkle overlay and all. You can tell it to do something out on […]

Robert and Chris hop on the show to talk about choices we’ve had to make around Babel. Probably the best way to use Babel is to just use the @babel/preset-env plugin so you get modern JavaScript features processed down to a level of browser support you find comfortable. But Babel supports all sorts of plugins, […]

Rachel and Chris jump on the show to talk about a bit of client-side technology we use: Apollo. We use it because we have a GraphQL API and Apollo helps us write queries and mutations that go through that API. It slots in quite nicely with our React front-end, providing hooks we use to do […]