I am persevering with Astro despite spending almost an hour trying to get my code editor to recognise HTML (it’s a modern app).

I was a little perturbed by Astro’s “Use minimal (empty) template” option writing a damned CLAUDE.md — come on! That’s absolute rage bait.

Now that I’m settled, Astro does look well designed and documented. The website I’m building is small enough should I ever need to jump ship. If Astro makes me snap I’ll take 11ty for a spin. If that fails I’ll go back to writing HTML as god intended.

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Eric Meyer’s post on split-cell table headers uses @supports to detect Safari. I gave a drive-by suggestion to Sophie Koonin who adapted this for: “Time-based background colour transitions with Temporal and CSS color-mix” — that’s a really cool theme! I wish my website was themeable…

I would only use such a technique on sites I actively maintain. You never know what future browser versions might do to break it!

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Generative AI killed that career. Towards the end, I was asked to replace my thoughtful activity with ill-gotten slop. My prior activity was supported by my unique relationship with the tools and practices learned and refined over a long career of identifying patterns and differences. That experience, though shareable, was never fungible.

And the sea, Dent - Chris Dent

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Just skip to my next note.

Reading Salma’s post “Goodbye, forever, probably.” hits hard. Especially the part about AI killing developer education. I wish Salma all the best in her future.

I don’t like to swear so choose your own word: #$@! the AI boosters in this industry. Those selfish despicable #$@!s are destroying the web from the inside.

Personally I’m focused on my own challenge and opportunity. I’ve got no other skills to be successful offline. If I’m eventually driven away though, expect an explosive uncensored blog post! I’m half inclined to start naming and shaming these #$@! more directly.

I need a cup of tea to cool down.

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I collected an innate upgraded Arsenal followed by Crash Landing — also innate from Royal Stamp — along with the Throwing Axe relic — meant a guaranteed 14–15 strength in the first two cards! Not to mention a Regalite relic for the same amount of block. Follow that with a corrupted Supermassive for 100+ damage. Then a couple of Cosmic Indifference to rinse and repeat.

Absolutely melted act 3! Time for random runs.

Ascension 10 wins:

• The Silent
• The Defect
• The Necrobinder
• The Ironclad
• The Regent

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While the attempts to collectively gaslight the entire world into believing this technology is anything more than an elaborate pyramid scheme branded in warm orange and transitional serifs continue unabated, there is a world of opportunities away from the noise and clamour.

By Humans, For Humans - Scott Riley

Scott speaks the truth in this piece.

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The W3C ARIA Authoring Practices Guide is an incredibly detailed resource. It describes every common pattern (tabs, dialogs, menus, accordions) with expected keyboard behavior, ARIA roles, and states.

And with modern LLM agents, turning a spec into working code is surprisingly fast. Point the agent at the APG pattern, describe your component’s markup, and get a solid first draft you can refine and test.

Evil Martians

It’s from a blog post in May I won’t be linking to (I found it searching the quote). The final word “test” is doing some serious heavy lifting.

As Manuel Matuzović notes the APG is full of anti-patterns. It is decidedly not a practical how-to guide. The purpose of the APG stated by WAI is to demonstrate the ARIA specification regardless of support. Browsers and assistive technology can use the patterns to test their support. What patterns are supported? Who knows! Not your LLM.

The first rule of ARIA gets misquoted often as “don’t use ARIA” but that’s honestly salient advice. The more I learn the less I use.

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A heavy block build carried me to an easy ascension 10 victory. I picked up the Sturdy Clamp relic to persist 10 block per turn. Then I got Unmovable from the first Act 2 elite and Barricade from the Act 2 boss. It was a long grind as I struggled to deal damage.

Only The Regent to go for ascension 10 on all characters.

Ascension 10 wins:

• The Silent
• The Defect
• The Necrobinder
• The Ironclad
• The Regent

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Yeah… that’s grim. All in the name of subsidised slop. Hard drives I need to upgrade my NAS are also double the cost (when in stock).

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Ascension 10 wins:

• The Silent
• The Defect
• The Necrobinder
• The Ironclad
• The Regent

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Personally I hate ::pseudo-elements so I’m inherently skeptical, especially if it’s on by default. As noted in the GitHub issue it will be removed by every CSS reset. I think that’s an unfortunate reality.

What I know for sure is that 100% of clients I build websites for will get confused and demand I remove the ⓘ button — it’s hard enough to convince them focus state is not just “ugly”. “What is that! That wasn’t in the design.” — and so ends the tale of the interest button.

I fully agree with Bramus’s take: “websites should not look/behave the same on different devices or input mechanism”. An interest invoker only working on mouse hover can be okay. If not, that’s a content/design problem; solve it another way (or create your own interest button).

Edit: Bramus has since written: Do Websites Need to Function Exactly the Same on Every Platform?

A tiny button — not that it looks like a button, nothing does these days — next to (or on top of) another interactive element doesn’t feel like a good solution to me. Seems like it might easily fall foul of WCAG guidelines itself. And that’s assuming users know what ⓘ means. Developers are free to style the pseudo-element themselves, but what else is clearer?

Browsers adding this as an accessibility option that websites can’t even touch, I’d be down for that. I’m not convinced it needs to be in CSS by default. You can’t force developers to build accessible websites but you can annoy them into removing accessible defaults.

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Oh god, he’s going for the jukebox!

A Human Artist’s Defense of AI Art - Asher Perlman

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Is the AT Protocol an RSS killer? No, you can’t beat a single XML file. I do think atproto offers some interesting utility. I really like I own my data which sits on a Raspberry Pi in my office.

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Given the non-deterministic nature of LLMs and the variety of available models, it’s often challenging to compare their behavior with or without certain skills, prompts, tools, and MCPs enabled.

Introducing the MDN MCP server

Brace yourselves, MDN slop is coming.

What a spit in the face to every outside contributor that took care authoring content. Their professional expertise probably given away for free in the hopes of educating the next generation. All thrown to the wood chipper for processing.

It’s just a tool though innit?

The AI industry doesn’t do consent and MDN probably has a contributor license that allows this (haven’t looked) but I wonder if they even solicited feedback from contributors first? Any dissenting voices, or has everyone really just given up?

The deskilling of our industry continues and it’s being done from within.

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Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit.

AI Economics for Dummies - Andrew Singleton, McSweeney’s

I’ll think of this every time someone tells me I’m being “left behind”. Enjoy shovelling mule shit :)

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A browser (Safari) shipped “masonry” layout. The Field Guide to Grid Lanes by the Apple’s WebKit/Safari team is a bookmark to remember.

My take from — checks notes — two years ago:

Personally I’m in favour of just banning masonry layout entirely. The last thing the web needs is a resurgence in “infinite scrolling” masonry.

Always the optimist, I see.

I seem to have flip-flopped on my preferred spec last year.

The thing is, and I’m not trying to be facetious, but I needed CSS masonry ten years ago, not today.

Damn. I need to be less cynical of the standards process. The alternative is browser vendors shipping whatever they desire (more Prompt APIs).

I suspect masonry grid-lanes has subtle utility in UI layout beyond a big wall of boxes. Let’s hope Chromium gets this shipped soon.

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