Journal

I was at the State Of The Browser event recently, which was great as always.

Manu gave a great talk about colour in CSS. A lot of it focused on OKLCH. I was already convinced of the benefits of this colour space after seeing a terrific talk by Anton Lovchikov a while back.

After Manu’s talk, someone mentioned that even though OKLCH is well supported in browsers now, it’s a shame that it isn’t (yet) in design tools like Figma. So designers are still handing over mock-ups with hex values.

I get the frustration, but in my experience it’s not that big a deal in practice. Here’s why: oklch() isn’t just a way of defining colours with lightness, chroma, and hue in CSS. It’s also a function. You can use the magical from keyword in this function to convert hex colours to l, c, and h:

--page-colour: oklch(from #49498D l c h);

So even if you’re being handed hex colour values, you can still use OKLCH in your CSS. Once you’re doing that, you can use all of the good stuff that comes with having those three values separated out—something that was theoretically possible with hsl, but problematic in practice.

Let’s say you want to encode something into your CSS like this: “if the user has specified that they prefer higher contrast, the background colour should be four times darker.”

@media (prefers-contrast: more) {
  --page-colour: oklch(from #49498D calc(l / 4) c h);
}

It’s really handy that you can use calc() within oklch()—functions within functions. And I haven’t even touched on the color-mix() function.

Hmmm …y’know, this is starting to sound an awful lot like functional programming:

Functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values.

For the past couple of years, myself and Jessica have been going to the Belfast Tradfest in the Summer. It’s an excellent event with great workshops, sessions, and concerts. And it helps that Belfast is such a lovely city to spend a week in.

What struck me the first time we were participating in workshops there was the great mix of age ranges. It always warms my heart to see young people getting really into the music.

Then I found out about their bursary sponsorship scheme:

For many young musicians, financial barriers stand in the way of this invaluable experience. Your support can make a real difference by sponsoring a bursary that covers the cost of tuition for a deserving student.

Last year, I decided to forego one month’s worth of donations to The Session—the contributions that help cover the costs of hosting, newsletters, geocoding, and so on. Instead the money went towards bursary sponsorships for Belfast Tradfest.

It was a great success that managed to cover places for quite a few young musicians.

So we’re doing it again.

Normally, I wouldn’t mention the ins-and-outs of TheSession.org over here on adactio.com but I thought you might like to partake in this year’s fund drive:

For the month of April 2025, any donations made to The Session will go towards bursary sponsorships for young musicians to attend workshops at this year’s Belfast Trad Fest:

thesession.org/donate

Maybe you’ve liked something I’ve written here. Maybe you enjoyed Resilient Web Design, the free book I published online. You can also read HTML5 For Web Designers and Going Offline for free now too.

I’ve never asked for any recompense for my online ramblings, but if you’ve ever wanted to drop me some money to thank me for something I’ve put out there, now’s your chance.

Any contribution you make will go towards fostering the next generation of traditional Irish musicians, something that’s very dear to my heart.

This Saturday, April 12th, is Record Store Day. To mark the occasion, Salter Cane will be playing a stripped-down set at Union Music Store in Lewes. That’s the place that Jamie used to run, so it has a special place in our hearts.

Liza Lo will be playing at midday.

Salter Cane are on at 1pm.

If you’re in the neighbourbood, please swing by! We’re really looking forward to playing a mix of some old songs and some brand new songs from our brand new album.

The Wikimedia Foundation, stewards of the finest projects on the web, have written about the hammering their servers are taking from the scraping bots that feed large language models.

Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.

Drew DeVault puts it more bluntly, saying Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face:

Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.

And no, a robots.txt file doesn’t help.

If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned.

Free and open source projects are particularly vulnerable. FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies:

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects’ infrastructure, and it’s getting worse.

You try to do the right thing by making knowledge and tools freely available. This is how you get repaid. AI bots are destroying Open Access:

There’s a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet.

My own experience with The Session bears this out.

Ars Technica has a piece on this: Open source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries .

So does MIT Technology Review: AI crawler wars threaten to make the web more closed for everyone.

When we talk about the unfair practices and harm done by training large language models, we usually talk about it in the past tense: how they were trained on other people’s creative work without permission. But this is an ongoing problem that’s just getting worse.

The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.

If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.

If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.

My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel.

Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfolding.

I remember the build-up at the end of February. We were in Galway for a birthday weekend getaway. One morning in the hotel I saw the papers were running a story that seemed so Irish to me: because of this emerging virus, people were no longer to give the “sign of peace” at mass (that’s the bit where you awkwardly shake hands with the people around you). I chuckled. Nervously.

Then we were leaving Ireland, in the taxi to the airport in Dublin the radio was on. A medical professional was urging the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day parade because a grand total of 2 or 3 people in the country had this virus. The DJ reacted with incredulity. It sounded like a pretty far-fetched idea to me too, because St. Patrick’s Day was just over two weeks away.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled.

Throughout The Situation I was keeping track of things in Ireland. It was like seeing an A/B test unfolding. Everything that England was doing wrong, Ireland was doing the opposite. It wasn’t quite New Zealand, but they put scientists front and centre of their decision-making precision. Whereas here, policy was driven by wishful thinking.

I was writing about it all here on my website. I also started recording a tune every day for 200 days. Here’s the first one. See how fresh-faced I am? I decided to stop shaving during lockdown. After six weeks, I looked like this.

But to really recall what that time was like, I recommend reading Jessica’s account of 2020. The first entry is called A Journal of the Plague Week and it was published five years ago. The final entry was A Journal of the Plague Week 52 a year later.

I’ve been banging on for a while now about how much I’d like a declarative option for the Web Share API. I was thinking that the type attribute on the button element would be a good candidate for this (there’s prior art in the way we extended the type attribute on the input element for HTML5).

I wrote about the reason for a share button type as well as creating a polyfill. I also wrote about how this idea would work for other button types: fullscreen, print, copy to clipboard, that sort of thing.

Since then, I’ve been very interested in the idea of “invokers” being pursued by the Open UI group. Rather than extending the type attribute, they’ve been looking at adding a new attribute. Initially it was called invoketarget (so something like button invoketarget="share").

Things have been rolling along and invoketarget has now become the command attribute (there’s also a new commandfor attribute that you can point to an element with an ID). Here’s a list of potential values for the command attribute on a button element.

Right now they’re focusing on providing declarative options for launching dialogs and other popovers. That’s already shipping.

The next step is to use command and commandfor for controlling audio and video, as well as some form controls. I very much approve! I love the idea of being able to build and style a fully-featured media player without any JavaScript.

I’m hoping that after that we’ll see the command attribute get expanded to cover JavaScript APIs that require a user interaction. These seem like the ideal candidates:

• button command="share"
• button command="fullscreen"
• button command="print"
• button command="copy"
• button command="install"

There’s also scope for declarative options for navigating the browser’s history stack:

• button command="back"
• button command="forward"
• button command="refresh"

Whatever happens next, I’m very glad to see that so much thinking is being applied to declarative solutions for common interface patterns.

There’s a new proposal for giving developers more control over styling form controls. I like it.

It’s clearly based on the fantastic work being done by the Open UI group on the select element. The proposal suggests that authors can opt-in to the new styling possibilities by declaring:

appearance: base;

So basically the developer is saying “I know what I’m doing—I’m taking the controls.” But browsers can continue to ship their default form styles. No existing content will break.

The idea is that once the developer has opted in, they can then style a number of pseudo-elements.

This proposal would apply to pretty much all the form controls you can think of: all the input types, along with select, progress, meter, buttons and more.

But there’s one element more that I wish were on the list:

legend

I know, technically it���s not a form control but legend and fieldset are only ever used within forms.

The legend element is notoriously annoying to style. So a lot of people just don’t bother using it, which is a real shame. It’s like we’re punishing people for doing the right thing.

Wouldn’t it be great if you, as a developer, had the option of saying “I know what I’m doing—I’m taking the controls”:

legend {
  appearance: base;
}

Imagine if that nuked the browser’s weird default styles, effectively turning the element into a span or div as far as styling is concerned. Then you could style it however you wanted. But crucially, if browsers shipped this, no existing content would break.

The shitty styling situation for legend (and its parent fieldset) is one of those long-standing annoyances that seems to have fallen down the back of the sofa of browser vendors. No one’s going to spend time working on it when there are more important newer features to ship. That’s why I’d love to see it sneak in to this new proposal for styling form controls.

I was in Amsterdam last week. Just like last year I was there to help out Vasilis’s students with a form-based assignment:

They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.

Yes, all the excitement of taxes combined with the thrilling world of web forms.

(Side note: this time they were told to style it using the design system from the Dutch railway because the tax office was getting worried that they were making phishing sites.)

I saw a lot of the same challenges again. I saw how students wished they could specify a past date or a future date in a date picker without using JavaScript. And I saw them lamenting the time they spent styling legends that worked across all browsers.

Right now, Mason Freed has an open issue on the new proposal with his suggestion to add some more elements to consider. Both legend and fieldset are included. That gets a thumbs-up from me.

Dan wrote an interesting post with a somewhat clickbaity title; This Competition Exposed How AI is Reshaping Design:

I watched two designers go head-to-head in a high-speed battle to create the best landing page in 45 minutes. One was a seasoned pro. The other was a non-designer using AI.

If you can ignore the title (and the fact that Dan still actively posts on Twitter; something I find very hard to ignore), then there’s a really thoughtful analysis in there.

It’s less about one platform or tool vs. another more than it is a commentary on how design happens, and whether or not that’s changing in a significant way.

In particular, there’s a very revealing graph that shows the pros and cons of both approaches.

There’s no doubt about it, using a generative large language model helped a non-designer to get past the blank page. But it was less useful in subsequent iterations that rely on decision-making:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: design is deciding. The best designers are the best deciders.

Dan finishes by saying that what he’d really like to see is an experienced designer/decider using these tools to turbo-boost their process:

AI raises the floor for non-designers. But can it raise the ceiling for designers?

Meanwhile, Matt has been writing about Vibe-designing. Matt is an experienced designer, but he’s not experienced with Figma. He’s found that he can work around that using a large language model:

Where in the past 30 years I might have had to cajole a more technically adept colleague into making something through sketches, gesticulating and making sound effects – I open up a Claude window and start what-iffing.

The “vibe” part of the equation often defaults to the mean, which is not a surprise when you think about what you’re asking to help is a staggeringly-massive machine for producing generally-unsurprising satisfactory answers quickly. So, you look at the output as a basis for the next sketch, and the next sketch and quickly, together, you move to something more novel as a result.

Interesting! Just as Dan insisted, the important work is making the decision and moving on to the next stage. If the actual outputs at each stage are mediocre, that seems to be okay, as long as they’re just good enough to inform a go/no-go decision.

This certainly seems more centaur-like than the usual boring uses of large language models to simply do what people are already doing.

Rich gets at something similar when he talks about using large language models for prototyping, where it’s okay if the code is kind of shitty:

If all you need is crappy code to try out a concept or a solution, then an LLM might well enable you (the designer) to do that.

Mind you, even if you do end up finding useful and appropriate ways to use these tools, you’re still using a tool built on exploitation and unfairness:

It’s hard (and reckless) to ignore the heartfelt and cogent perspective laid out by Miriam on the role of AI companies in the current geopolitical crisis:

When eugenics-obsessed billionaires try to sell me a new toy, I don’t ask how many keystrokes it will save me at work. It’s impossible for me to discuss the utility of a thing when I fundamentally disagree with the purpose of it.

I’ve had my head down for the past six months putting the line-up for UX London together. Following the classic design cliché, the process was first divergent, then convergent.

I spent months casting the net wide, gathering as many possible candidates as I could, as well as accepting talk proposals (of which there were lots). It was fun—this is when the possibility space is wide open.

Then it was crunch time and I had to start zeroing in on the final line-up. It wasn’t easy. There were so many times I agonised over who’d be the right person to deliver the right talk.

But as the line-up came together, I started getting very excited. And now when I step back and look at the line-up, I’m positively vibrating with excitement—roll on June!

I think it was really useful to have a mix of speakers that I reached out to, as well as talk proposals. If I was only relying on my own knowledge and networks, I’m sure I’d miss a lot. But equally, if I was only relying on talk proposals, it would be like searching for my keys under the streetlight.

Putting the line-up on the website wasn’t quite the end of the work. We got over 100 proposals for UX London this year. I made sure to send an email back to each and every one of them once the line-up was complete. And if anyone asked for more details as to why their proposal didn’t make it through, I was happy to provide that feedback.

After they went to the trouble of submitting a proposal, it was the least I could do.

Oh, and don’t forget: early-bird tickets for UX London are only available until Friday. Now’s the time to get yours!

I left Twitter in 2022. With every day that has passed since then, that decision has proven to be correct.

(I’m honestly shocked that some people I know still have active Twitter accounts. At this point there is no justification for giving your support to a place that’s literally run by a nazi.)

I also used to have some Twitter bots. There were Twitter accounts for my blog and for my links. A simple If-This-Then-That recipe would poll my RSS feeds and then post an update whenever there was a new item.

I had something something similar going for The Session. Its Twitter bot has been replaced with automated accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky (I couldn’t use IFTTT directly to post to Bluesky from RSS, but I was able to set up Buffer to do the job).

I figured The Session’s Twitter account would probably just stop working at some point, but it seems like it’s still going.

Hah! I spoke too soon. I just decided to check that URL and nothing is loading. Now, that may just be a temporary glitch because Alan Musk has decided to switch off a server or something. Or it might be that the account has been cancelled because of how I modified its output.

I’ve altered the IFTTT recipe so that whenever there’s a new item in an RSS feed, the update is posted to Twitter along with a message like “Please use Bluesky or Mastodon instead of Twitter” or “Please stop using Twitter/X”, or “Get off Twitter—please. It’s a cesspit” or “If you’re still on Twitter, you’re supporting a fascist.”

That’s a start but I need to think about how I can get the bot to do as much damage as possible before it’s destroyed.