Bruce raises an interesting question with media playing in popovers—shouldn’t the media pause when the popover is closed? I agree with Bruce that this is a common use case that should be covered declaratively.
I endorse this statement.
This free day-long online event all about accessibility and inclusive design is happening right now. You can join live, or catch up on the talks that have already happened, like the excellent talks from Russ Weakly and Manuel Matuzović.
It looks like it will be a great tool for prototyping. A tool to help developers that don’t have experience with CSS and layout to have a starting point. As someone who spent some time building smoke and mirrors prototypes for UX research, I welcome tools like this.
What concerns me is the assertion that this is production-grade code when it simply is not.
Go spelunking down the archives to find some lovely graphic design artefacts.
This is quite mesmerising—click on an image that takes your fancy; see it surrounded by related images; repeat.
The slides and transcript from a great talk by Maggie Appleton, including this perfect description of the vibes we get from large language models:
It feels like they’re either geniuses playing dumb or dumb machines playing genius, but we don’t know which.
Another great talk from Simon that explains large language models in a hype-free way.
A false sense of security persists surrounding digitized documents: because an infinite number of identical copies can be made of any original, most of us believe that our electronic files have an indefinite shelf life and unlimited retrieval opportunities. In fact, preserving the world’s online content is an increasing concern, particularly as file formats (and the hardware and software used to run them) become scarce, inaccessible, or antiquated, technologies evolve, and data decays. Without constant maintenance and management, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. Our modern records are far from permanent.
Some lovely scroll-driven animations illustrate this great little microsite.
There’s something very pleasy about the chunky design that harkens back to the Zeldmanesque early web.
A great reminder of just how much you can do with modern markup and styles when it comes to form validation. The :user-invalid and :user-valid pseudo-classes are particularly handy!
An impressive piece of internationlisation and inclusive design.
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.
The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.
Emily M. Bender:
I dislike the term because “artificial intelligence” suggests that there’s more going on than there is, that these things are autonomous thinking entities rather than tools and simply kinds of automation. If we focus on them as autonomous thinking entities or we spin out that fantasy, it is easier to lose track of the people in the picture, both the people who should be accountable for what the systems are doing and the people whose labor and data are being exploited to create them in the first place.
Alternative terms:
And this is worth shouting from the rooftops:
The threat is not the generative “AI” itself. It’s the way that management might choose to use it.
This is a really clear, practical, level-headed explanatory talk from Simon. You can read the transcript or watch the video.
A plea to let users do web things on websites. In other words, stop over-complicating everything with buckets of JavaScript.
Honestly, this isn’t wishlist isn’t asking for much, and it’s a damning indictment of “modern” frontend development that we’ve come to this:
- Let me copy text so I can paste it.
- If something navigates like a link, let me do link things.
- …
Could the tsunami of AI shite turn out to be a flash flood? Might the models rapidly degrade into uselessness or soon be sued or blocked out of existence? Will users rebel as their experience of the internet is degraded?
In my most optimistic moments, I find myself hoping that the whole AI edifice will come tumbling down as tools disintegrate, people realise how unreliable they are, and how valuable human-generated and curated information really is. But it’s not a safe bet.
Coming soon—Ethan’s next book is exactly what the tech industry needs right now.
Tech workers—designers, engineers, writers, and many others—have learned that when they stand together, they’re poised to build a better version of the tech industry.