Links

Lea Verou explains how we could do if statements, that are coming to CSS, today.

She explored various very clever ways to do it.

Great point on abstractions:

Ugliness is only acceptable if it’s encapsulated and not exposed to component users.

(From: Inline conditionals in CSS, now? • Lea Verou)

This post is a bit violent at times, but has some very, very good points on the “AI” hype from someone who actually knows the technology and sees through the hype:

You either need to be on the absolute cutting-edge and producing novel research, or you should be doing exactly what you were doing five years ago with minor concessions to incorporating LLMs. Anything in the middle ground does not make any sense unless you actually work in the rare field where your industry is being totally disrupted right now.

(From: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again — Ludicity)

Richard Rutter explains that maybe the ch unit isn't the best choice if you're trying to follow Robert Bringhurt's guidelines:

The important part of Bringhurst’s guideline is not the ’66-characters’ but the ‘satisfactory length’. This is about readability, and readability is affected by the length of a line more so than the number of characters in it.

(From: Use of ch unit considered inappropriate (in certain circumstances) | Clagnut by Richard Rutter)

Apple's ethos3 has always been about building tools to empower users to make art, to create, to be original. I don't know what is is, but it sure as hell isn't human creativity.

(From: roguelazer's website: oh, the humanity)

Rahim Abdi of Apple describes an effort to make it possible to test more web platform features for accessibility features:

what if we could regularly test the accessibility behavior of any and all web platform features on the latest browsers in an automated fashion? How much time and effort could this save?

(From: Improving Web Accessibility with Web Platform Tests | WebKit)

Neven Mrgan received an email:

my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this

(From: How it feels to get an AI email from a friend)

In his post he talks about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of AI generated content, in this case one where you'd hope these tools aren't used: an email from a friend. Not for grammar checks, but for the actual message. It felt off:

It felt like getting a birthday card with only the prewritten message inside, and no added well-wishes from the wisher’s own pen.

Firefox experiments with automatic text alternative text generation, using a local and therefore privacy-preserving (?) machine learning model:

Until recently it’s not been feasible for the browser to infer reasonably high quality alt text for images, without sending potentially sensitive data to a remote server. However, latest developments in AI have enabled this type of image analysis to happen efficiently, even on a CPU.

We are adding a feature within the PDF editor in Firefox Nightly to validate this approach. As we develop it further and learn from the deployment, our goal is to offer it for users who’d like to use it when browsing to help them better understand images which would otherwise be inaccessible.

(From: Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog)

This is good to see as so many websites lack text alternatives and this may be the first of its kind made by a company that didn't take part in large scale user privacy violations.

CSS can lay things out for you automatically, which is cool but could mean reading order and visual order end up not matching. Luckily, Rachel and others at the CSS Working Group are working on a solution, that lets developers choose which order makes most sense:

There’s a proposal however that aims to deal with this, that would let developers indicate to the browser that they want to follow the “visual” flow of items rather than source order. This is currently named reading-order-items, and I recently added a draft of the proposal to the CSS Display Level 4 editor’s draft. The specification deals with reordering both in an automatic sense, but also the reordering you might want to do when placing items on the grid.

(From: Masonry and reading order – Rachel Andrew)

Jeremy noticed that an Instagram
notification said:

we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve AI

(From: Adactio: Journal—InstAI)

That's not by any means reasonably what the word legitimate means, is it?

It's unfortunate many interesting people and businesses can mostly or only be followed on Instagram, as that's pretty much why I still keep an account. This feels like the social media equivalent of being kept hostage.

Rachel Smith on makers vs idea guys:

Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.

(From: Generative AI is for the idea guys)