A shorter roundup
Once again a slightly smaller roundup than some weeks have been this year, but still some great reading and viewing to tide you over. From a milestone implementation of the new Date and Time API for JavaScript, Temporal, to news on a brand new browser engine, and much more, these are the things that have caught me eye this week.
And, we have a lot going on here at Web Directions.
- First I’m off to speak at CSS Day in Amsterdam next week. I’m excited to revisit the Dao of Web Design, focusing on CSS. It’s sold out, but…
- We’re streaming CSS Day on Conffab–and you can watch the entire conference live for just €99 (thats $A149)–2 Days of the very best speakers on CSS in the world (plus me :-)
- Our Code and Code Leaders conferences are coming up in Melbourne in 2 weeks. The lineups are incredible, covering timely topics in front of end engineering and engineering leadership, and you can attend in person or via the live stream, an increasingly popular option.
- A little further out, our Engineering AI conference in Sydney September 12, and Developer Summit and Next in November in Sydney have open CFPs–so why not put in a proposal?
Now on with the reading!
Shipping Temporal | SpiderMonkey JavaScript/WebAssembly Engine
The Temporal proposal provides a replacement for Date, a long standing pain-point in the JavaScript language. This blog post describes some of the history and motivation behind the proposal. The Temporal API itself is well docmented on MDN.Temporal reached Stage 3 of the TC39 process in March 2021. Reaching Stage 3 means that the specification is considered complete, and that the proposal is ready for implementation.
Source: Shipping Temporal | SpiderMonkey JavaScript/WebAssembly Engine
The folks at Mozilla are the first to fully ship support for Temporal the ECMAScript replacement for the aged date and time features of JavaScript. This is a monumental piece of work and a huge improvement for JavaScript so well done to the team there!
Introduction to JavaScript Frameworks
JavaScript, react, software engineering
Have you ever wondered why it feels like there are so many JavaScript Frameworks? In this video we will look at 5 popular frameworks: React, Angular, Vue, Svelte, and Solid, to better understand why they exist, how they work, and what makes them unique.
Ryan Carniato, developer of the framework SolidJS compares and contrasts several popular frameworks and their approaches.
The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype
AI Native Dev, LLMs, software engineering
From NoCode to AI-AssistedEvery few years, a shiny new technology emerges that promises to make software developers obsolete. The headlines follow a predictable pattern: “The End of Coding,” “Anyone Can Build Apps Now,” or my personal favorite, “Why Your Five-Year-Old Will Be Programming Before Learning to Read.”The executives get excited. The consultants circle like sharks. PowerPoint decks multiply. Budgets shift.And then reality sets in.
Source: The Recurring Cycle of ‘Developer Replacement’ Hype
Danilo Alonso observes we’ve seen this pattern before–an emerging technology (nocode, Cloud) reducing or eliminating the need for developers. And it never seems to pan out like that. Alonso argues the same will be true for LLMs.
Ladybird: That Rare Breed of Browser Based on Web Standards
There appear to be a lot of different web browsers available — but on closer examination, this isn’t entirely true. Many browsers are based on Chromium, the open source code behind Google’s Chrome browser. Safari and Firefox are the notable exceptions, but Microsoft Edge, Opera and Brave (to name just a few) are all based on Chromium. However, soon there will be a new fully open source browser, constructed independently from the ground up, called Labybird.
Source: Ladybird: That Rare Breed of Browser Based on Web Standards – The New Stack
Dialog is for modals, popover is for everything else
<dialog> and <popover> are currently the only two ways to access the browser’s top layer. So what’s the difference between them and which one should you use when?
Source: Dialog is for modals, popover is for everything else
We’ve covered dialog and the popover API a bit here at Conffab. But when do you use which? Mayank fills us in.
Microsoft is opening its on-device AI models up to web apps in Edge
Web developers will be able to start leveraging on-device AI in Microsoft’s Edge browser soon, using new APIs that can give their web apps access to Microsoft’s Phi-4-mini model, the company announced at its Build conference today. And Microsoft says the API will be cross-platform, so it sounds like these APIs will work with the Edge browser in macOS, as well.
Source: Microsoft is opening its on-device AI models up to web apps in Edge | The Verge
When we think of using LLMs, we’ll likely be thinking of using a hosted model via API. But smaller on device models are increasingly capable, and address two significant concerns about LLMs-their energy use and worries about privacy. We’ve covered how Chrome and Firefox have brought language model inference to the browser (Google had more announcements at I/O about this), but at their Build conference, Microsoft announced support for their Phi-4-mini model in the browser, giving JavaScript developers access to this model on Mac OS and Windows.
Adactio: Journal—The landing zone
But there is no fold. We pretended that everyone’s screens were 640 by 480 pixels. Then we pretended that everyone’s screens were 800 by 600 pixels. But we never really knew. It was all a consensual hallucination. Even before mobile devices showed up there was never a single fold.
Even if you know that there’s no literal page fold on the web, using the phrase “above the fold” is still insidiously unhelpful.So what’s the alternative? Well, James has what I think is an excellent framing: The landing zone.
Source: Adactio: Journal—The landing zone
Jeremy Keith challenges us to reconsider one of the longest lasting anachronisms we use when describing web pages–’the fold’ (a term that comes from the newspaper world). He amplifies James (last name I can’t find!) suggested framing–’the landing zone’.
Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?
architecture, performance, SPAs
The friction involved with a hard page load doesn’t exist because web developers are too lazy to do performance work—it reflects a real, physical limitation in the system that is beyond the ability of one developer, and possibly humanity, to overcome. SPAs not only fail to remove the need for the network call, they diminish the user’s ability to manage when that network call is made, and handle failure cases.
Source: Who’s Afraid of a Hard Page Load?
When the iPhone came out people lost their minds. Well in lots of ways. Obviously it was a paradigm shifting new platform and hardware device. But when apps came to the platform, where previously web technology had been the way to develop for this marvel, then criticism of web apps versus native apps emerged. And a significant aspect of the superiority of native apps over web apps was perceived performance. I mean when the hundreds of MBs or GBs of code for your app are right there on the device, as opposed to needing to be downloaded to be used, there’s an advantage right there. The response of the Web development profession to this was the single page app architecture. First download the app scaffolding, then load in the specific parts of the app required by the user. Transitioning between different stated can be all ‘buttery smooth’ like all those native app animations we envied. Here Alexander Petros argues against that, that “The web has seams, let them show”
Developers are naturally inclined to make their applications feel more responsive, and when they test their SPA, it feels like a more natural experience than a clunky old web page. But this instinct is usually incorrect, because most websites need to hit the network in response to user actions.
The web is a medium-it is not paper as it took the first decade of its existence and more to work out, but it’s not an operating system of app platform either, though it rhymes with both things.
What Would “Good” AI Look Like? – Anil Dash
This isn’t a comprehensive list, but it’s possible to imagine some traits of an AI system that could credibly offer an alternative to the offerings that are currently dominating the conversation. (This is deliberately light on technical specifics and is intended for a more general audience, but is grounded in familiarity with the current state of progress on consumer-grade AI technologies.) Here are some highlights:
Source: What Would “Good” AI Look Like? – Anil Dash
Anil Dash provides some thoughts on what ‘good’ AI might look like.
MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 – Anil Dash
Over the last few months, all the nerds have gotten excited about Model Context Protocol, or MCP. It’s a spec that was designed by Anthropic (the Claude folks) last year to let their LLM know how to ask various apps for information or be able to interact with different systems. Then, a couple months ago, OpenAI decided to support the same protocol in ChatGPT, and voila! Now it’s a standard that everybody has adopted. It’s even in Windows, the official operating system of the late 20th century.
The interesting thing about the rapid adoption of MCP isn’t the specification itself. Honestly, the spec is… kinda mid. Compared to the olden days, when specs were written by pedantic old Unix dudes who were never in danger of being gruntled in the first place, they would be scratched out in plain text, with the occasional shouting in ALL CAPS about what we SHOULD and MUST do. MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~. But MCP works! And it’s open — and that’s what counts.
Source: MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0 – Anil Dash
Anil Dash is bullish on MCP-not the technical details of the protocols itself so much as what it may enable.
After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain
AI Native Dev, LLMs, software engineering
TLDR: LLMs are okay at coding, but at scale they build jumbled messes. I’ve scaled back my use of AI when coding and gone back to using my brain and pen and paper.A few months ago I needed to build a new infrastructure for my SaaS, as the current PHP+MySQL combo was not fit for purpose anymore. I was excited about the opportunity to make the most of all the new LLMs I’d been playing with, so I set aside my SWE hat and I started acting as a product manager, chatting with Claude about best practices, doing some research on my own and then coming up with a plan, after many back and forths. I ended up choosing Go+Clickhouse.
Source: After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain • albertofortin.com
A salutary tale from Alberto Fortin, on working with LLMs as a software developer. It seems relatively clear can’t presently (if ever?) get them to develop code and use it sight unseen. Though a new generation of agentic coding technologies promise to do just that at significant scale.
Unlocking Generative AI in your Web App
Discover how to seamlessly integrate AI LLM models into your website using cutting-edge techniques like new client-side APIs and cloud services. Learn how to execute AI models in the front-end without incurring cloud fees by leveraging Chrome’s Gemini Nano model using the window.ai inference API, or utilizing WebNN, WebGPU, and WebAssembly for open-source models.
This session dives into API integration, token management, secure prompting, and practical demos to get you started with AI on the web.
Unlock the power of AI on the web while having fun along the way!
Source: Unlocking Generative AI in your Web App － firt.dev
Adding generative AI to a web app is not restricted to relying on cloud based APIs like those front Anthropic or OpenAI–the capability is already in the browser in various ways.
Great reading, every weekend.
We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday.
