Your weekly reading from Web Directions
Last week we hosted UX Australia – the first for a couple of years. It was an amazing two days of in-depth expert talks on service design and user experience and all things modern design. The values of community, connection, and care emerge time and again across the talks.
We’ll have the videos from the conference available in the coming weeks, so if you’re a Conffab Pro member, you’ll be able to get access to them soon.
We also have our Engineering AI Conference coming up on September 12th, so only a couple of weeks away now. If you are a software engineer, an engineering leader, or a manager, then this single day will help you think much more deeply about the impact that large language models and AI are having on the practise of software engineering. We’ll go far beyond code generation. We’ll think about security, performance testing, the culture of teams, the role of the engineer. It is a time of transformation for the profession. In a single day, for a very affordable front price, you can hear from experts thinking really deeply about what the implications for these technologies are on what we do.
It’s taking place in Sydney on September 12th, and also online on our streaming platform Conffab. So, grab a ticket and we will see you there.
There’s a lot of reading in this week’s newsletter, and it covers, as always, a really broad range of topics. But all relevant for those who design and develop digital and web-based products and sites and apps (whatever we call these things these days).
Hope these will be of value, at least some of them, for your work. We’ll see you again next week.
Web Platform & Browser News
Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs
For the last year, I’ve been working as part of the Chrome built-in AI team on a set of APIs to bring various AI models to the web browser. As with all APIs we ship, our goal is to make these APIs compelling enough that other browsers adopt them, and they become part of the web’s standard library.
Working in such a fast-moving space brings tension with the usual process for building web APIs. When exposing other platform capabilities like USB, payments, or codecs, we can draw on years or decades of work in native platforms. But with built-in AI APIs, especially for language model-backed APIs like the prompt API, our precedent is barely two years old. Moreover, there are interesting differences between HTTP APIs and client-side APIs, and between vendor-specific APIs and those designed for a wide range of possible future implementations.
In what follows, I’ll focus mostly on the design of the prompt API, as it has the most complex API surface. But I’ll also touch on higher-level “task-based” APIs like summarizer, translator, and language detector.
Source: Designing the Built-in AI Web APIs | Domenic Denicola
Domenic Denicola here looks at the development of new APIs in the browser. Specifically, AI-related APIs in Chrome. This is an area we have a lot of interest in, as we see on-device inference as being a way of making the browser a first-class citizen when it comes to Generative AI, and of addressing some of the environmental impacts and privacy concerns people have with generative AI.
How To Use The Safari Developer Tools
Browser developer tools are essential for debugging problems with your website. And if you’re facing Safari-specific issues, whether on your Mac or on iOS, you’ll need to use the Safari developer tools. This article provides a detailed guide to how to get started with the Safari Web Inspector and introduces some of its more advanced features.
Source: How To Use The Safari Developer Tools | DebugBear
It’s hard to believe that for the first 15 years or so of their existence, browsers didn’t have any developer tools. Firebug, for the then-new Firefox in 2006 was the first of the tools that we would recognise as modern web developers. It established the paradigm for all the browser-based developer tools that came after it. As a developer, you doubtless use these tools at least from time to time. But they are likely far more capable than even very experienced developers might realise. Here Matt Zeunert gives us a pretty thorough overview and introduction to Safari’s developer tools, which are very similar to those in Firefox and in Chromium-based browsers as well. Even if you’re experienced with dev tools in browsers, I suspect you’ll learn a thing or two here about features you didn’t know about.
CSS & Frontend Development
Another article about centering in CSS
The tired old meme that centering in CSS is “impossible” has never been so irrelevant. In fact, I’d argue there’s almost too many options now. Let’s have a look at some common contexts, what approaches we have available to us and what I would choose per context.
Source: Another article about centering in CSS – Piccalilli
In most areas of practice, not least of all when it comes to software development, acknowledging hapless ignorance is not exactly something people tend to do. Except when it comes to CSS, and then all bets are off. I honestly can’t count the number of times I have seen the meme, animated or otherwise, from The Family Guy of the blinds as some sort of analogy for how CSS is broken. When in fact, what it really says to me is you don’t really understand CSS. One of those areas in which people have long decried the shortcomings of CSS (and I mean decades long) is when it comes to centering. One more time: Here collected are the various (in fact, perhaps too numerous) ways in which you can centre content vertically and horizontally with CSS.
A gentle introduction to anchor positioning
anchor positioning CSS CSS Layout
Anchor positioning allows you to place an element on the page based on where another element is. It makes it easier to create responsive menus and tooltips with less code using only CSS. Here’s how it works.
Source: A gentle introduction to anchor positioning | WebKit
CSS provides a significant array of different ways of positioning content on a web page. Absolute, relative, static, fixed. Using Grid and Flex. And soon to be added to this anchor positioning. Just as Grid and Flex replaced outdated hacky ways of doing page layout, I suspect in short order anchor positioning will replace a lot of the way we position dynamic content like tool tips and menu items and other things that appear interactively in our web content.
Better CSS layouts: Time.com Hero Section
In this article series, I plan to choose layouts from popular websites and see how I can rebuild them better in CSS. This time, it’s the top news section in Time.com’s layout.
Source: Better CSS layouts: Time.com Hero Section
Ahmad Shadeed is one of the very best communicators on CSS and modern web design, hands down. His interactive tutorials and detailed articles clearly and comprehensively explore ideas beyond the introductory and obvious. He has a great book “Debugging CSS”, which has been out for a while now that I highly recommend. In fact, I wrote the forward for it. And he also has a number of talks here on Conffab, including a recent talk at CSS Day that I also highly recommend. And last but not least, he has an upcoming course, “The Layout Maestro” on CSS layout that you should get on the waitlist for.
Un-Sass’ing my CSS
Un-Sass’ing? With this in mind, I thought I’d start another little series of articles. This time, I’ll be showcasing how aspects of modern CSS can replace your favourite CSS preprocessor, what I’m going to call “Un-Sass’ing.”
Adding Transparency To A Colour
As we work in an agile environment, not everything is fully developed or finalised yet. One of the requirements we’ve encountered is the need to create transparent backgrounds. Since we are not using Sass for this project, I wondered if we could achieve similar effects using CSS. In my search, I discovered the color() function, and Manuel kindly shared some other examples of different ways to implement transparency in using modern CSS.
Source: Un-Sass’ing my CSS | Always Twisted
As the web platform increasingly matures, not just with APIs or JavaScript capabilities, but with CSS capabilities as well, how might we move away from a framework-first or tool-first approach to a platform-first approach to developing? Here Stuart Robson looks at ‘un-sassing’ his CSS, with a focus on the new colour functionality in the language.
Style your underlines
We shouldn’t rely on colour alone to indicate that something is interactive.
Take links, for example. Sure, you can give them a different colour to the surrounding text, but you shouldn’t stop there. Make sure there’s something else that distinguishes them. You could make them bold. Or you could stick with the well-understood convention of underlying links.
This is where some designers bristle. If there are a lot of links on a page, it could look awfully cluttered with underlines. That’s why some designers would rather remove the underline completely.
Source: Style your underlines – Adactio: Journal
For designers, underlines can be a point of contention. On the web, they’ve always indicated that something in the text has been clickable. But in print, traditionally, the underline is very sparingly used. Here Jeremy Keith looks at how with modern CSS we have a little bit more to play with when it comes to underlines than simply the binary on/off.
New series of blog posts: learning web development
CSS HTML JavaScript Web Development
This blog post provides an overview of my new series of blog posts called “Learning web development”. What do I need to learn for web development? In order to create a web app, you need to know about the following technologies: HTML is used for specifying the content – what we see on a web page: text, images, etc. CSS is used for specifying what the content looks like: layout, colors, etc. JavaScript makes web pages truly interactive. Servers are where the web pages are stored. They can also store data so that it lives outside web browsers, perform computations for web browsers, and more.
Source: New series of blog posts: learning web development – 2ality
Axel Rauschmeyer is one of the great communicators and educators of JavaScript and web development. He’s begun a new series on learning web development, and it’s one I think anyone, no matter what their level of experience, would benefit from at least perusing. I know I certainly will. So if you haven’t already, why not subscribe to his RSS feed (well, it’s atom but potato tomato) and keep up as new instalments are published?
An Introduction to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) Part 2: Positioning in SVG
An Introduction to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
We mentioned part one, the introduction to this series from Rob Lander on SVG. Part two has just arrived, this time focusing on positioning in SVG. At 15 minutes or so, it’s substantial but not overwhelming. And I can’t wait to see what follows as well.
AI & software engineeringHello.
What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be traced back to January, 2020, when a team of researchers at OpenAI published a thirty-page report titled “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models.” The team was led by the A.I. researcher Jared Kaplan, and included Dario Amodei, who is now the C.E.O. of Anthropic. They investigated a fairly nerdy question: What happens to the performance of language models when you increase their size and the intensity of their training?
Source: What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? | The New Yorker
The recently released GPT-5 from OpenAI was among the more hotly anticipated technological releases in some time. Given the rapid increase in capability from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 in late 2022 to GPT-4 in March 2023, the two years since seems like an eternity. Along the way, we did see new models from OpenAI, as well as other models from Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and other labs, which all seem to suggest that the upside in new large language models was unbounded. And yet GPT-5 seems to have landed with a thud, particularly amongst those who are the most avid users of these technologies. So, what if that’s all there is? What if the scaling laws of large language models mean that simply adding more data and more compute ultimately has an asymptote? And what we see with today’s models is largely as good as it’s going to get? Cal Newport considers this in the New Yorker this week. My feeling is that even if this is all there is, then certainly when it comes to specific use cases like software development, we’ve already come a very long way and likely transformed the nature of software engineering.
A Gentle Introduction to Context Engineering in LLMs
AI Native Dev context engineering LLMs software engineering
If I received a request that said, ‘Hey Kanwal, can you write an article about how LLMs work?’, that’s an instruction. I would write what I find suitable and would probably aim it at an audience with a medium level of expertise. Now, if my audience were beginners, they would hardly understand what’s happening. If they were experts, they might consider it too basic or out of context. I also need a set of instructions like audience expertise, article length, theoretical or practical focus, and writing style to write a piece that resonates with them.
Source: A Gentle Introduction to Context Engineering in LLMs – KDnuggets
We’ve seen context engineering turn up a few times in recent Elsewheres. This looks like an excellent addition to those other recent pieces.
AGENT.md: Why your README matters more than AI configuration files
AI Native Dev documentation software engineering
The AGENT.md specification emerged in July 2025 as an attempt to solve a real problem: developers maintaining separate configuration files for each AI coding tool (.cursorrules, .windsurfrules, CLAUDE.md, and more). Created by Sourcegraph’s Amp team, AGENT.md promises “one file, any agent”. A vendor-neutral standard to unify AI assistant configuration. But a surprising truth has emerged: the proliferation of AI configuration files has inadvertently revealed that most projects have terrible documentation, and fixing your README is more important than adopting any new standard.
Source: AGENT.md: Why your README matters more than AI configuration files – Upsun Developer Center
Write good documentation is the “eat your vegetables” of the developer world. We all know we should do it, but time and again it’s likely we cut corners, took shortcuts, and our documentation wasn’t quite up to the standards that we’d expect even of ourselves. Turns out documentation is not just valuable for your fellow developers and yourself months later when you revisit your code and scratch your head at what on earth it is doing. It’s also valuable for coding agents because the more context you can provide for your code and what it is doing, the better able agents are to work with it. So, eat your Brussels sprouts and write your documentation, ironically perhaps with the help of some large language models.
AI’s Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You
AI AI Engineering LLMs software engineering
On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction of a major breach within six months, and real-world use cases of his open source tools, from investigative journalism to OSINT sleuthing. Simon shares grounded insights on coding with AI, the real environmental impact, AGI skepticism, and why human expertise still matters. A candid, hype-free take from someone who truly knows the space.
Source: AI’s Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You – Last Week in AWS Podcast
If you paid any sort of attention, we quote Simon Willison quite a bit here at Elsewhere on Conffab. Not only does he have a tremendous track record as one of the co-inventors of the Django framework, with a huge amount of work in Python, founder of the late lamented Lanyrd site, and then CTO at Eventbrite for a long time, over the last three years or so, he’s become one of the real go-to voices on software development with large language models and on large language models more broadly. SimonWillison.net is a daily go-to where Simon writes frequently on these topics. And if there’s a podcast interview with him by anyone, I will listen to it and recommend it.
Performance & Web Optimization
How To Fix A Slow Website: 4 Web Performance Tips
Nobody I know purposely designs a slow website. I have never found a person yet who said, “I like your website, but I wish it was just a little slower.” Poor website speed can be a major roadblock to success. It impacts everything from the end user experience to search engine rankings. It definitely has financial costs. This is now pretty much common knowledge, yet it’s still easy to find slow websites everywhere. In this blog, I want to guide you through practical steps to diagnose and fix my own slow website. I will show you how I used insights from DebugBear to find and solve the performance issues fast with just a few tweaks and very few changes to the actual site itself.
Source: How To Fix A Slow Website: 4 Web Performance Tips | DebugBear
While this might seem relatively introductory, this is a pretty thorough look at some of the most obvious reasons why site performance might be poor. Before we jump into complicated, convoluted potential solutions, it might be worth checking off the suggestions in this list.
Why is GitHub UI getting slower?
GitHub’s performance has been rapidly degrading ever since they started rewriting everything in React. It’s basically impossible to view diffs now because they often fail to load, render correctly, or just are incredibly slow.
Source: Why is GitHub UI getting slower? | Hacker News
A popular thread on Hacker News asked why the GitHub UI was seemingly getting slower. I’m not going to spoil the answer. Follow through and take a look for yourself after conjecturing as to why.
Design
The Arialpocalypse: Default thinking ate the world
We need to talk about Arial. Not because fonts matter in some precious design-nerd way, but because Arial is the perfect metaphor for how we ended up in this timeline: exhausted, homogenized, and giving up on even the smallest moments of agency. The Dodge Aries K Car of typography has led to the dystopian hell we’re wading in right now. See for yourself.
Source: The Arialpocalypse: Default thinking ate the world | Brilliant Crank
Greg Story is a designer of immense experience and influence. Here he has a detailed history of how Arial, the font, has taken over the modern design landscape. Like Greg, I consider Arial itself to be a poor knock-off of Helvetica. But his essay is not simply about taste and aesthetics, but about how its adoption is a metaphor for much else that has gone awry in our modern world.
The Psychology Of Color In UX Design And Digital Products
Rodolpho Henrique guides you through the essential aspects of color in digital design and user experience, from the practical steps of creating effective and scalable color palettes to the critical accessibility considerations. You will explore the psychological impact of different hues and learn how to strategically leverage color to evoke specific emotions, enhance user experience, and understand why thoughtful color choices are essential for successful digital products
Source: The Psychology Of Color In UX Design And Digital Products — Smashing Magazine
We cover the technical aspects of colour quite a lot at our conferences and here on Elsewhere, but not so much the design and psychology of colour. Here is a great article about that from our very good friends at Smashing Magazine.
Episode 0001: Ethan Marcotte
KG: Our guest today on so many questions is Ethan Marcotte. He is the person who coined the phrase “Responsive Web Design”. He also is a writer, speaker, a designer, and I’m so glad that he came on the show. I have so many questions.
We talk a lot about early web, tech unions, the community aspects of the web of inclusivity and justice that kind of is a thread through everything. I’m super excited to share this with you.
Source: Episode 0001: Ethan Marcotte | So Many Questions Podcast Show
If you like your history of the web, then this is an in-depth interview with Ethan Marcotte. He is perhaps best known for coining the term “responsive web design.” But his work is far more extensive than that. I highly recommend you take a listen or just read the transcript.
Accessibility & Standards
On Dashes, A.I., and Screen Readers
This post was prompted by some discussion at TPGi about the use of em dash punctuation, on two fronts:
- Is the use of the em dash making our posts look like they were generated by A.I.?
- How do screen readers convey em dashes?
If, at this point, your reaction is “What’s an em dash?”, jump to the section in this post that explains the difference between the two kinds of dashes, hyphens, and the minus symbol. Otherwise, read on.
Source: On Dashes, A.I., and Screen Readers – TPGi
I have to be honest and say that every time I see some social media post talking about how we can tell if content was generated by a large language model because it contains em dashes, I get a little bit cranky. Here long-time friend of Web Directions and Conffab, Ricky Onsman looks at em-dashes and asks not only does their use indicate the generation of that content by a large language model, but also, and much more importantly, their impact for screen readers.
Can components conform to WCAG?
a11y accessibility web components
We can build UI components with accessibility in mind. We can also document accessibility specifics alongside them. Both are helpful and recommended. What about claiming conformance? In this post, I’ll talk about how WCAG doesn’t allow for that, and why I believe WCAG is right.
Source: Can components conform to WCAG? | hidde.blog
This one is a little bit esoteric. We recently linked to Hidde de Vries’ analysis of the idea of compliance vs conformance, particularly when it comes to accessibility. Here Hidde looks at why Web Components cannot be conformant to the WCAG rules and why he thinks this is the right idea.
Great reading, every weekend.
We round up the best writing about the web and send it your way each Friday.
