Polyfills and the evolution of the web - TAG finding

Web tech is better. Developer norms are worse. | Go Make Things

The web historically moves in waves.

Libraries are created to push complex features in an easier way. Then the libraries themselves get complicated, often more so than the benefits they provide.

Eventually, (some of) the core features of those libraries make their way into the browser itself, but the libraries linger like water on the shore, slowly receding.

And before the sand has a chance to fully dry, a new set of libraries washes in to push the web even further.

10 things I learned making the fastest site in the world

Behind the amusing banter there’s some really solid performance advice in here. Good stuff.

Client Side Rendering (CSR), or as I call it “setting money on fire and throwing it in a river” has its uses, but for this site would have been madness.

State of the gap

Remy looks at the closing gap between native and web. Things are looking pretty damn good for the web, with certain caveats:

The web is the long game. It will always make progress. Free access to both consumers and producers is a core principle. Security is also a core principle, and sometimes at the costs of ease to the developer (but if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun, right?).

That’s why there’ll always be some other technology that’s ahead of the web in terms of features, but those features give the web something to aim for:

Flash was the plugin that was ahead of the web for a long time, it was the only way to play video for heavens sake!

Whereas before we needed polyfills like PhoneGap (whose very reason for existing is to make itself obsolete), now with progressive web apps, we’re proving the philosophy behind PhoneGap:

If the web doesn’t do something today it’s not because it can’t, or won’t, but rather it is because we haven’t gotten around to implementing that capability yet.

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption | Vale.Rocks

Want to use all those great features that have been in landing in browsers over the past year or two? View transitions! Scroll-driven animations! So much more!

Well, your coding co-pilot is not going to going to be of any help.

Large language models, especially those on the scale of many of the most accessible, popular hosted options, take humongous datasets and long periods to train. By the time everything has been scraped and a dataset has been built, the set is on some level already obsolete. Then, before a model can reach the hands of consumers, time must be taken to train and evaluate it, and then even more to finally deploy it.

Once it has finally released, it usually remains stagnant in terms of having its knowledge updated. This creates an AI knowledge gap. A period between the present and AI’s training cutoff. This gap creates a time between when a new technology emerges and when AI systems can effectively support user needs regarding its adoption, meaning that models will not be able to service users requesting assistance with new technologies, thus disincentivising their use.

So we get this instead:

I’ve anecdotally noticed that many AI tools have a ‘preference’ for React and Tailwind when asked to tackle a web-based task, or even to create any app involving an interface at all.

Taking RWD To The Extreme — Smashing Magazine

Some really great advice here:

• Use native layout systems
• Start with semantic HTML
• Use fluid type with fluid space
• Always bet on progressive enhancement
• Trust the browser
• Ditch the “physical” CSS