An excellent feature of Eleventy1 is the @11ty/eleventy-plugin-syntaxhighlight plugin, which adds build-time syntax highlighting support via PrismJS. Official support keeps 11ty sites from worrying about client-side bloat from JS-based highlighters and the common failure mode of over-including langu...

My colleague Marko Ilić has published an insightful piece on how to schedule work on the critical path, and I recommend reading it before proceeding here. ContentsElimination vs. Scheduling: An Organisational PerspectiveWhat's Good for the Goose..."Preloading" as SchedulingScheduling Is For ClosersG...

It is by no means the gravest linguistic crime of the React epoch,1 but "state management" grates like nails on chalkboard. A Socratic dialogue I keep having about it goes something like this: me: This UI is far too heavyweight for what it does, have you considered not using React? them: But how wil...

It's perilous to disagree with someone as wise and thoughtful as Jeremy, but for the past fortnight his post in response to Apple's iOS 27 marketing invades my quiet moments like a cricket in the attic. "Why", I ruminate, "should someone who understands the state of play give Apple credit for doing ...

TL;DR: Armed with new powers to rein in the worst excesses of mobile's duopolists, antitrust bodies around the world are struggling to find their footing, and an incurious tech press is letting it pass with nary a nod. Browsers are app stores too, but that perspective is almost entirely absent from ...

Twitter's descent into a gutter of the lowest order has been wrenching: Elon Musk’s Grok and the Mass Undressing Scandal As I draft this, a week later, it appears pressure from civil society, investigations by regulators, and outright bans on multiple continents have forced Musk to back down to an u...

The Budget, 2026 Edition Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Updated network test parameters for 2026 are: 9 Mbps downlink 3 mbps uplink 100 millisecond RTT Regarding devices, my updated recommendations are the Samsung Galaxy A24 4G (or equivalent) and the HP 14. The goal of these recommendations is t...

Eric Prouzet And now we see it clear, like a Cupertino sunrise bathing Mt. Bielawski in amber: Apple will censor its App Store at the behest of the Trump administration without putting up a fight. It will twist words into their antipodes to serve the powerful at the expense of the weak. To better se...

This blog really isn't just for beating up on Apple for the way it harms users, the web, standards, and society to maintain power and profits. So here's some fun stuff I've been doing in my 11ty setup to improve page performance. ContentsPage-Specific Resources via Shortcodes and the 11ty BundlerMo ...

ContentsLies by Any Other NameGreat Artists StealDear Tech Reporters: Access Is Not A Beat This blog is failing on several levels. First, September 2025 is putting the “frequent” in “infrequently”, much to my chagrin. Second, my professional mission is to make a web that's better for everyone, not t...

Update: The charts below were inappropriately snapped, compressing the range of values. This has been corrected. Feature availability numbers also changed since drafting and have been updated. In several recent posts, I've attempted to address how the structure of standards bodies, and their adjacen...

Photo by Photo by Artan Sadiku Commentary about browsers and the features they support is sometimes pejorative towards pre-standardisation features. Given Apple's constriction of Mozilla's revenue stream and its own strategic under-funding of WebKit, this usually takes the form "Chromium just ships ...

TL;DR: Market competition underlies the enterprise of standards. It creates the only functional test of designs and lets standards-based ecosystems route around single-vendor damage. Without competition, standards bodies have no purpose, and neither they, nor the ecosystems they support, can retain ...

Photo by Claudia Raya Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is Facebook's chauffeur; holding Zuck's coat while Facebook1 wantonly surveils iPhones owners.2 Facebook's gross profit over time. Facebook and Apple mugged convincingly for the cameras as "App Tracking Transpare...

Anyone who has worked closely with me, or followed on social media [, ], will have seen a post or comment to the effect of: Names and dates on docs. Every time. Don't forget. This is most often tacked onto design documents lacking inline attribution, and is phrased provocatively to make it sticky....

Mel Conway's seminal paper "How Do Committees Invent?" (PDF) is commonly paraphrased as Conway's Law: Organizations which design systems are (broadly) constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. This is deep organisational insight that engi...

Frances has urged me for years to collect resources for folks getting into performance and platform-oriented web development. The effort has always seemed daunting, but the lack of such a list came up again at work, prompting me to take on the side-quest amidst a different performance yak-shave. If ...

Before saying anything else, I'd like to thank the organisers of JSNation for inviting me to speak in Amsterdam. I particularly appreciate the folks who were brave enough to disagree at the Q&A sessions afterwards. Engaged debate about problems we can see and evidence we can measure makes our work b...

At Apple's annual developer marketing conference, the Safari team announced a sizeable set of features that will be available in a few months. Substantially all of them are already shipped in leading-edge browsers. Here's the list, prefixed by the year that these features shipped to stable in Chromi...

Over the past decade, my work has centred on partnering with teams to build ambitious products for the web across both desktop and mobile. This has provided a ring-side seat to a sweeping variety of teams, products, and technology stacks across more than 100 engagements. While I'd like to be spendin...

This post is an edited and expanded version of a now-mangled Mastodon thread. ContentsPlatforms Are Competitions...and We're LosingWin ConditionYou Do It To Yourself, And That's What Really HurtsGroundhog DayReboot Some in the JavaScript community imagine that I harbour an irrational dislike of thei...

Other posts in the series: Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape Reckoning: Part 2 — Object Lesson Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock Frontend took ill with a bad case of JavaScript fever at the worst possible moment. The predictable consequence is a web that feels terrible most of the time, resulting in low a...

Other posts in the series: Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape Reckoning: Part 2 — Object Lesson Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out ContentsComplexity PerplexityCarrying CapacityShould This Be An SPA?The PitsAftermath Last time, we looked at how JavaScript-based web development compounded serving errors ...

Other posts in the series: Reckoning: Part 1 — The Landscape Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out --> ContentsThe Golden WaitThe Truth Is In The TraceZip ItNear PeersBlimeyJavaScript MasshatteryMaryland Enters The ChatChattanooga Chug ChugSNAP? In Jersey? FuhgeddabouditHoosier...

Instead of an omnibus mega-post, this investigation into JavaScript-first frontend culture and how it broke US public services has been released in four parts. Other posts in the series: Reckoning: Part 2 — Object Lesson Reckoning: Part 3 — Caprock Reckoning: Part 4 — The Way Out When you live in th...

The W3C Technical Architecture Group1 is out with a blog post and an updated Finding regarding Google's recent announcement that it will not be imminently removing third-party cookies. The current TAG members are competent technologists who have a long history of nuanced advice that looks past the s...

There are only two-and-a-half reasons to build a browser, and they couldn't be more different in intent and outcome, even when they look superficially similar. Learning to tell the difference is helpful for browser project managers and engineers, but also working web developers who struggle to devel...

Update: OWA is out with an open letter appealing to Apple to do better. If you care about the future of the web, I encourage you to sign it, particularly if you live in the EU or build products for the common market. After weeks of confusion and chaos, Apple's plan to kneecap the web has crept into ...

The global device and network situation continues to evolve, and this series is an effort to provide an an up-to-date understanding for working web developers. So what's changed since last year? And how much HTML, CSS, and (particularly) JavaScript can a new project afford? ContentsThe Budget, 2024J...

The tech news is chockablock1 with antitrust rumblings and slow-motion happenings. Eagle-eyed press coverage, regulatory reports, and legal discovery have comprehensively documented the shady dealings of Apple and Google's app stores. Pressure for change has built to an unsustainable level. Somethin...