Public

Way back in the early oughts (actually, 1999–2000) I wrote a CMS (Content Management System) based on delimited text files. It was a lark. I wanted to teach myself some programming skills and my brother needed a mini-CMS while he was overseas. I quickly ran into the heading issue that HTML5 tried to solve — sometimes his content would be re-used elsewhere in the layout, and the headings would not make sense anymore. But I solved it. I solved it without any fancy frameworks or libraries or HTML5 retooling. Every content container carried a variable (this was all server-side code). That variable was a number reflecting its nesting level on the page. That number was then used to replace the number in any <h#> levels in the content (the content was chunked enough that there was not more than one heading). I carried that technique forward into projects on much beefier CMSes and never had to worry about training authors how to manage chunked content on their home pages (and similar chunked pages). The move to HTML5 never made me consider an all-<h1> solution, partly because I knew the outline was not supported.

Have a single <h1> per page, and that <h1> should correspond to the value of the <title> (excluding the site name, marketing tagline, etc).

Dave’s ‘SBRDFLT’ acronym is based on the ‘layers’ I expose in the layer-selection settings below. Roughly, they imply: /* SBRDFLT */@layer spec, browser, reset, default, features, layout, theme;

Facebook memes taught me that, instead of facing my fear of needles, I could instead pretend I conscientiously object to vaccination programs, now my lungs are riddled with Covid and I can’t breathe.Sitting in my legally parked car eating a zinger burger was such an affront to the existence of an off-duty klansman that he put his boot on my neck and now I can’t breathe.I wiggled my little hedgehog nose into a plastic bag because vine fucking tomatoes have to be hermetically sealed for sale or a petrochemical heir won’t be able to afford his 17th Lamborghini and now I can’t breathe.My employer reclassified my job as a hobby and hobbies don’t come with sick pay or medical insurance, so now I’m living in a loophole, sat in an unheated flat cultivating pneumonia and I can’t breathe.A couple of breeders 100km upwind thought a pyrotechnic was the best way to communicate that their newly minted child comes with its own penis, now I’m chocking down burnt tree and I can’t breathe.I’m reading about all this chaos and misery and greed and sickness and it feels like it’s closing in around me, getting nearer every day and it feels like my throat is closing up and I can’t breathe.

Design systems go stale fastImagine the frustration of using a library with stale documentation. Brad points out stale documentation as the primary pitfall for design system teams: "They treat [design systems] as this off-to-the-side thing… Chores suck, so teams eventually stop updating reference documentation. Once the documentation ceases to reflect the reality of the product, the effort is dead in the water."If you could auto-generate documentation from code, that would ensure the production UI and docs stay in sync. When you build components in Storybook, you naturally capture all their use cases as stories. Those stories can also be used to auto-generate interactive API documentation. What’s more, you can add more context by writing Markdown or embedding design assets.

I under-appreciate the ability to patch or coerce websites to meet my needs. That’s a feature of HTML, written in the by-laws as “consider users over authors”. As a user, I get the final say. This is why stylesheets cascade, why JavaScript can be turned off, and why browser extensions exist; it’s a foundational aspect of the web.

I’d been in therapy for decades, but I had a new psychologist helping with my anxiety who was teaching me about my young self. I talked to her about how I felt in the present day (afraid, tired, hungry, tired, angry), and she helped me draw links between those feelings and what happened when I was small.Then she encouraged me to talk to that little girl.Like, to have an actual conversation.“That’s stupid,” I said, pretending to be a rational person who’s not in constant dialogue with her cat.“Try it,” she said. “What would you tell yourself?”I tried it. From my therapist’s couch I found, in my memory, a small blond child alone on a schoolyard swing. She had been booted from class to “calm down”, so she was twisting up the chains and then letting go so they would spin her around. The air was cool. Autumn. Through the window, she could see other kids painting bright colours on to butchers paper.I imagined myself sitting next to her on the other swing. Why are you out here? I would ask, and she would say, I’m naughty, and the chains would clang as they unravelled.But what if, I would say, I knew you were trying your best?No one had ever said this to six-year-old Anna. They had only ever told her to be something different. I felt something click in my chest.After I had used up all my therapist’s tissues and gone home, I kept visiting this past self. I found her in classrooms where everything seemed too noisy. I found her hiding under the bed from people who would yell at her, panicking about report cards, forgetting her homework. I found her yelling, crying, laughing, wishing she could be somebody else. This anxious, bound-up kid fighting every single thing in her life.

With web components, the platform is the framework.

Personal websites are the backbone of the independent Web of creators. Even after all those years, they remain a vital part of what makes the web the most remarkable and open medium to date. We shouldn’t take this for granted, though. If we don’t pay enough attention and care about the open web enough, we might lose this valuable asset. So let us protect the Web as a source of inspiration, diversity, creativity, and community. Let us maintain what we have and work together to make this little part of the magic of the Web sparkle even brighter. Let us help new members of the community to start their journey. Let us build, prototype, publish, and connect.