Web developers have been waiting years for traction in styling HTML form controls. Is it possible the day has come? Here’s Jen Simmons on Mastodon: My team is working on a solution — you’ll apply appearance: base and switch to a new interoperable, consistent controls with easy to override default CSS. They inherit much more of what you already have going on. And then you can override (even more of) those styles using new pseudo-elements. If you want the details, check out the working draft. It’s pretty cool what they’ve come up with, especially in the face of what is undoubtedly a Herculean task to balance developer desire against user preference while preserving accessibility standards. I applaud all involved 👏 That said, I have thoughts. Not new ones. I’ve voiced them before. And I’ll do it again. As developers, we’ve long been clamoring for this functionality: “We want to override defaults, give us more control!” But I wish there was equal voice for: “We want better defaults, not more control!” More control means you have to do more work. I don’t want to do more work, especially for basic computing controls. There are too many edge cases to think about across the plethora of devices, etc. that exist in the world wide web — it’s overwhelming if you stop to think about them all, let alone write them down. I want to respect user choice (which includes respecting what hardware and OS they’ve chosen to use) and build web user interfaces on top of stable OS primitives. Give me better APIs for leveraging OS primitives rather than APIs to opt out of them completely. That’s me, the developer talking. But there’s a user-centric point to be made here too: when you re-invent the look, appearance, and functionality of basic form inputs for every website you’re in charge of, that means every user is forced to encounter inconsistent form controls across the plethora of websites they visit. I’m not saying don’t do this. The web is a big place. There’s undoubtedly a need for it. But not all websites need it, and I’m afraid it’ll be the default posture for handling form controls. I don’t need different radio controls for every healthcare form, shopping cart, and bank account website I use. As a user, I’d prefer a familiar, consistent experience based on the technology choices (hardware, OS, etc.) I’ve made. As a developer, I don’t want to consistently “re-invent the wheel” of basic form controls. Sure, sometimes I may need the ability to opt-out of browser defaults. But increasingly I instead want to opt-in to better browser (and OS) defaults. Less UI primitive resets and more UI primitive customizations. I want to build on top of stable UI pace layers. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Heydon Pickering has an intriguing video dealing with the question: “Why is everything binary?” The gist of the video, to me, distills to this insight: The idea that [everything] belongs to one of two archetypes is seductive in its simplicity, so we base everything that we do and make on this false premise. That rings true to me. I tend to believe binary thinking is so prevalent because it’s the intellectual path of least resistance and we humans love to lazy. The fact is, as I’m sure any professional with any experience in any field will tell you, answers are always full of nuance and best explained with the statement “it depends”. The answers we’re all looking for are not found exclusively in one of two binary values, but in the contrast between them. In other words, when you test the accuracy of binary assertions the truth loves to reveal itself somewhere in between.[1] For example: peak design or development is found in the intermingling of form and function. Not form instead of function, nor function instead of form. Working on the web, we’re faced with so many binary choices every day: Do we need a designer or a developer? Do we make a web site or a web app? Should we build this on the client or the server? Are we driven by data or intuition? Does this work online or offline? And answering these questions is not helped by the byproduct of binary thinking, which as Heydon points out, results in intellectually and organizationally disparate structures like “Design” and ”Development”: Design thinking, but not about how to do the thing you are thinking about. Development doing, but without thinking about why the hell anyone would do this in the first place. It’s a good reminder to be consistently on guard for our own binary thinking. And when we catch ourselves, striving to look at the contrast between two options for the answer we seek. There’s a story that illustrates how you can reject binaries and invert the assumption that only two choices exist. It goes like this: A King told a condemned prisoner: “You may make one final statement. If it is true, you will be shot. If it is false, you will be hanged.” The prisoner answered, “I will be hanged.” This results in the King not being able to carry out any sentence. The prisoner manipulates the King’s logic to make both options impossible and reveal a third possible outcome. ⏎ Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Here’s Gordon Brander in an article titled “Don't fork the ecosystem”: Most of our software has been shaped by chance decisions made in haste by people who could not have predicted how the system would end up being used today. And if we could rebuild those systems today, knowing what we know now, we’d invent a whole new class of problems for ourselves twenty years from now. Software can be rebuilt, because software is a machine. But a software ecosystem is not a machine. It is a living system. When we attempt to rebuild the ecosystem, we’re making a category error. We confuse the software for the ecological process unfolding around it. Seems akin to hiring and firing. People are not cogs in a machine. Team dynamics are disrupted when people leave, as an ecosystem is being tampered with. When I was a kid, I did not understand why we couldn’t “just” go back to the moon. We’d already done it once before. So if we’d done it before, can’t we just do it again? I thought of it like riding a bicycle: once you know how to do it, can’t you just do it again whenever you want? Only as I grew older did I come to understand that an entire ecosystem of people, processes, tools, organizations, experience, storehouses of knowledge, and more made it possible to go to the moon. And you can’t just turn that back on with the flip of a switch. I was confusing the artifact (a human being on the moon) for the ecosystem that made it possible (NASA, contractors, government officials, technology, etc.) Carrying forward old baggage offends our sense of aesthetics, but hey, that’s how evolved systems work. Chickens still carry around the gene for dinosaur teeth. This is because a living system must be viable at every evolutionary stage. It can never pause, reset, or make a breaking change. The path of evolution is always through the adjacent possible. Lesson: the web isn’t an artifact. It’s an ecosystem. Don’t break the web. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights which made me question my knee-jerk reaction to building pieces of a page as JS-powered interactions on top of the existing document. With cross-document view transitions getting broader and broader support, I’m realizing that building in-page, progressively-enhanced interactions is more work than simply building two HTML pages and linking them. I’m calling this approach “lots of little HTML pages” in my head. As I find myself trying to build progressively-enhanced features with JavaScript — like a fly-out navigation menu, or an on-page search, or filtering content — I stop and ask myself: “Can I build this as a separate HTML page triggered by a link, rather than JavaScript-injected content built from a button?” I kinda love the results. I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work. Allow me two quick examples. Example 1: Filtering Working on my homepage, I found myself wanting a list of posts filtered by some kind of criteria, like: The most recent posts The ones being trafficked the most The ones that’ve had lots of Hacker News traffic in the past My first impulse was to have a list of posts you can filter with JavaScript. But the more I built it, the more complicated it got. Each “list” of posts needed a slightly different set of data. And each one had a different sort order. What I thought was going to be “stick a bunch of <li>s in the DOM, and show hide some based on the current filter” turned into lots of data-x attributes, per-list sorting logic, etc. I realized quickly this wasn’t a trivial, progressively-enhanced feature. I didn’t want to write a bunch of client-side JavaScript for what would take me seconds to write on “the server” (my static site generator). Then I thought: Why don’t I just do this with my static site generator? Each filter can be its own, separate HTML page, and with CSS view transitions I’ll get a nice transition effect for free! Minutes later I had it all working — mostly, I had to learn a few small things about aspect ratio in transitions — plus I had fancy transitions between “tabs” for free! This really feels like a game-changer for simple sites. If you can keep your site simple, it’s easier to build traditional, JavaScript-powered on-page interactions as small, linked HTML pages. Example 2: Navigation This got me thinking: maybe I should do the same thing for my navigation? Usually I think “Ok, so I’ll have a hamburger icon with a bunch of navigational elements in it, and when it’s clicked you gotta reveal it, etc." And I thought, “What if it’s just a new HTML page?”[1] Because I’m using a static site generator, it’s really easy to create a new HTML page. A few minutes later and I had it. No client-side JS required. You navigate to the “Menu” and you get a page of options, with an “x” to simulate closing the menu and going back to where you were. I liked it so much for my navigation, I did the same thing with search. Clicking the icon doesn’t use JavaScript to inject new markup and animate things on screen. Nope. It’s just a link to a new page with CSS supporting a cross-document view transition. Granted, there are some trade-offs to this approach. But on the whole, I really like it. It was so easy to build and I know it’s going to be incredibly easy to maintain! I think this is a good example of leveraging the grain of the web. It’s really easy to build a simple website when you can shift your perspective to viewing on-page interactivity as simple HTML page navigations powered by cross document CSS transitions (rather than doing all of that as client-side JS). Jason Bradberry has a neat article that’s tangential to this idea over at Piccalil. It’s more from the design standpoint, but functionally it could work pretty much the same as this: your “menu” or “navigation” is its own page. ⏎ Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Matt Biilman, CEO of Netlify, published an interesting piece called “Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters” where he argues the coming importance of a new “X” (experience) in software: the agent experience, meaning the experience your users’ AI agents will have as automated users of products/platforms. Too many companies are focusing on adding shallow AI features all over their products or building yet another AI agent. The real breakthrough will be thinking about how your customers’ favorite agents can help them derive more value from your product. This requires thinking deeply about agents as a persona your team is building and developing for. In this future, software that can’t be used by an automated agent will feel less powerful and more burdensome to deal with, whereas software that AI agents can use on your behalf will become incredibly capable and efficient. So you have to start thinking about these new “users” of your product: Is it simple for an Agent to get access to operating a platform on behalf of a user? Are there clean, well described APIs that agents can operate? Are there machine-ready documentation and context for LLMs and agents to properly use the available platform and SDKs? Addressing the distinct needs of agents through better AX, will improve their usefulness for the benefit of the human user. In summary: We need to start focusing on AX or “agent experience” — the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform. The idea is: teams focus more time and attention on “AX” (agent experience) so that human end-users can bring their favorite agents to our platforms/products and increase productivity. But I’m afraid the reality will be that the limited time and resources teams spend today building stuff for humans will instead get spent building stuff for robots, and as a byproduct everything human-centric about software will become increasingly subpar as we rationalize to ourselves, “Software doesn’t need to be good for human because humans don’t use software anymore. Their robots do!” In that world, anybody complaining about bad UX will be told to shift to using the AX because “that’s where we spent all our time and effort to make your experience great”. Prior Art: DX DX in theory: make the DX for people who are building UX really great and they’ll be able to deliver more value faster. DX in practice: DX requires trade-offs, and a spotlight on DX concerns means UX concerns take a back seat. Ultimately, some DX concerns end up trumping UX concerns because “we’ll ship more value faster”, but the result is an overall degradation of UX because DX was prioritized first. Ultimately, time and resources are constraining factors and trade-offs have to be made somewhere, so they’re made for and in behalf of the people who make the software because they’re the ones who feel the pain directly. User pain is only indirect. Future Art: AX AX in theory: build great stuff for agents (AX) so people can use stuff more efficiently by bringing their own tools. AX in practice: time and resources being finite, AX trumps UX with the rationale being: “It’s ok if the human bit (UX) is a bit sloppy and obtuse because we’ll make the robot bit (AX) so good people won’t ever care about how poor the UX is because they’ll never use it!” But I think we know how that plays out. A few companies may do that well, but most software will become even more confusing and obtuse to humans because most thought and care is poured into the robot experience of the product. The thinking will be: “No need to pour extra care and thought into the inefficient experience some humans might have. Better to make the agent experience really great, so humans won’t want to interface with our thing manually.” In other words: we don’t have the time or resources to worry about the manual human experience because we’ve got all these robots to worry about! It appears there’s no need to fear AI becoming sentient and replacing us humans. We’ll phase ourselves out long before the robots ever become self-aware. All that said, I’m not against the idea of “AX” but I do think the North Star of any “X” should remain centered on the (human) end-user. UX over AX over DX. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky