Happy Friday!
Let me take away some of that happiness (😅) with some important content from Alex Russell. They’re writing a series called Reckoning. To use their own words, it’s an investigation into how JavaScript-first frontend culture broke US public services. It’s super long, but a must read. Start here.
Turning to what Alex urges us to do — write less JavaScript — David Darnes has come through with another banger web component you can drop onto your project: <live-filter>. David really is killing it in the web component space, I must say.
We linked to Heydon Pickering’s article on the HTML anchor element (<a>). Turns out they’re doing whole series, running alphabetically through all 110 or so elements. The <area> one is very funny (as I know they all will be). You can tell Heydon is hitting some real form and momentum with their writing too, which is great to see.
Chris Coyier has written really well about advertising. Chris knows their stuff too, as the former head-honcho of CSS-Tricks and dealing with advertisers at a higher standard than many of us even realise. It’s a subject I’m personally putting a lot of thought into right now and have come to similar conclusions as Chris overall.
Lastly, if you’re in the UK or are planning to travel to the UK, let me link you up to some top-tier, long running conferences that are coming up. First, State of the Browser returns on September 14. WDC is back on September 27 and finally, FF Conf is happening on November 8. I’m speaking at that one too!
P.S. here’s a cool personal home page.
Thanks for reading this issue of The Index. You can get future updates by subscribing.
Until the next issue, take it easy 👋
Andy