Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

Link: Browser adaptation

Something that I've been thinking about a lot recently is that the medium that is the web. It enables a lot of things that only the web can so this post by Brad Woods really resonated with me and it talks about how the web can be used to adapt stories to different mediums.

Different mediums convey information in unique ways and creators interpret the same story through unique perspectives. Tolkien gives relatively little detail of what Middle-earth looks like, leaving much of the work to the reader's imagination. Jackson on the other hand paints vivid pictures. Tolkien emphasizes the length of the journey by detailing every step, making readers feel the weight of the adventure. Jackson focuses on the major events, creating a fast-paced narrative. Neither approach is superior. Each explores Middle-earth from a different angle. Adaptations allow audiences to make a deeper connection with the story, enriching their understanding and appreciation of the original work.

What the browser offers

The browser offers the following communication tools:

▪text ▪image ▪video ▪sound ▪interactivity ▪video game environments (2D and 3D) With these, we can recreate most story mediums. For example, using image and text to make a comic book or sound to make a podcast. This gives the creator freedom to choose the communication tool(s) that best fit the story they want to tell.

Yes. YES. YES! I love it.

He also discusses the idea of Personalization and Interactivity. Quadruple yes! The web as a medium is so incredibly versatile and I love seeing people explore that.

In 2014 Jeremy Keith published a post "Continuum" and it touches on a different aspect of the value of the web: it's resilence and ability to adapt to the devices it runs on and the browsers it runs in.

I'm still working on how I want to be able to express the value of the web more, especially in a world where it looks like the youth of today who grew up with mediums such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram don't naturally see the web as a medium that they can use to express themselves (or even enjoy).

As a side note, this blog is a gold mine of neat experiments and explainers

• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/svg/draw-on-scroll
• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/css/blend-modes
• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/javascript/web-api/intersection-observer
• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/javascript/web-api/intersection-observer/dynamic-header
• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/misc/news
• https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/game-dev-journal/03-persistence

Link: Planet Igalia

When I was preparing the Interop post yesterday, I found one of the agalia links didn't work and while I was hunting for the new link, I found Planet Igalia. :mind-blown:

I've always wondered what's happening at Igalia and while I love the podcast, I do love a good Blog.... I'm really not sure how I missed this entire part of the site, but it's go so much good information and often frequent deep dives in to browsers. For example Maxsim Sisov's post on "Unmasking Hidden Floating-Point Errors in Chromium’s Ozone/Wayland" - such an awesome read into an area I had zero knowledge about.

Triff and marv.

Link: ESLint now officially supports linting of CSS - ESLint - Pluggable JavaScript Linter

We feel that validation and enforcing baseline features are the minimum that a linter needs to support in 2025, and so we spent a lot of time making the no-invalid-at-rules, no-invalid-properties, and require-baseline rules as comprehensive as possible.

Love it!! Absolutely love it.

One of the areas that we would love to see more of (and we hope to work) is more integration of Baseline in to developer workflows. That could be Linters (like ESLint), boot-strappers, IDEs, compilers, frameworks, DevTools. You name it, I think it would help the entire ecosystem if we could get see increase awareness and usage of Baseline and therefore adoption of the features that all the browsers implement natively in to the hands of developers.

Exciting times.

Link: How Google Chrome’s autofill feature helps both shoppers and merchants

One of Shopify’s key metrics is Checkout Conversion Rate (CCR), which measures the rate of successful checkouts completed over a period of time. Through testing, Shopify found that removing unnecessary steps led to more customers completing their checkouts. Guest checkouts using autofill had a 45% higher CCR than guest checkouts without autofill. Basically, the customers who didn’t have to spend time filling out forms were more likely to actually buy something at the end of their online shopping trip.

Emphasis mine, but this is incredible and is something that I think has gone under the radar.

For the longest time it was thought that there was no way to measure the impact of autofill on the web. In 2016 I developed a small snippet to detect when autofill happens and while no one paid attention, it's good to see that with the introduction of CSS :autofill pseudo-class in Baseline, we can create some simple JS that will more effectively detect when autofill happens.

There's also now better autofill tooling in Chrome DevTools, so my hope is that more people will start to understand the impact of autofill on their sites and start to optimize for it....

... maybe.. There is still a lot of concern in the ecosystem about autocomplete=off and a lot of people that don't want the user's agent to control the autocomplete experience.

Link: Interop 2025: another year of web platform improvements

It's exciting to see the web platform continue to evolve and improve. Interop along with Baseline are aimed to solve some of the top challenges that developers have when building for the web.

Ultimately we only make progress as a platform when the major user-agents make shared and consistent progress on the platform and this has been a huge effort from the teams at Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple, not to mention Igalia and Bocoup as well as all the developers that have helped to prioritize what is important to them.

Here are the announcements from other browsers:

• WebKit
• Firefox
• Edge
• Igalia
• Bocoup

While I've been following the progress on Interop I hadn't noticed that they are looking at new areas of investment:

In addition, and as in previous years, there's a set of areas for investigation. These are areas where we don't have enough information or tests to include as a focus area, but the group feels some work should be done to get them to a stage where we can include them.

• Accessibility testing
• Gamepad API testing
• Mobile testing
• Privacy testing
• WebVTT

This feels like a good set of areas to focus on. I'm particularly interested in the Accessibility testing and Privacy testing. I think these are areas that are often overlooked and are critical to the success of the web platform.

Finally, I encourage everyone to look towards the tooling that is available because of the work that the Interop group is doing to understand all of the web-features and their availability across the platform.

You can follow along on the Interop 2025 dashboard at https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025 and as things become Baseline Newly available they'll show up in the Baseline 2025 list on webstatus.dev too.

Link: WikiTok

This is such an amazing site and has become a bit of a daily habit for me. It's a brilliantly simple idea that means I'm browsing more of Wikipedia than I ever have before.

I built a similar demo a while ago using the now-defunct Portals API because I want to explore what a Web Browser could be if it had a UI like TikTok. My hypothesis was that while links are amazing, what is behind them is hidden, and worse (imo) it's behind a banner image that is often not representative of the content.

So the idea was that as long as you had a list of sites that you might visit it might be neat to have a way to flick between them quickly and get an idea if you actually want to dive into the content. The portals API seemed like a good way to do it because it could run JS, but was non-interactive and in theory privacy-preserving.

I adapted it in mid-2024 to use generated screenshots of the pages. I also thought I should give it a snappy name. Flick the Web's code is here and the you can play with the demo that runs over the latest articles on HackerNews.

I'm really glad that WikiTok did this and also it has been open sourced as I can totally imagine that this type of UI takes off on the web.

Link: Why I use Cline for AI Engineering - by Addy Osmani

In this post Addy describes his use of Cline (Jan 30). It was the first time I'd heard of it. I was kinda surprised because I've been on top of tooling for a while now.

For the longest time I'd been using Replit, it had a nice flow to it. I could ask it to help me solve a problem and it would just apply the code to the project. For me, it was a nice way to get things done.

I liked Replit, I built a lot of apps with it, however their hosting is expensive and their new checkpoint based pricing model frustrated me, especially when it made very clear mistakes.

At the time (like two weeks ago) Copilot didn't apply any changes to the code, it just suggested things which I had to then copy and paste... and even then the suggestions just weren't that good.

Cline has replaced both Copilot and Replit.

I don't mind paying for the use of an LLM and as noted by Addy:

I’ve also deeply appreciated Cline’s proactive accounting of cost during a session. This is most notable when switching between model providers:

I love that I can see where the costs are coming from. I can see how much I am spending on the model and how much I am spending on the compute. It's a nice touch.

When you add this with something else Addy points out:

The DeepSeek-R1 + Sonnet hybrid approach Recent benchmarks and user experiences have shown that combining DeepSeek-R1 for planning with Claude 3.5 Sonnet for implementation can reduce costs by up to 97% while improving overall output quality.

It's a pretty compelling solution.

My own workflow at the moment has be to plan with R1 (via OpenRouter) and then implement with Sonnet. I personally don't look at the costs, but I do inspect the output a lot and this has felt like a pretty good balance for my personal projects.

This great post by Dion "English will become the most popular development language in 6 years" is worth a mull imho.

There's obviously a lot of push back on LLM's be it what they were trained on and how much energy they use. However the technology is here, and Dion poses a great question: Will natural language become the way people control their computers?

Two things resonated with me:

The reason that we see so many applications pop up with a chat side bar is a signal that we are building bridges between the computers and the humans in natural language ways.

and

Future: your English is the source, and as your computer systems improve, they can be regenerating new and improved implementations. It behooves you to invest in testing and validation in this world, but this is something that is actually really needed any way… we just sometimes get away without doing it.

I maintain a list of apps that I'm happy for people to use. I've also got a huge list of disposable apps that I've built for myself. I'm pretty certain that "natural language" as the main development language will happen at some point and as it developes millions more people will have the ability to control their compute in ways that echo how Spreadsheets enabled people to manipulate their data in their businesses.

Dion centers some of his discussion on Chat-first vs Spec-first. I agree that the Spec is important, I just don't know how this part will develop. Do we develop the spec completely up-front, or is there a chat-like assistant that accretes the spec as we develop. I'm thinking the later, I can imagine a world where we have a set of critics that attempt to objectively look at your spec and tell you what's missing or what could be developed further.