hypermedia.lol

← Back to the wall

The web is the most widely deployed application platform ever built, and we have spent fifteen years treating it as a rendering target.

Every year the browser learns to do something else on its own — forms that validate, dialogs that trap focus, transitions between pages, scroll effects, popovers, containers that respond to their own size. And every year we ship a library that does the same job worse. Not because anybody compared the two. Because nobody checked.

The cost is never abstract. It's a login form a screen reader can't get through. A back button that stopped working. A phone burning battery to assemble a page that could have arrived finished. A typo that takes twenty minutes to deploy. A site that goes dark because one CDN had a bad afternoon.

Nobody chose any of that. It accumulated, one defensible decision at a time, until it became the water.

So this is a site of short arguments, each one small enough to check yourself. Read the spec. Use the element. Ship the document.

The browser already does that.

It's open. Send a pull request — one file, markdown or HTML, and the only rule is no JavaScript.