Links

I know there’s a lot of AI fatigue out there. I feel it, too. Most of that though is more about the noise surrounding both sides of the hype spectrum. What’s covered way less is context for where it fits best in a development workflow and what sorts of practical uses it might have to benefit — not destroy — our work.

That’s why I’m stoked to check out Smashing’s AI conference on December 1. We all know Smashing. The good folks over there check the hype luggage at the door and give these sorts of landscape-changing things careful and thoughtful consideration. All their events, not to mention their articles, are that way and always have been. The best, really.

Here we go! Syntax highlighting for code blocks without the complicated markup, spans, classes, and bloated JavaScript, courtesy of Uncle Dave.

Just looking at what Bramus shared the other day:

So happy to see WordPress.com offering a pricing tier aimed at students that gives them free hosting for a year:

WordPress.com offers the Student plan free, so cost is never a barrier to learning web skills. The goal is for students of any subject to create and share their thoughts and work online, and to own their online presence from the start.

Exactly the kind of nerdy UI/UX discussion I love:

Smashing Magazine’s in-person conferences are back and returning to the wonderful city of Freiburg next month, September 7–10. In you didn’t know it, Freiburg is where it all started for Smashing Magazine! It’s their home turf and the conferences, if you haven’t been to one before, are always worth it.

No secret that Adam’s all about props. Dude gave us Open Props a good while back for a slew of preconfigured variables for color, shadows, sizing, typography, among much much more. Now he’s back with Prop For That, a similar sorta idea, but mind-blowing in the sense that it creates live props based things CSS can’t normally see in the browser. Things like cursor position, progress values, certain form states, current time, scroll velocity — you know, the stuff that JavaScript sniffs and passes to CSS.

Mark Underhill:

And now to the reason I wrote this post: including the word “navigation” in your <nav> labels. There’s no need. If we did, we’d hear something like “Navigation, Primary navigation”. Not the end of the world, but unnecessarily repetitive for screen reader users.

Mat Marquis on Google pulling the web standards equivalent of U2 album marketing:

As a Chrome user, you’ll have received Gemini Nano in the form of a 4GB transfer recently; no permission asked or required. If you remove it, Chrome will re-download it. For reasons I can only guess at, Gemini Nano is presumably now considered to be part of Chrome itself, despite being a standalone product that is included alongside but not integrated into the browser — the way a copy of Bonzi Buddy included in a browser update might be considered a part of said browser.

We all have a few skeletons in our CSS closets. There’s probably that one-off !important where you can now manage that more effectively with cascade layers. Or maybe a dated Checkbox Hack that :has() has solved. Perhaps it’s been a long while since your last site redesign and it’s chock-full of vendor-prefixed properties from 2012. Thar be demons!

Stu Robson’s ReliCSS (clever name!) tool can excavate outdated CSS in your codebase that have modern CSS solutions.