Chris Coyier commenting on AI’s slurping up the entire internet:

It’s rude. Nobody asked...if that’s OK. Now that’s the bar.

Feels incredibly relevant to more than just AI and tech.

The first one to come along and unabashedly break social contracts gets to plunder the reward and, in the process, normalize it for everyone else. And once a bar is lowered it’s incredibly hard to raise it again.

Chris Coyier isn’t letting Google off the hook for their shenanigans, but their investment in Chrome is an investment in the web, and that’s a good thing. Better than the proprietary alternatives.

A stagnated web is incentive for the operating system makers of the world to invest in pulling developers toward those proprietary systems. The browser wars sucked but at least we were still making websites. Being forced to make proprietary apps to reach people is an expensive prospect for the rest of us companies of the world, it will probably be done poorly, and we’ll all suffer for it.

Me personally, I’d rather see better OS primitives available to browsers.

A great paragraph describing the state of how the web works:

Go to The Verge (just to poke at a site I generally like) without an ad blocker, open up the Network panel in DevTools and just let ‘er rip. I’m seeing 400+ requests. That’s tracking at work. You can even just sit there and watch it continue to make requests over time, even while you’re doing nothing. JavaScript is whirring, soaking up whatever data it can, setting cookies, and blasting data along with your precious IP address to god-knows-where. All those requests are slowing down the site, costing you bandwidth, laughing at your privacy, and causing legislation that at least you have to click a giant content-blocking banner with a “yes, this is fine.” button.

The ever practical Chris Coyier

Life is full of unreviewably large choices. People move to cities because they visited once and thought the downtown was cute. They have no way of really knowing if they’ll like it there, but they do it anyway, because sometimes you just gotta make the call.

Chris reflecting on his CSS-Tricks article “The Great Divide”:

Since there is too much for any web developer to know, what is the most graceful and professionally acceptable way of not knowing things?

Whatever the answer is, it’s definitely not “ignore, shit on, and downplay the things you don’t know and gatekeep the things you do.”

RSS solves many of the same problems [AMP, Facebook Instant astticles, Apple News Formawt] were trying to solve, like out-of-control JavaScript ruining the mobile web…

Guess which format is going to outlast all these proprietary syndication formats. I’d say RSS, which I believe to be true, but really, it’s HTML.

Great point about the longevity of HTML, especially since feeds (XML or JSON ones) are just a wrapper around the content which comes in guess what format? HTML.