Timeless piece by Hidde de Vries:

the web in its default state [is] very fast. No added styles or interactions, just HTML. I’m not arguing we should serve plain HTML, but we should realise that everything that is added to [the default state] will make the page slower

Everything you add to a website slows it down.

Every. Thing. No exceptions.

It’s just a matter of how much?

(Love the airline check-in example.)

When I want to find a recipe for pizza dough on the web, I would consider myself lucky if I could get ahold of a blog post from someone who cares passionately about the right kind of dough, who maybe ran an artisan pizza kitchen in Naples for the past 30 years or has a background in baking. ‘Dream on’, you think. Well, these people exist on the web and the web is awesome for being an open platform that anyone with a passion can write on. I don't want to find text produced just because someone saw “pizza dough” is a common search phrase and a potential for top result ad money to be extracted. The passion that drives them isn't the pizza dough—that's fine, but it makes their content less relevant to me.

A take that, in my limited experience, reflects most of the reality around accessibility.

The system is, sadly, ableist and almost every website you look at has accessibility conformance and usability issues… it has often frustrated me and made me more cynical than I want to be. You write down the same issues over and over, knowing they are just a few lines of code. I always had to channel my inner developer again, and remember what it can be like. Yes, removing the line outline: none is trivial, and it's extremely ableist to keep it in, but what can a developer do if the QA and/or design departments flag it as a bug and they're the only one on the team who ‘gets’ this need. Let's not blame the developer, let's blame the ableist system we all operate in.