Dispatches From The Internets

Don’t Outsource Your Perspective to a LLM

A person playing trumpet and a robot playing drums are on a stage in a jazz band. They are looking at each other. In the style of a 60s jazz album cover.

At A List Apart, I’m seeing a lot of article pitches that were clearly written by a Large Language Model (LLM) rather than a human being. In many cases, the people making the submission clearly put a lot of thought into the prompts they used to get the output they desired, but had zero follow though when it came to taking ownership of the output they were handed. To be clear, the issue I have here is not that they used an LLM as part of their process, but rather how they failed to wield such powerful tool effectively.

Acessibilidade: O verdadeiro diferencial dos livros digitais

It’s nice to see folks in the digital book space beginning to embrace the potential of their medium:

Para abraçar verdadeiramente o potencial do digital, é essencial adotar uma mentalidade ‘digital first’. Isso significa que o conteúdo digital não deve ser uma simples transposição do impresso, mas sim algo que aproveita ao máximo as funcionalidades únicas do meio digital.

The UX of HTML

Somehow my students are allergic to semantics and shit. And they’re not alone. If you look at 99% of all websites in the wild, everybody who worked on them seems to be allergic to semantics and shit. On most websites heading levels are just random numbers, loosely based on font-size. Form fields have no labels. Links and buttons are divs. It’s really pretty bad. So it’s not just my students, the whole industry doesn’t understand semantics and shit.

I feel this… deeply. And I 100% agree with where Vasilis is coming from here. I do take a bit of umbrage with the idea that heading levels don’t matter—they really do—but his point about getting folks excited about the stuff they get for free by paying attention to their markup is something I’ve been pushing for years as well.

If you’re interested in a related deep dive into HTML’s lack of dependencies, check out this piece I wrote for Smashing Magazine. If you’d like to dive deeper into forms, I have this talk you might like.