Top picks — 2026 June
Pretty big month for the web. Tons of great posts came out, Apple WWDC took place and a few shocking acquisitions happened as well. I have been travelling for work and with family this month a lot so no other crazy updates from my personal life this month, but as always great music recommendations for you all and a bunch of links. We freaking love good links right! Enjoy!
Album of the month
“Dirty Old Hip Hop” by Visioneers directed by Marc Mac, is a compilation of jazz interpretations of super influential rap and funky tunes. Initially released in 2006 and recently repressed for it’s 20th anniversary. You will find on this album great versions of “Runnin’” by The Pharcyde, “The world is yours” by Nas or “Ike’s Mood I” originally released by the great Isaac Hayes. Back in November of 2024 I was recommending stuff by Visioneers already, this one is another, probably even better one to add to your collection!
Top picks
“Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently” by Den Odell
Browsers ship with a long list of quirks, just to make sure a rendering is consistent with the dominant player, Google Chrome. Due to the significant market share dominance, Google’s browser doesn’t have a quirk mode. This is pretty shocking, and I would encourage you to look into the list of quirks. In some situations, Safari and Firefox literally modify the browser agent. A really nice deep dive by Den.
“Overview of Digital Accessibility Technologies” by Declan Vale Chidlow
Declan is one of my favourite bloggers in recent years. The subjects that he picks are just so close to my heart. No matter if this is about the open web, accessibility or Neovim, I love his writing. This one is no different and it is a good reminder that when we talk about assistive technologies, it is not only about the screen reader. The list of input and output devices in this list is a real eye-opener, and it is non-exhaustive.
“On the <dl>” by Ben Myers
I love Ben and his never-ending advocacy to just use the web. This one is another great post by him that gives you six million reasons why you should consider the HTML <dl> element in your markup. I’m sure plenty of unordered lists (or divs if you’re a horrible person) can be replaced with details lists. Great semantics improvement and a good win for accessibility.
“In-N-Out Animations: Dialogs (Part 1/3)” by Chris Coyier
I recently spent hours trying to understand the order of transitions and animations of the top level HTML elements like dialogs and popovers. Shit is complicated! Only when I managed to make it work, Chris published that article that made me actually understand these things. Chris builds this mental model of three distinct states and puts them in the timeline. This is the top explainer of the in and out animations of dialogs folks.
VoidZero is Joining Cloudflare
VoidZero, a company founded by the creator of the Vue framework, now holds the most powerful suite of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, and the Ox set of tools (linter, formatter, parser and so on). Now it becomes part of CloudFlare, a company that I’m a huge fan of, but at the same time I’m a little scared that they own all the tools I like. Not long ago, they also acquired Astro. I really hope that CF won’t become a bad player and that they will fulfil the promise of continuous openness and development under the current licence for all these apps.
“Reading your own writes with WAIT FOR LSN in Postgres 19” by Redowan Delowar
There is a cool feature coming to Postgres 19. Read-after-write removes the need for the age-old hack of querying the data after writing it with a delay in between to accommodate replica delays. Redowan explains it really well.
".gitignore Isn’t the Only Way To Ignore Files in Git" by Nelson Figueroa
What a hot tip. I had no idea I can make a global .config/git/ignore file to never again deal with the annoying macOS .DS_Store files. Short one, good one.
no slop grenade.
Ain’t that golden? Literally a whole website with a cool domain (I love short, single-purpose, even silly domains) dedicated to all I have been moaning about for the past years since the AI-generated slop explosion happened. Love it, read it, apply it and keep the human conversation going.
“The Siren Song of ariaNotify()” by Mat Marquis
Good explainer of the new ariaNotify() and the overall state of assistive technology announcements of live regions. Mat Marquis presented a few practical examples, two ways of triggering new notifications and left us with a fair warning not to abuse this API.
The Field Guide to Grid Lanes
Here is a helpful little cheat sheet about new grid lanes display layouts (aka masonry) created by the WebKit team. Not only does it explain and present cool demos of the new feature, but it also explains in a really nice way other core aspects of layout sizing methods. For years I struggled to wrap my head around the min-content and max-content keywords, but this little guide nailed the definitions. I like little single-purpose pages like this one.
“Publishing on the Atmosphere with Standard.site” by Declan Chidlow
Standard.site came out of nowhere some time ago, and a bunch of bloggers integrate their blogs with the new lexicons on the ATProto (Authenticated Transfer Protocol is the tech behind BlueSky). I read a few of the guides, and as much as the implementation makes sense to me, the part I was missing is the basic understanding of the ATProto concepts needed for the integration. This article by Declan “Vale” Chidlow is just perfect. It goes into the very basics of the concepts and presents just the essential parts needed for the integration. What a good blogger he is!
“The curious case of the disappearing Polish S” by Marcin Wichary
What a great story by Marcin of the little decades-old keyboard quirk that made typing “S” a little bit more problematic for Polish keyboard users. As you could expect from his post, it is packed with obscure details about the keyboard’s design and little-known history facts behind the editor’s inner workings.
“What’s new in WebKit for Safari 27” by Jen Simmons
This year Apple invested more time into the improvements other than new features across the board of all OSs, which was a general theme of this year’s WWDC. Safari is no different and the huge focus went into the interoperability of Safari with other engines. But a few brand new things landed of course — grid lanes and customisable selects are probably the highlights most are talking about. For me, the changes to the web extensions and the way to package them up in Safari are the most noticeable changes. This 16-minute session with Jen Simmons sums it up really nicely.