Frontend Dogma

5 Questions for Jeremy Keith

by @adactio@mastodon.social and @j9t@mas.to (@frontenddogma@mas.to) on , tagged , , , , (toot this?)

Jeremy Keith is a mediocre middle-aged white man [publisher’s note: Jeremy’s words 🙂] from Ireland living in Brighton, England, where he works with Clearleft, your strategic design partner. He’s written a bunch of books on stuff like HTML5, resilient web design, and service workers. He plays traditional Irish music on the mandolin, and he plays slide bouzouki in the band Salter Cane. His website is adactio.com, where he’s been writing for more than twenty years.

Jens: Hi Jeremy, great to have you here! What are you working on these days?

Jeremy: I’m mostly working on events. Right now I’m putting together the schedule for this year’s UX London in June. I’m very excited about the line-up I’ve curated!

I’ve got some other event-related irons in the fire, too, but I’m going to remain mysteriously taciturn about that.

Jens: Can you share a little more about UX London 2025?

Jeremy: Well, in terms of the line-up I’m putting together, I’m quite excited to do the opposite of what most events seem to be doing. For example, I’m going out of my way to keep the schedule free of so-called “AI.” And while most companies seem to be bending over backwards to ditch any previous commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, I’m doubling down.

Jens: You’re known to make thoughtful observations about the Web and the web platform. What’s your take on where we stand today?

Jeremy: The Web is doing great… on desktop. But the Web is doing absolutely terrible on mobile.

It’s such a shame, because there’s no technical reason it should be this way. Mobile web browsers are incredibly full-featured now. There’s very little you can do in a native app that you can’t do on the Web. And yet the general consensus is that the Web on mobile is a horrible experience—slow to load, filled with annoying pop-ups and trackers.

Like I said, there’s no technical reason for it to be this way. This is something we’ve done by repeatedly providing shittiness on the Web on mobile devices.

But hey, desktop web browsers are ruling the roost. We literally have Photoshop in a web browser—the idea of that used to be a joke.

Jens: What trends are you most positive about? About which ones are you most concerned?

Jeremy: I’m really happy with the interoperability between web browsers today. Sure, there are differences but they’re generally pretty small potatoes compared to the bad old days. The past few years have seen an amazing explosion of standards being implemented, CSS in particular. View transitions, scroll-driven animations, the :has() selector…

What concerns me is that most people aren’t set up to take advantage of these great features. People reach for JavaScript libraries and CSS frameworks by default, even though there’s never been less need for them. Inertia is a powerful force. If you’re used to forcing your users to download React and Tailwind just so you get to use the idioms you’re comfortable with, it hardly matters how many great features are being implemented in browsers.

That said, I think I might be sniffing the scent of change on the wind. Even the most gung-ho developbro is beginning to realise that doing everything in the client (including just rendering text) isn’t actually a very smart idea.

Jens: You’ve been working on the Web for many years. What advice would you give new web developers starting out today?

Jeremy: Learn HTML. But like, really learn HTML. I know it looks deceptively simple, but boy, is it actually a powerhouse.

Then learn CSS. Although that’s a tall order, because CSS is so fully-featured these days.

Finally learn JavaScript and check out all the great JavaScript APIs that ship with browsers these days.

If you do that, then you’ll be well set up to choose if and when you want to use any third-party libraries. You will be the master of them instead of them controlling you.

Of course if it’s a job you’re looking for, use React and Tailwind I guess.

Jens: Long live the web platform! Thank you, Jeremy!