Jeremy Keith
adactio.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Jeremy Keith is a web developer who has blogged for over 20 years about web standards, HTML, and the open web.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it as a front-end blog to follow, praise his long-running blog, and note he copies his social posts to his own site.
165HN people shared it
30linked it in comments
178stories submitted
2.3Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1HTML Web Components5 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 2Homepage5 people · first shared 2019
- 3The Web on Mobile4 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 4Battle for the planet of the APIs3 people · 8 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 5Clean Advertising3 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 6Seams3 people · 5 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 7The meaning of AMP2 people · 314 points · first shared 2017 · 169 comments on HN
- 8Rotten Apple2 people · 216 points · first shared 2024 · 214 comments on HN
- 9Regressive Web Apps2 people · 107 points · first shared 2016 · 80 comments on HN
- 10[HTML5] Badge of shame2 people · 44 points · first shared 2011 · 22 comments on HN
- 11Calling up someone who has completely ripped off your website2 people · 10 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 12Why Use React?2 people · 9 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 13Style Your Underlines2 people · 5 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 14Intolerable2 people · 5 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 15Adactio: Journal – Denial2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
azangru · 2022-06-09
> Really hard for non-techies
Yes; but it’s not like even that many techies host their own content.
I love how Jeremy Keith copies everything he tweets to his own site [0]. Wanted to check how he set it all up; but his site isn’t open-sourced.
[0] - https://adactio.com
stepbeek · 2021-12-16
I follow the following blogs for front-end.
* https://adactio.com
* https://piccalil.li/blog/
* https://stephaniewalter.design/
* https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/
This post has some good pointers: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/what-do-i-need-to-read-to-be-a-cs…
I'm not sure what other advice to give. A lot of this was collected over time in response to frustrations I felt around the direction front-end has been moving in (css-in-js, atomic css etc.) and looking for people writing criticisms of it.
billyjobob · 2021-04-03
That is a photo of Jeremy Keith [https://adactio.com] who was part of the team involved in this effort: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/
[Copied from mxuribe at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263365 ]
SCUSKU · 2021-03-18
Randomly came across a random site of someone who has been blogging for over 20 years [1]. I recently just started mine after procrastinating for 2 years. It's pretty exciting and humbling to see such great and dedicated folks on the web. Wonderful project dbrereton, thank you for sharing.
[1] https://adactio.com/journal?start=2760
mxuribe · 2019-02-27
That is a photo of Jeremy Keith [https://adactio.com] who was part of the team involved in this effort: https://worldwideweb.cern.ch/colophon/
alanh · 2010-12-20
Flash is disabled (not JS).
Boy am I starting to get tired of companies talking about how much they love HTML5 without walking the walk. Google employes Ian Hickson, the “dictator” at HTML5’s helm,† but fails to support <video> with a Flash fallback. It’s really not hard!
Adobe is guilty of this hypocrisy; Google is quite guilty… only Apple is mostly walking the walk (you never need Flash for any of their web properties), and increasingly Microsoft (no Flash or Silverlight is needed for http://zoom.it).
Edit: YouTube supporting HTML5 ≠ this Google web page supporting HTML5.
And FWIW, even the YouTube HTML5 beta is insufficient — Many times nothing at all will play, even though third-party sites like DetURL or File2HD can find .MP4 files for that video, and the video plays fine on iOS(!). And I’m using Chrome with the plugin completely disabled, for Chrissake — Given there is no technical reason they can’t tell I don’t have Flash, it becomes obvious no one at Google cares about walking the walk.
†Dear downvoters: I am not making up, Hixie refers to himself this way. http://adactio.com/journal/1600/
phil-pickering · 2026-08-09
Some nice posts about his prediction on Jeremy Keith's blog:
https://adactio.com/journal/tags/longbets
post_break · 2026-03-25
This reminds me of the photo of the vehicle assembly building featured in Iron Man: https://adactio.com/journal/1530/
troupo · 2025-02-22
Yeah, the "HTML Web Components" can be useful: https://adactio.com/journal/20618 and https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/html-web-components/
nolanl · 2024-09-29
I use shadow DOM every day, but yes, it is often the part of WCs that baffles people – probably because they don't need it.
Alternative approaches that may work for your use case:
- "HTML web components" [1] - light DOM only, SSR-first, good as a replacement for "jQuery sprinkles"
- "Shadow gristle" [2] - use as little shadow DOM as possible. If you need styling or composition, put it in the light DOM!
[1]: https://adactio.com/journal/20618
[2]: https://glazkov.com/2023/03/02/shadow-gristle/
simonw · 2023-11-13
Also read these articles for more on the idea of "HTML Web Components":
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/11/01/blinded-by-the-light-dom… - "So there you have it: a few thousand words on my journey through coming to understand and work with these fully-Light-DOM web components, otherwise known as custom elements. Now all they need is a catchy name, so we can draw more people to the Light Side of the Web."
https://adactio.com/journal/20618 then suggests the catchy name.
rado · 2022-11-23
It's called "the intrinsic web". Things like flexbox and grid with content-aware sizing will eventually make the breakpoints obsolete.
https://adactio.com/links/19047
mwcampbell · 2022-09-27
Counterpoint: Seams (2014): https://adactio.com/journal/6786
Edit: related, from the same author: Regressive Web Apps (2016): https://adactio.com/journal/10708
Erwin · 2020-04-27
Going one level up to https://adactio.com/journal shows a sparkline (with author's activity perhaps, the latest posting is entry 2666!) which has a feature I have never seen before: an audible graph. Clicking on the sparkline plays tones matching the data. Not particulary useful, but make me thing about using audio for presenting data (apparently "sonification" is a thing!)
perilunar · 2019-03-23
When I learnt front-end dev there were no seniors to learn from — I was part of the first generation, and we pretty much just made it up as we went. We learnt by trial and error, and by looking at each others source code.
And blogs. Read web dev blogs. Much more up to date than books, and you get to see the latest ideas and take part in discussions of evolving standards. My favs: A List Apart, Adactio, Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, Zeldman, Stuff & Nonsense, The Web Ahead, Mozilla Hacks, Coding Horror.
https://alistapart.com
https://adactio.com
https://www.smashingmagazine.com
https://css-tricks.com
http://www.zeldman.com
https://stuffandnonsense.co.uk
http://5by5.tv/webahead
https://hacks.mozilla.org
https://blog.codinghorror.com
pmlnr · 2018-06-29
http://longbets.org/601/
https://adactio.com/journal/11937
"The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years."
This has been a known problem for a while, but it's always nice to see more voices crying out about it to the more general public.
kingkool68 · 2015-11-30
tl;dr
Twitter uses the name attribute, Facebook/opengraph uses the property attribute, therefore...
<meta name="twitter:url" property="og:url" content="https://adactio.com/journal/9881">
technojunkie · 2014-10-30
Jeremy Keith talked about progressive enhancement with some similar thoughts:
https://adactio.com/journal/7706
It's a problem that I hope can be solved sooner than later. As powerful as Angular et al are, I go to so many sites that don't load any content at all because I use NoScript (FF) or ScriptSafe (Chrome) and I can tell these sites are not at all using progressive enhancement.
kaishiro · 2014-02-12
Yes! Was surprised this wasn't there and was happy to see someone toss it in the comments :)
Edit: How he got there is a neat, quick read for anyone interested: http://adactio.com/journal/5429/
jaffathecake · 2013-12-14
I could say all mobile-versions are badly built, but I'd be wrong.
Not all mobile-optimised sites have endless scrolling. Presenting the same amount of data to mobile as you would desktop, but linearised, is bad design. Having to pan and zoom is also bad design.
Conditional loading is the ideal http://adactio.com/articles/5043/.
I do this in a minor way on my blog http://jakearchibald.com/ - the side bar doesn't appear on mobile, as it would linearise below the main content where few would see it. Instead, it becomes a navigation item at the top of the page.
rokekr · 2011-08-26
user-scalable=yes breaks presentation on iPad when switching orientation
http://adactio.com/journal/4470/
j4mie · 2011-01-18
Nice article by Jeremy Keith on why this logo creates and propagates confusion between HTML5 and CSS3:
http://adactio.com/journal/4289/
fhars · 2008-11-06
Right there on the home page mibbit.com is asking for Yahoo!Messenger passwords. So it is essentially a phishing operation, no? Google is right to disassociate itself from that.
Cf. http://adactio.com/journal/1357
madmotive · 2008-10-30
It might not be conventional but if you stuck this form in front of someone that had never used a web based form before I think they'd find it quite usable.
As for ignoring web standards have you looked at the markup? It's compliant HTML5: http://adactio.com/journal/1524/
dbingham · 2023-11-27
One of the links articles [1] makes an interesting claim that feels like a reach to me, but I'd be interested in hearing HN's take on it:
> At this point React is legacy technology, like Angular. Lots of people are still using it, but nobody can quite remember why. The decision-makers in organisations who chose to build everything with React have long since left. People starting new projects who still decide to build on React are doing it largely out of habit.
I'm going to withhold my own thoughts about that quote, cause I'm curious what everyone else thinks.
Wrt. Web Components, I played around with Web Components about half a decade ago and they felt promising but not ready for prime time yet. They were pretty messy and felt like they did a poor job of encapsulation, ultimately. (At least at the time.) I haven't looked at them recently, but the code examples in this articles look much better (and cleaner) than what I remember.
[1] https://adactio.com/journal/20618
anon1385 · 2013-06-25
A proper standard for syncing rss? So that, like email, you just have to point your various clients at the address of the sync server you are using. That can be one you run yourself or one from some third party provider. If your provider closes you can just point your clients at the new service, without each client needing to implement a new custom API. You are also free to use whatever client(s) you want. It seems to me like this should have been part of RSS since the beginning.
The web community seems disinterested in developing standards other than presentational ones (HTML/CSS), I guess largely for commercial reasons: the creators of services want to lock you into their specific (magic hip RESTful JSON) API.
Five years ago, if you wanted to show content from one site or app on your own site or app, you could use a simple, documented format to do so, without requiring a business-development deal or contractual agreement between the sites. Thus, user experiences weren’t subject to the vagaries of the political battles between different companies, but instead were consistently based on the extensible architecture of the web itself. -- Anil Dash [1]
[1] http://adactio.com/journal/6291/
masklinn · 2011-09-27
> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.
We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released.
By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available.
Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.
IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al.
Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).
Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to…
keeperofdakeys · 2011-09-13
Here is one of the lines of the source code:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, minimum-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">
For those who don't know, this disables user scrolling on every standards-compliant mobile device. The reason is a bug on iOS, that causes test to flow off screen when changing orientation on non-default zoom levels. http://adactio.com/journal/4470/
I really wish more sites would enable it by default, then use javascript to disable it for iOS devices. I have come across many sites with small text that I want to zoom, but can't (this is especially bad for people with poor eyesight). Disabling it for everyone reminds me of the days of IE5 and 6, when other browsers were hampered by IE's bugs; we are only starting to see what having no bug-ridden, dominant browser on the Desktop can bring.
Before anyone says that browsers shouldn't implement this feature, they should. For better or worse, it is a part of the standard. Using browsers that don't implement parts of the standard would bring about situations even worse then this.
paulirish · 2008-07-13
As for contacts and the address book:
+ http://code.google.com/apis/contacts/
+ http://developer.yahoo.com/addressbook/
+ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb463989.aspx
Stop using the password anti-pattern (http://adactio.com/journal/1357)
Facebook has a nice auth flow that http://www.billmonk.com uses. I'd suggest that.
Oh, and hire a visual designer. A strong visual design goes a lot farther than any copy or lock icons ever will.