Archive: May 2026

Today I learned via Paweł Grzybek’s post on Mastodon, where Temani Afif pointed out that text decorations propagate to their descendants, they aren’t inherited.

The difference between propagation and inheritance is that the descendants don’t get their own text-decoration property. So, the line, color, style and thickness are all determined by the ancestor where text-decoration was declared.

A descendant can still declare its own text-decoration, but that creates an additional decoration on top, it doesn’t modify or remove the ancestor’s.

Today I learned, adding tabindex="-1" to skip link targets is likely no longer necessary in modern browsers.

Manuel Matuzović tested skip links without tabindex="-1" on targets across major browsers and screen readers on macOS, Windows and Android, concluding it is safe to remove in most setups, thanks to sequential focus navigation starting point.

Furthermore, adding tabindex="-1" to skip link targets also introduces a regression in usability. With tabindex="-1" on main, clicking on any non-interactive area inside main makes main itself the focus starting point. So, the next tab press sends focus to the first focusable element in main, not the next one after where the user clicked. The gov.uk team removed tabindex from main for this reason.

Turns out, if you have a website and you think of the browser as a way to navigate documents — rather than a runtime to execute arbitrary code and fetch, compile, and present them — things can be a lot simpler than our tools often prime us to make them.

You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.

Complexity looks smart. Not because it is, but because our systems are set up to reward it.

Today, while working through an exercise in Eloquent JavaScript, I learned about the concept of parity in maths.

The parity of an integer is its attribute of being even or odd. Thus, it can be said that 6 and 14 have the same parity (since both are even), whereas 7 and 12 have opposite parity (since 7 is odd and 12 is even).

– Weisstein, Eric W, Parity

Initially, I had assumed “same parity” meant “same value”, which is roughly what it means in English. However, in maths it’s narrower. It just means both numbers are even or both are odd.

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture.

[…] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.

A developer who builds accessible interfaces is more skilled. Say this out loud. Repeat it often. A developer who creates accessible interfaces isn’t doing extra work; they’re doing the work the right way.