#26: Hello, Again! (and Why You’re Here)
Caring about vanilla web tech and the open standards process
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Look, I won't beat around the bush. I took some time off earlier this spring from the newsletter, and that ended up being far too long of a time period. My bad.
But I'm back in the saddle, and in case you need a refresher why you're a subscriber or reader of That HTML Blog:
Hi, I'm Jared. 👋😃
I'm a senior freelance web developer who cares a lot a lot about "vanilla" web tech and the open standards process. Things like web components, HTML-first interactivity, CSS-powered design systems…you know the drill. I also care about lightweight libraries which enable huge gains in vanilla-adjacent productivity, such as signals.
I started That HTML Blog because I wanted to share links and document some of the awesome stuff going on which so often gets buried under hype from Big Framework (y'know, React, Next.js, Tailwind, blah blah blah). You also might see a little bleed-over from my other newsletter, Cycles Hyped No More, where I talk about how to fight back against Big Tech run amuck (as a pro-craft activist, I have been leading the charge to promote ethical genAI-free software development practices).
If you haven't visited the blog in a while, I do have a few recent-ish posts there, and I'll be back on a regular schedule going forward (probably 2-3 posts a week) as well as sending this newsletter out on a weekly basis (more or less).
There's a lot of noise out there about the future of web browsers, browser engines, the companies and organizations who work on specs, and even how "open" is defined. (For example, if you've heard that Model-Context Protocol is an "open standard", that's actually not true. There is no open standards body behind MCP. It's just some corporations and a GitHub repo!) I'll be covering that sort of thing now and then, as well as the typical #WebDev fare you're used to. And given that The Fediverse is all built atop web standards, we'll dive more into that side of things as well!
So I hope you enjoy this v2.0 of That HTML Blog, and please do let me know (reply here or message me on Mastodon) what you'd like to see more of in the weeks ahead!
Cheers,
Jared ✌️