Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 1d

Anyways, after this go-ahead double, I hugged my wife and high-fived a bunch of strangers; the TV broadcast apparently cut to a guy crying tears of relief and joy; baseball!

Reposted by Eric Portis

Jake Archibald @jakearchibald.com · 1d

Folks who want to see JPEG-XL supported in more browsers, what is it about the format that attracts you to its use on the web?

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 1d

In order:
1. Better encoding efficiency than AVIF = faster/cheaper builds.
2. Ability to losslessly cut weight from existing libraries of JPEGs.
3. I still believe progressive decodes = good UX.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 5d

Safari 26 on Sequoia: buggy and gets laggy as heck for me. Had to switch from Compact to Separate tabs because I often stopped being able to close tabs w/ mouse. Scrolling, interacting with the URL bar, & DevTools often getting multiple-second lags until I close all tabs and quit/re-open. Just me?

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 6d

For one thing, captures the experience of being on the other side of an argument with a motivated implementer, uh, quite well.

Screenshot of a paragraph from the article. It reads, "I pushed back and proposed alternatives and compromised and proposed alternatives and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and finally gave up; and those were only my attempts to push back. Others also pushed back and pushed back and asked for a pause and pushed back and pushed back and recanted their earlier support and pushed back and asked for a pause and asked for a pause and pushed back." Every action described in the paragraph (e.g., "pushed back", "asked for a pause") is a hyperlink, linking to the discussion in question.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 6d

If you work in web standards, you RFC 2119 MUST read this article. alice.boxhall.au/articles/a-t...

A threat model for accessibility on the web - Alice

A explanation of the primary threat to accessibility on the web, and a call to action for the web standards community

alice.boxhall.au

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Reposted by Eric Portis

Lea Verou, PhD @lea.verou.me · 9d

🔥 New blog post!

Covering, among other things:

- Why making simple things easy and complex things possible is not enough
- How to maximize your UI’s signal-to-noise ratio
- Why you can’t uncover friction through user feedback
- How to prioritize user needs

lea.verou.me/blog/2025/us...

In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam • Lea Verou

User effort is a currency. To create a product users love, design the tradeoffs of use case complexity to user effort with the same care you design your pricing scheme.

lea.verou.me

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 15d

From left-pad to Left Behind

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 16d

Cloudinary repeatedly ran into this, years ago. It as eventually straightened out, but I forget the details.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 22d

I believe I am in one of the farthest cities from OKC in the lower forty eight but ——— no tolls!

Google maps showing 1d 6h drive time between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Bellingham, Washington

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 22d

Three and a half gallons of prunes. We did what we could 🫡

Six large jars and one medium jar of prunes on a kitchen table. There are some lovely dahlias in the background.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · 27d

I have a lil post going about render blocking and how to skip it when you’re *disabling* cross-document view transitions (because prefers-reduced-motion). Does “do no harm” count as “real nice”?

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

But you see *I* also want to be able to share components that run code in any server side stack and deliver different markup depending on external API calls, or the specifics of the request, with the option to run that code at either build or delivery time, and also I want a pony

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

next you'll be telling me to call a singular "panini sandwich" a "panino"??? this is america bob

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

oh that's a differ—hey wait a minute

Giant printed tarp above a vendor's stall with giant photos of various fried foods

Zooming in on "Zak's Zucchini" which is very fried

Zooming all the way in on the words "ZAKS ZUCCHINI"

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

look i don't know what y'all are doing over there but we have some truly fantastic children's food art and you are: not invited. sometimes a <del>cigar</del><ins>zucchini</ins> is just a <del>cigar</del><ins>penguin</ins>.

A green cabbage turned into a head (kinda like a snowman's head), with grapes for mouth, potatoes for ears, berries for eyes, and something orange as a nose

A bell pepper cut in half and filled with cherry tomatoes with faces drawn on them in sharpie. They all sit on a paper plate that's been colored blue with a crayon. In kid's writing the plate also says "BOAT BOAT"

A real potato turned into Mr Potato Head. Googly plastic eyes, carrot nose, apple-slice-mouth, cucumber ears, and amazing broccoli hair.

A zucchini artfully carved into a penguin! White parts of the penguin are skinned. Slices peeled up for wings. The stem of the zuke is the penguin's nose.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

smh never taking you to a state fair zach

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

We're hiding the last of our giants behind a plant.

(I think yours might be bigger!)

A 30" zucchini propped up in a corner on a shelf, behind a tall houseplant.

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 5

Does anyone need any plums?

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Sep 4

Ever *have* an image file but *want* a URL? In a click/tap or two? There are many ways to accomplish this, but here's mine: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiJt...

Upload images to Cloudinary with Shortcut - Dev Hints

YouTube video by Cloudinary

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by Eric Portis

Jake Archibald @jakearchibald.com · Sep 4

Interop 2026 is now open for proposals!

This is your chance to tell browser-makers which well-defined, well-tested features you wish had better support across browsers.

⬇️ Here's how ⬇️
github.com/web-platform...

github.com

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Reposted by Eric Portis

Noam Rosenthal @nomster.bsky.social · Sep 3

What if some client-side browsing features were part of the web platform?

Direct CSS reflection of URL state, snappy pending/optimistic UI, URL-to-scroll-snap binding, and some basic same-document navigation use cases, with JS being only an option.

github.com/WICG/declara...

Inviting feedback!

github.com

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Aug 27

I'm still trying to figure out my stance towards AI-powered coding tools generally, but this one? Specifically? Nooooooooppppppe nope nope nope no uh-uh no way josé github.blog/changelog/20...

Grok Code Fast 1 is rolling out in public preview for GitHub Copilot - GitHub Changelog

Grok Code Fast 1 will be available as an opt-in public preview for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise plans in Visual Studio Code. Rollout will be gradual —…

github.blog

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Reposted by Eric Portis

Mat “Wilto” Marquis @wil.to · Aug 26

Alright, this is it. Today is the your last chance to snag a spot in the course at the lowest possible price. Head on over to piccalil.li/javascript-f... to lock it in, and I'll see you in the Discord.

Also, this reminder comes with a little formal announcement:
wil.to/newsletters/...

Dawn of the Final Day

wil.to

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Eric Portis @ericportis.com · Aug 17

Ah that's better

Screenshot of the updated blog post, showing off syntax highlighting