events/2026-01-15-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #044 was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2026-01-15.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2026-01-15-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #044

Jan 15, 2026

Participants

• Joe Crawford
• capjamesg
• Jonas Olson https://www.jonasolson.se
• Nick Simson
• Thomas Vander Wal https://vanderwal.net
• Mike Waggoner https://herebox.org
• Eric M
• Emily N

• ... add names

Joe's Background Today

• A snippet from a 1999 capture of the page on info.webcrawler.com:
  • https://web.archive.org/web/19990117003420/http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html
  • https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001501/http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/exclusion.html
  • Those pages moved to https://www.robotstxt.org in the 2000s
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martijn_Koster

Notes

• humans.txt - is a side file - a response
  • https://humanstxt.org/
  • sidefiles sidefile-antipattern

• • https://llmstxt.org/

Jonas

• Jonas is starting a course of study learning web technology in Sweden
  • Portfolio site to show things off - https://www.jonasolson.se/
  • Nick's reaction: gravitates to sites and portfolios where the personality comes through - and would rather see something that demonstrates how you approach development.
    • I really like the statement on https://pjonori.design/work/preamble/
    • Live links are always helpful for development portfolios!

• • Emily - avoid template / cookie cutter
• Joe: Show what you are proud of

• Animations course animatiions on the web
  • https://animations.dev/

• https://llmstxt.org/
  • large_language_model_traffic
• https://brennan.day/respecting-the-no-js-choice-making-your-site-work-for-everyone/
• Web components and to do or not to do
  • Don't repeat yourself
  • components as a navigation
  • https://brennan.day/respecting-the-no-js-choice-making-your-site-work-for-everyone/
  • web spidering?
  • js dependent spiderable?
  • GitHub relative-time component seems a perfect usage for it

• Blocked javascript because of ads
  • adsense-blocking classnames? what classNames should be avoided?
  • Example: Adblock Plus Chrome hides elements with "adsense" string in any classname
  • Example: Adblock (unknown) refuses to load javascript source with "ads" string in filename
  • Possible dictionaries of strings to avoid:
    • https://gist.github.com/spyesx/42fe84c0ef757d1c38a4
    • https://gist.github.com/sagarkbhatt/968a9ada317b63a7c4b8f99eb51e3d0e

• media on the page on a long page with lazy loading
• Delegate https://learn.jquery.com/events/event-delegation/

• A browser is a first person scroller - must be 60Mhz.
• Scrolling a page is an animation
• https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/06/20/first-person-scrollers/

• view transitions, has - warnings about "unconstrained has" may be a problem
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Intersection_Observer_API
• https://eieio.games/blog/the-secret-inside-one-million-checkboxes/

• https://cybercultural.com/p/history-of-web-design/
• https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

• Ubiquitous and consistent - are time constrained
  • Time moves forward, displays go big
  • most technologies are not forward and backward compatible in time

• Firefox profiler ~ explicit test with profiling a web page - James showing power usages

• https://www.canidev.tools/?category=Performance

• Cookie cutter websites - conssitenty and usability are good, but there ought to be a place for personality, flair and delight

• Grid lanes
  • Do masonry to do traffic elements
• https://webkit.org/blog/17660/introducing-css-grid-lanes/
• https://webkit.org/blog/17746/new-safari-developer-tools-provide-insight-into-css-grid-lanes/

• Anchor positioning ~ side notes! Nicer asides, footnotes, etc
• https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/10/29/custom-asidenotes/

• Global namespace programming may be

• Options for creating awe and art as pages are scraped by obsidian web clipper / llms into markdown
  • use whitespace?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack
  • In computer security, a billion laughs attack is a type of denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) which is aimed at parsers of XML documents

• How much formatting do you need?
• Licensing of Word, Word was not on every device? Mobile changed the web for good
• https://faq.metafilter.com/tags/html
• sanitize

• ... add notes

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Group Photo 2026-01-15