I've been closely following the intersection of web and AI this year, so who better to talk to about this than Jason Mayes, who leads Web AI initiatives at Google. For Google, Web AI is primarily about running client-side AI in the browser. The two key Web AI trends I learned about are: 1. The increasing power of in-browser inference — meaning LLMs working with your data on-device; and 2. Google's new Web AI runtime for web apps, LiteRT.js. This framework is focused on inference only, whereas Google's previous Web AI framework — TensorFlow.js — does both training and inference. LiteRT.js will eventually replace TensorFlow.js altogether, Mayes told me. On-device inference has clear privacy benefits, since your personal data won't get sent to clouds. It also means faster AI processing. Mayes noted that this offers more opportunities to JavaScript developers to work with AI. Python will still be the go-to language for LLM training, which largely happens on the cloud, but web developers can use JavaScript for inference-related work (which is where LiteRT.js comes in). Mayes told me: > “So I think then that enables all the JavaScript developers to fine-tune models or retrain them for their business needs, and then convert those models to a web AI form; and that’s what actually gets deployed, especially if they care about privacy or cost.” Mayes believes there will be an "aha moment" for Web AI soon, as developers realize that 95% of AI use cases can run in the browser, on-device. I encourage you to read my full writeup on The New Stack to understand this trend more. Now let's get to the week's web tech news... ## Web Platform 🌎 Apple has announced the Mini Apps Partner Program; it defines mini apps as "self-contained experiences that are built using web technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript." To incentivize this, Apple is offering "a reduced commission rate of 15% on the sales of qualifying In-App Purchases" (but, as they say on podcast ad-reads, terms and conditions apply). Sarah Perez has some good context, including that Apple may see this as a way to compete against ChatGPT apps (which are also, basically, mini web apps inside a native app). Meanwhile Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, positions it as a tax on web games: > "The sad part of this that we shouldn’t lose sight of - this isn’t a new, better rate for apps that connect to web games, it’s the application of a new 15% Apple tax to web games that were formerly never taxed at all, with WeChat and ByteDance being examples." 🌎 Meta has replaced the WhatsApp native app for Windows 11 with a web wrapper created with Microsoft Edge WebView2, writes Mayank Parmar. He thinks it's "a performance nightmare" because the web version uses far more RAM. There's a good discussion on Hacker News, including from someone who claims to be "the person who designed and fought for this app". That person writes: > "I've come to the conclusion that native desktop apps are just not viable from large companies, even if there is headcount. The problem is coordination cost." 🌎 Last month I noted the launch of Quiet, an open source UI library for the web, created by Cory LaViska (who also created Shoelace, a library of web components). Well, unfortunately Quiet has since been withdrawn from the web. The homepage now states: > "Quiet UI is no longer available to the general public. I will continue to maintain it as my personal creative outlet, but I am unable to release it to the world at this time." Chris Ferdinandi blogged about this, with the headline "Open source is still broken": > "After a month or two, Cory had sold just two or three licenses, and decided to switch to MIT licensed. In a now-deleted blog post, he talked about feeling hindered by the lack of adoption, and his frustration that companies will pay massive salaries to devs but won’t spend $100 or so on something that will save hundreds of hours of work." He adds: "Candidly, I’m seeing the same thing with Kelp." (Kelp is an HTML-first UI library created by Ferdinandi.) 🌎 Patrick Brosset, developer PM at Microsoft, commented on Mastodon about the long list of "features missing in just one browser engine" on the W3C's Web platform features explorer website: > "If the web platform is to survive, we MUST keep on innovating and shipping new APIs and capabilities, in ALL areas of software development. > > Device access, OS integration, storage, file system, animations, codecs, styling, typography, networking, custom elements, styling and extending built-ins, performance, media, ..." Amen to that. Also check out Brosset's related article on Piccalilli, Perfecting Baseline. 🌎 Fabio Manganiello, a longtime developer, reminds us of the simple and elegant functionality that XSLT provided back in the day. This is on the back of news that Google has confirmed it is deprecating XSLT in Chromium. Manganiello recalls: > "My website back in 2007-2008 consisted in a bunch of XML files, which were rendered on the fly either as HTML or RSS feeds depending on the client. And XSLT was there operating this transformation behind the scenes. [...] XSLT provided the perfect glue to transform one into another with a (relatively) simple markup language." ## Web AI 🤖 Sir Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed by Nilay Patel from The Verge. Patel brought up the rise of AI browsers and asked Sir Tim about AI inference running locally, which ties in well with my TNS post this week. Sir Tim's reply: > "The right place to end up is where you’re totally in control of your data. As the power of local devices becomes greater, then the amount of stuff which gets stored locally increases… a lot of the things that people are building out there on the web are local-first, meaning that they’re designed to be able to work without the cloud. They store data either on the web, or they store the data on your local device. The good place to be is that the data is all stored on your local device. The inference is happening in your device, and you’re in control." 🤖 My colleague at The New Stack, Loraine Lawson, posted more about on-device AI. In _Why the Frontend Should Run AI Models Locally With ONNX_, she interviews Sonu Kapoor (a full-stack developer and Angular consultant) about how AI models can be treated as local assets, enabling better performance and privacy. ONNX is the Open Neural Network Exchange, an open standard for machine learning interoperability. Kapoor described ONNX as like a .pdf for machine learning. "With ONNX, actually, you can download the model so you can convert it and you can run it anywhere you want, like with JavaScript or Node.js," he said. 🤖 Mozilla announced a Firefox feature called "AI Window" this week, which opens up a new browser window that "lets you chat with an AI assistant and get help while you browse." This seems to be exactly what OpenAI's new Atlas browser offers by default, except with Firefox you can elect not to use AI (or, to continue the window metaphor, you can open or close the AI Window at any time): > "We see a lot of promise in AI browser features making your online experience smoother, more helpful, and free from the everyday disruptions that break your flow. But browsers made by AI companies ask you to make a hard choice — either use AI all the time or don’t use it at all." Per The Verge, Firefox users "will be able to pick the AI model they want to use." Firefox AI Window; image via Mozilla ## Open Social 💬 In a previous era of the social web, Facebook Like and Comment buttons were a common sight on blogs and websites. We had the Like button on ReadWriteWeb, and I know TechCrunch had the Comment plugin enabled – meaning people could leave a comment on a TC post in Facebook, and it would be mirrored on the blog post. It was neat functionality and showed that websites and social media _could_ (on occasion) play nice together. But now, Meta has decided to kill off this functionality, and the plugins will be discontinued on February 10, 2026: > "The plugins that will be discontinued reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved." 📺 Micro.blog founder Manton Reece announced a $20 per month "Studio" tier to his indie microblogging platform: > "Micro.blog Studio adds longer video hosting for your blog, with uploads up to 20 minutes. [...] It can automatically copy videos to PeerTube and Bluesky too." 🦋 Stonking News is like a Hacker News for stories trending on BlueSky. The frontpage is dominated by politics, as you'd expect from the wider Bluesky community. But the tech page is a potentially useful thing that I'm going to keep an eye on; it's a bit Wired-heavy right now, but hopefully more diverse sources will start to appear. Stonking News tech page ## One More Thing 🎈 Remember when the downsides of Netflix were disc scratches and embarrassingly long queues? This blog post from 2004 made me smile. Via Classic Web, my Mastodon alt a/c that posts screenshots of classic websites and blogs. Damaged Goods weblog, October 2004 Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. If you liked what you read today, please consider sharing the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

2025 is a strange time to start a newsletter about web technology. The past four editions of WTN have focused on the intersection of the web and AI, because frankly that's where most of the excitement is on today's internet. But as a few people I link to this week point out, **the web platform has improved** to a point that it now does much of what frontend frameworks do. So why isn't there as much exciting activity to report on regarding the web platform? The problem, I think, is that web platform improvements are being undermined by AI development trends. I see two main issues: 1. The leading large language models, like GPT-5, are **defaulting to React and Next.js** when being asked to create web apps or sites. That entrenches the power that React has on the web development ecosystem, which means web platform improvements aren't being utilised by AI. Which leads to point #2... 2. I've heard both Vercel and Netlify (two of the leading web developer platforms) say in recent weeks that their user bases are massively increasing. Why? Because of vibe coders. The definition of a "developer" has expanded to include people who rely on prompting rather than programming. But the problem is that **vibe coders get fed React code instead of web-native code**. What's happening is that vibe coders ask their magic lamps to build an AI app or agent, and the AI genie gives them a React app in response. As Alex Russell noted when I tooted about the massive increase in vibe coding "developers" on Vercel and Netlify's platforms: "It's hard to think of this as anything but terrible news for users." I agree, and replied that it's analogous to what's happening to web content — AI slop is drowning out human-created content. None of this is good for the Web: worse content, worse code, worse Web. So what can we, the web technology community, do to promote web platform features over React code? Here are a few suggestions: 1. **Teach vibe coders to explicitly prompt for web-native solutions** (“use vanilla JS”, “no React”, “use HTML/CSS APIs”). 2. Find a way to get the LLMs to (dare I say it) ingest more web platform code — one way is to **build open datasets of framework-free web code** , and invite AI models to use that. 3. **Spotlight teams or projects that ship modern web experiences without heavy frameworks** — proving that the native platform is indeed ready. (This is definitely something WTN can help with, so please hit me up on Mastodon, Bluesky or LinkedIn if you know of such projects.) Ok, time to surf around the webtech-osphere. Let's start with some of the people who inspired this week's WTN theme... ## Web Platform 🌎 John Allsopp has a thoughtful post on how frontend frameworks (especially React) have become too much of a constraint on innovation, given the big improvements on the underlying web platform in recent years. Like me, John is more energized by AI Engineering than frontend these days. I would just note that web technology is a key part of AI development, so I am energized by that. But I do agree that framework fatigue is a real thing. John writes: > "But what aren’t we building? What new kinds of experiences, what new kinds of applications, what new kinds of interaction could we create if we were deeply exploring and engaging with the capabilities of the platform? I don’t know, because we’re not building them. We’re building what the frameworks enable us to build, what the assembly line can produce efficiently." 🌎 Jeremy Keith has a similar take, and further suggests that frameworks are often slow to adopt new web platform features: > "These days, client-side JavaScript frameworks don’t abstract away the underlying platform, they instead try to be an alternative. In fact, if you attempt to use web platform features, your JavaScript framework will often get in the way. You have to wait until your framework of choice supports a feature like view transitions before you get to use it. > > This is nuts. Developers are choosing to use tools that actively get in the way of the web platform." 🌎 Jeremy links to a Jim Nielsen post on the same topic, that specifically mentions @view-transition: > "Browser makers have teams of people who, day-in and day-out, are spending lots of time developing and optimizing new their offerings. > > So if you leverage what they offer you, that gives you an advantage because you don’t have to build it yourself." 🌎 Meanwhile, here's an unexpected use of slick web technologies... Apple has recreated the App Store on the Web! Although as MacStories points out, there is currently no way to download or buy apps on the web version. As an aside, for a brief time you could view the source code of the web App Store, which revealed the site was made with Svelte. However, that GitHub repository was then disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice (via Reddit). Apple App Store in the browser ## AI x Web 🤖 This week Microsoft Research launched an open source simulation environment for AI agents, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, who manages the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Before the interview, I must admit I wasn’t sure why Microsoft would be releasing a simulated marketplace instead of the real thing. But Kamar convinced me that it’s not only sensible to fully test how agents collaborate before a public marketplace goes live, but it’s actually dangerous _not_ to run the simulations first! Microsoft's Magentic Marketplace for AI agents 🤖 Dennis Crowley, who founded Foursquare during Web 2.0, has a new startup called Hopscotch Labs. It's released BeeBot, "an app for AirPods" that combines AI, audio, and location-based social features; it's iPhone-only and US-only currently. (via Techmeme) 🤖 Vercel on what it's learned building agents: "The highest likelihood of success for current-generation agentic AI comes from work that requires low cognitive load and high repetition from humans." ## Open Social 🦣 Mastodon 4.5 has been released, featuring quote posts, a solution to missing replies, and native emoji support. There's also an updated roadmap. 🦋 Bluesky reaches 40 million users (note: there was no indication of how many are active). 🦋 Laurens Hof gives "an overview of the current state of blogging on atproto, and how it gives insight on what decentralisation on atproto actually looks like in practice". He mentions several blogging tools on AT Protocol, but Leaflet (where he wrote this post) is definitely the most interesting: > "Leaflet has quickly become the most popular blogging platform on atproto, and it is actively seeing further development. Leaflet is a block-based editor, that does not use markdown. Leaflet is now also starting to move towards the social side of blogging, with its own comment section (that exists outside of Bluesky), a reader feed that shows all recently published Leaflet posts, and a discovery page for finding other Leaflets." 🦣 Bonfire Social 1.0 has been released; it's a community-focused network on the fediverse. The group says: > "It's time to go beyond microblogging and build apps for community organising, open science, mutual aid, and collective decision‑making. Let's take back the internet with open protocols, consent‑based governance, and portability by design." 🦣 🦋 Bridgy Fed has rolled out two new features: DM to block multiple users at once and ATProto block list subscriptions. ## One More Thing 🎈 BBC reports that 'vibe coding' has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. While it's easy to scoff at this, someone on Bluesky pointed to this 1988 comment about HyperCard, the classic Apple dev tool: > "The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call "programming for the rest of us"." Perhaps we're all developers after all! Although, I will always prefer the devs who can actually code. Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. If you liked what you read today, please consider sharing the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

This week I spoke to Vercel’s Andrew Qu about the company’s recent experiments running a full Next.js application inside ChatGPT. OpenAI's apps were originally designed for relatively limited HTML pages (at least compared to Vercel's SPAs), delivered through a tightly sandboxed, triple-nested iframe system. Vercel’s challenge was to bring server-rendered, dynamic behavior into that environment. Long story short, Qu’s team proved that a Next.js app can function inside ChatGPT without changes to the framework itself. You can read my article on The New Stack for the technical details, but I'll leave you with this quote from Qu, which shows that web apps will play a key role in the AI era: > "We’re trying to do this thing with Next.js as a proof point that even if people don’t really interact with the web in the traditional sense […] it’s still up to the people to build the experiences that will then be embedded into the chat experiences.” Ok, onto the week's web tech news, including more WebAI developments. But let's start with the good old web platform... ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌎 Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and Mallik Tatipamula (CTO at Ericsson) outline their "7 Phases of the Internet" for IEEE Spectrum, calling it "a map to where the Web goes next." We're currently in phase 4, according to the pair, which is "The Internet of AI Agents." > "Even as the Internet enters into Phase 4, long gone is its limited mandate of merely moving data packets. The Internet is today and over its future phases becoming the intelligent, resilient, and universal fabric upon which the world’s digital future rests. And in the age of AI, connectivity is not merely the foundation. It is increasingly intelligence itself." 💡 _I put this in the web platform section mainly to illustrate that AI and agents are now effectively a part of the internet's foundation. I may not be around for the final "Quantum Internet" phase, whenever that happens, but the AI agent phase is exciting enough for now!_ 🌎 Brendan McLoughlin explains how Remix 3 has diverged from the React path and embraced the web platform: > "This is Remix's value proposition: Simplicity (explicitly control when things update), Web Platform Alignment (standard events, standard streams, cross-runtime compatibility), and Debuggability (trace every update back to a specific this.update() call). The team isn't rejecting React's goal of raising the UX bar, but they are rejecting the complexity tax React accepts to achieve it." 💡 _Remix’s turn toward native web APIs shows that the pendulum is swinging back from abstraction toward the platform itself. The big test will be whether simplicity can win developer mindshare after a decade of React habits._ 🌎 Blake Watson is also pro-web platform and explains how you can forgo build tools: > "Modern web development is inundated with dependency management and build tools that, while ostensibly created to make you more productive, introduce complication and technical debt. But while we were busy webpack-ing our way to success, the web platform got good. We can now enjoy such things as CSS nesting, JavaScript modules, and even NPM packages without the need for a build step." 💡 _I'm not sure how realistic this is for apps that need to scale, e.g. in an enterprise. Still, it's encouraging to see developers exploring "no build" options._ 🌎 Loren Stewart built the same app 10 times to evaluate frameworks for mobile performance. It's a very long, technical post, which you should absolutely read if you're a web developer and want the _what_ and _how_ of Loren's analysis. For WTN, I just want to highlight the _why_ , to illustrate **why the web matters on mobile** : > "My team needed to choose a framework for an upcoming app. The requirements were clear: it had to work well on mobile. Not “acceptable on mobile,” but actually good. We’re building tools for real estate agents working in the field: open houses, parking lots, spotty cellular signals. When someone’s standing in front of a potential buyer trying to look professional, a slow-loading app makes them look unprofessional." 🌎 Baldur Bjarnason ponders a worrying trend that I too have noticed: the reliance on React that LLMs like GPT-5 have. > "...web developer tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have, seemingly, stalled the shift away from React that had been gathering steam. LLMs can’t help you with the genuinely new and innovative: frameworks, libraries, and standards that have only recently been introduced don’t have enough critical mass in the training data, which leads to a shift back to React, which in turn prevents the innovations from ever attaining that critical mass." 🌎 Cloudflare has introduced Top-Level Domain (TLD) insights on Cloudflare Radar. Unsurprisingly, .com is number 1, but in a close second place is a Russian domain: .su. Cloudflare says .ru is "mostly associated with a popular online world-building game." Incidentally, WTN's chosen domain, .news, is 60th with a 7.875 "magnitude." I like to think that's because WTN is on the cutting edge! ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 OpenAI blog: How we built OWL, the new architecture behind our ChatGPT-based browser, Atlas. Written by Ken Rockot, Member of the Technical Staff, and Ben Goodger, Head of Engineering for ChatGPT Atlas. OWL — OpenAI’s Web Layer — is described as "our integration of Chromium, which entails running Chromium’s browser process outside of the main Atlas app process." OpenAI's OWL architecture Rockot and Goodger note: > "Think of it like this: Chromium revolutionized browsers by moving tabs into separate processes. We’re taking that idea further by moving Chromium itself out of the main application process and into an isolated service layer." 💡 _OWL confirms that OpenAI is treating the browser layer as core infrastructure. By pulling Chromium into its own “web layer,” Atlas effectively makes the web a subsystem of ChatGPT. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing for the open web, but it's an ingenious technical solution._ 🤖 Laurie Lay, senior software engineer at Ippon Technologies, on why JavaScript is a rising trend in Machine Learning (via my TNS colleague Loraine Lawson): > "It’s an evolution of the web platform that’s happening right now, and as developers, we have the ability to build the new generation of these intelligent applications. Many of our apps that are already built with JavaScript have the ability to keep application data localized, private and real time. This makes JavaScript a really perfect language for deploying machine learning models on our small, resource-constrained local devices." 💡 _JavaScript’s rise in ML isn’t hype — it’s a practical response to running models close to the user. I've just spoken to someone from Google about this for an upcoming TNS article, so will have more to say next week._ 🤖 Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, on JS growth in AI: > "The world runs on TypeScript & JavaScript. Our bet is that AI engineering will follow suit. The growth in [Vercel's AI SDK] downloads and adoption has been astonishing." 💡 _AI SDK is Vercel's AI toolkit for TypeScript, so Vercel’s bet is clear: if the web is where agents surface, then JavaScript will become the default agent language._ 🤖 Calcalistech: Google’s AI fund backs $6M Seed in Anchor Browser, an Israeli AI automation platform: > "Its technology enables AI to interact directly with websites without relying on traditional APIs or scripts, which often limit automation’s reliability and scalability." 🤖 TechCrunch: Canva launches its own design model, adds new AI features to the platform > "Canva said that it is launching its own foundational model, trained on its design elements, that generates designs with editable layers and objects rather than flat images." 🤖 The Agentic Internet Workshop unconference was held this past week at the lovely Computer History Museum in Mountain View. According to one of the sponsors, cheqd.io: > "Big takeaways: AI agents & Verifiable AI are front & center! Discussions covered agentic commerce, security frameworks, & the role of identity in keeping AI trustworthy." 👀 Ben Goodger, OpenAI lead on Atlas, tweeting about the web's wonders: > "There's always been something wonderful about the web. Zero configuration. Just click your way through. Ever since the 1990s it's felt like the future of the human-machine interface. From the earliest days, the browser was referred to as the "user agent" - now they're powered by AI we're starting to find out what super powerful user agents can do for you." ## Open Social Business 🦣 The PeerTube account posted this week on Mastodon that it was "10th anniversary of the first #PeerTube commit." 💡 _PeerTube hitting ten years shows that decentralized video can endure, even without algorithmic amplification. That said, I myself haven't used it much and I hardly ever see PeerTube videos in my Mastodon feed — perhaps the next step is making video federation as seamless as YouTube’s embeds once were._ 🦣 John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost (the publishing platform I am using for WTN), posted some ActivityPub stats: > "After 3 months - counting by number of servers (unique domains) - @ghost is now the most-deployed piece of ActivityPub software out there > 31% of all sites that interop with open social web standards are running on Ghost" Graphic showing popular software using ActivityPub 💡 _Open social isn’t just for microblogging anymore. Publishing platforms embracing federation could bring the fediverse to more creators, BUT there are still a lot of usability issues (which I covered in an August post_ _on my personal blog_ _)._ 🦣 Jaz-Michael King: There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Pickleball Courts. > "The fediverse doesn’t need to resurface the tired, worn-down tennis courts of the old internet. It needs to create something new. This ecosystem offers an entirely different kind of online experience. It’s smaller, more local, more relational. It’s messy in the best ways. It prioritises conversation over content, sharing over extraction, and community governance over corporate control." ## One More Thing 🎈 On the back of my Cybercultural post looking back on blogging in 2001, I ran a Mastodon poll asking whether people think their personal website will still be around in 20 years. Perhaps it's audience bias, but I'm pleased to report that 70% of respondents said yes! There's still time left in the poll, if you'd like to have your say. Mastodon poll results Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

The big news this week was the launch of OpenAI's new browser, Atlas, which further validates my thesis that the web has become the UI layer for AI systems. Reactions to Atlas have been mixed (I have a selection of quotes below), but so far I have two main takeaways: 1. The product itself is slick, as you would expect from an engineering team led by Ben Goodger (who was an early engineer on both Firefox and Chrome). _But_ I am concerned about how Atlas treats websites as almost second-class citizens, and also the privacy implications of OpenAI gobbling up all your browsing data. 2. For web professionals, once again this shows how OpenAI is using web technology to build out its platform — some might say that Atlas is an attempt to create an "OS for AI," although personally I think that's too simplistic. But certainly, web technology has become a key weapon for OpenAI with the launches of ChatGPT apps (which use web tech) and now Atlas. On the first point, Anil Dash published a strongly worded post this week that accuses OpenAI of building an "anti-web" browser. He points out that often you don't even see websites in the search results: > "I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all." I tested this by opening a new tab in both Atlas and Google Chrome and typing: "what happened on the internet in 1995?" In Chrome, my website Cybercultural comes up as the first link in Google's search results — actually, my link shows up _twice_ , to the side and below the "AI Overview." On Atlas, which defaults to a ChatGPT search, my post is less visible — and also, in my view, less likely to be clicked since OpenAI has 'trained' us to use ChatGPT as an answer-engine. Test query in Atlas This is something we will be grappling with as web professionals going forward — yes, web tech is to the fore in modern AI, but are powerful companies like OpenAI and Google undermining the open web? More on Atlas below, along with a bunch of other AI x Web stories (it's been a busy week!). Following that I have some web platform news and open social web developments. ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 As noted in the intro, OpenAI launched its new browser, Atlas. It's MacOS-only to begin with, with the promise of Windows, iOS, and Android "coming soon." As with many other new browsers these days, Atlas has been built on top of Google's open source Chromium project. Most intriguing feature: a built-in browser agent that can browse the web on your behalf (for paying users only). _💡 After the_ _recent launch of ChatGPT apps_ _(and the Apps SDK), this is more proof that OpenAI is doubling down on web apps. For OpenAI, being able to add browsing data to its LLMs is a big win. But of most interest to web developers is the opportunity to create more powerful versions of their native apps — in the sense that they can be tightly integrated with AI, either inside Atlas or ChatGPT._ Bonus quotes about Atlas from people in the know: * "As I’ve used Atlas I’ve noticed I’ve become more curious. I ask more questions about the web around me." Ben Goodger, head of engineering for Atlas (and former Firefox and Chrome dev) * "The Apps SDK is great for bringing services into ChatGPT, but ChatGPT should also be able to help you where you already are. That’s the point of our new browser, ChatGPT Atlas." Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications, OpenAI * "We’ve talked about ChatGPT evolving into an operating system as a layer that connects intelligence to the apps and actions you use every day. Atlas is one step in that direction. It makes the browser itself part of the experience." Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT, OpenAI * "I remain unconvinced by the entire category of "browser agents", the security and privacy challenges still feel insurmountable to me." Simon Willison, AI developer and Django co-creator * "All told, Atlas’ “Agent Mode” isn’t yet reliable enough to use as a kind of “set it and forget it” background automation tool. But for simple, repetitive tasks that a human can spot-check afterward, it already seems like the kind of tool I might use to avoid some of the drudgery in my online life." Ars Technica's Kyle Orland after testing the Atlas agent feature. 🤖 Google held the 2025 Web AI Summit on Monday in San Francisco. Unfortunately it wasn't streamed online, but Junfan Zhu wrote a summary of the event on LinkedIn: > "The Browser as a Full AI Runtime > The 2025 WebAI Summit showcased a bold vision: the browser is evolving from a simple UI shell into a full-fledged AI operating system. From local model inference to multi-modal pipelines and agent orchestration, every layer of the AI stack is being reimagined for secure, private, and high-performance execution in-browser. 🚀" _💡 I've noticed that Google has been talking a lot about client-side AI recently; i.e. focusing on what devs can do in-browser. The idea is to keep inference and personalization on the user’s device instead of in a vendor’s data center. Something for devs and entrepreneurs to think about in terms of AI app ideas._ 🤖 Anthropic announces Claude Code on the web and in the Claude iOS app. From my TNS colleague Frederic Lardinois: > "...developers can now kick off Claude Code workflows directly from the Claude.ai web app, with Claude Code then running these coding tasks on Anthropic-managed instances." _💡 This news was enthusiastically received by developers this week, although quickly overshadowed by the Atlas news. But, again, it's interesting that more AI tooling is flowing to the web._ 🤖 Microsoft announces a preview of Copilot Actions in Edge, an "experimental, opt-in agentic browser feature, available for testing and research purposes." Safety tips were posted in a separate article. 🤖 Project NANDA is a new project out of MIT that is building an open, decentralized infrastructure for AI agents, as an alternative to proprietary platforms like OpenAI and Anthropic. I wrote about it this week for The New Stack: > "Whether or not NANDA itself becomes a mainstream platform, its open design at least provides a credible blueprint for how an agentic web might evolve. The ideas here matter: federated discovery, verifiable identity, protocol bridges. Those ideas echo the early web’s design and also the still-emerging world of the open social web (a.k.a. fediverse)." 🤖 My TNS colleague Loraine Lawson interviewed new React Foundation director Seth Webster, who told her that LLMs have mostly been trained on really bad React: > “They’re trained on the lowest common denominator React, which is what’s out in the world. They’re trained on the worst Svelte, they’re trained on the worst Swift, because what they’re training on is publicly available code. The best code in the world, oftentimes, is hidden behind private repo, and so they didn’t get to scrape that.” _💡 Needless to say, this lends even more credance to the "AI slop" argument being made by many anti-AI developers. On the other hand, it's an opportunity to prompt LLMs for native web platform code instead of React!_ 🤖 Vercel continues to re-position itself as being an agentic development platform: > "Agents will become part of every product the way frontends did. The teams that benefit first will be the ones who pair fast iteration with a platform that keeps promises about correctness, security, and total cost. The combination of AI SDK and Vercel AI Cloud gives you that platform." _💡 I have been keeping an eye on how companies like Vercel and Netlify are re-positioning for AI agents. I'm pleased to see that the web still seems front of mind for them both._ 🤖 Crazy Egg, a website optimization services company, analyzed a bunch of AI website builder products. It concluded that "AI is like a lazy designer," but that 3 vibe-coding tools — Base 44, Figma, and Bolt — performed best. Best and Worst AI website builders according to CrazyEgg ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌎 "Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the initiative kicked off in 2019 with the aim of developing innovative privacy-protecting technologies to replace third-party cookies on the web, is officially dead," reports AdWeek, adding that this news "comes just six months after Google officially abandoned its long-promised plans to wipe third-party cookies from Chrome." _💡 No quick fix for web privacy: with Sandbox gone, developers and website operators will need to keep balancing cookies and consent on their own._ 🌎 Cloudflare's Michael Rosenberg writes about improving the trustworthiness of Javascript on the Web; the article is regarding WAICT (Web Application Integrity, Consistency, and Transparency), "a W3C-backed effort among browser vendors, cloud providers, and encrypted communication developers to bring stronger security guarantees to the entire web." Basically, the goal is to provide security and trust guarantees on the web that are equivalent to centralized app stores. _💡 Extending web-level security without creating a centralized gatekeeper sounds like a great goal. If it lands, it will make the open web even more competitive with app-store trust models._ ## Open Social Business 🦋 Bluesky has published a "Protocol Check-in" for Fall 2025: > "We’re close to a big milestone for the protocol. Think of it as the “AT 1.0 moment” (even if we don’t literally call it that). As we wrap up our protocol work on auth scopes and Sync1.1, we believe that we’ve fleshed out a complete set of primitives for working with online identities and public broadcast data." _💡 It's been nice to see so much developer action on the AT Protocol, even if the content moderation drama continues to simmer on Bluesky._ 🦋 Bluesky has also released an OAuth guide for AT Protocol application developers. _💡 OAuth support in AT Protocol opens the door for even more third-party apps, along with possible enterprise integrations._ ## One More Thing 🎈 I liked this whimsical post by Chris Coyier: 50 Reasons to Build a Website. It's a reminder that the web can, and should, be fun (although it's also good to make money from at least some of your websites!): > "You can (and likely will) make websites that don’t make any money and you won’t be paid to build them. I, for one, think that’s awesome. Not everything has to be a hustle." Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

There's been a quiet inversion happening in internet technology: after a decade of smartphone apps dominance, the **web is becoming the default interface layer again**. Of course,**** this time it's for AI. I know many of you continue to be skeptical of AI and what it's doing to the open web (as I am too), but one thing we can hang onto is that web technology is a key part of the emerging AI stack. Consider: Google is baking AI directly into Chrome and Search, OpenAI is embedding web apps inside ChatGPT, and protocols like MCP-UI are standardizing how agents render web-based UIs. The web layer is where humans meet machines. For developers, that means the skills of the open web — **HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and frameworks like Vue and React** — are becoming the building blocks of AI experiences. For platforms, the real contest is the web layer — where AI meets the user. Google might still have the lead, but ChatGPT is a big player now and its newly announced app platform (Apps SDK) could well be a masterstroke. Plus, as you'll see below, Anthropic seems to be leading the charge on bridging technologies between AI and the Web — first with MCP, now with Skills. p.s. slight formatting change this week; from now on I'm using the _💡_ emoji to indicate my thoughts on a news item. ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌎 "React isn’t competing with other frameworks anymore. React has become the platform." Paul Kinlan, Google Chrome engineer, in a thoughtful blog post about what AI is doing to the web framework ecosystem. In short, making React even more popular! _💡 React’s dominance might be making it the de facto interface layer for AI-driven web apps. I don't actually like that trend, because I'd rather AI coding tools lean more towards native Web APIs. But, React does seem to be in an enviable position in terms of LLM 'knowledge'. Let's not call it a platform though!_ 🌎 At a frontend conference this month, Joeri Sebrechts showed how to port React applications to vanilla JavaScript. "It is a thing that pretty much nobody does for real but that is eminently doable," he said on Mastodon. Joeri posted his slides, which are worth perusing. 💡 _Now we're talking! Joeri Sebrechts’ demo is a reminder that AI-assisted dev tools can abstract away frameworks entirely...if prompted to._ 🌎 This week on The New Stack, I wrote about the launch of Vite+, a new unified JavaScript toolchain that aims to solve JavaScript fragmentation. The article includes quotes from my recent interview with Vite and Vue creator Evan You. 💡 _Vite+ aims to unify the scattered JavaScript toolchain — timely, as human devs and AI coding agents alike thrive on consistent build environments._ 🌎 The Web Components framework Lit is joining the OpenJS Foundation as an Impact Project, the project announced this week. 💡 _Lit joining the OpenJS Foundation helps position Web Components as a long-term standard. For businesses, that’s hopefully an encouraging sign to use WCs._ 🌎 Bramus from the Google Chrome team posted about what's new in view transitions, a new CSS feature that enables smooth animation between pages. MDN has a good overview. 💡 _The smooth navigation of View Transitions closes one of the last UX gaps between web apps and native apps — another quiet win for the browser._ ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 Anthropic has introduced "Agent Skills", which it defines as "folders that include instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can load when needed." The engineering blog adds: > "Skills extend Claude’s capabilities by packaging your expertise into composable resources for Claude, transforming general-purpose agents into specialized agents that fit your needs." Simon Willison thinks Skills could become even more important than MCP, which has arguably been the AI trend of the year (well, other than agents): > "I expect we’ll see a Cambrian explosion in Skills which will make this year’s MCP rush look pedestrian by comparison." 🤖 Cloudflare has updated Web Bot Auth, a protocol that "allows bots and agents to verify their identities to other parties using HTTP message signatures," and it is being extended for agentic commerce. Cloudflare provides the security infrastructure, while Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are all utilizing Web Bot Auth in their agentic commerce programs, says the company. 💡 _Payments players like Visa and Mastercard validating Cloudflare's protocol shows AI agent commerce is getting real. But, as noted last week, OpenAI and Shopify are also very active in this space — lots to work through yet._ 🤖 Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting spoke to Cloudflare Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen about the company's efforts to help publishers in the AI era. The goal is the Spotify model, Cohen told Morrissey. “There’s lots of money going to creators in that model… it took a while for that market to develop,” she said. 💡 _Cloudflare’s “Spotify model” for publishers hints at a future where AI platforms pay for licensed content access. That's the goal anyway, and I support it! Love the work Cloudflare is doing on this front._ 🤖 The Google Chrome team hosted an "AI in Action" technical workshop, to "demonstrate how client-side AI and built-in AI APIs can be directly integrated into their products..." 💡 _Chrome’s client-side AI push positions the browser as a local inference engine, not just a viewer — but we'll have to see how that affects web performance and privacy. I notice Firefox is pushing_ _similar technology_ _._ 🤖 Google Chrome also invites you to check out "the new Chrome DevTools Model Context Protocol (MCP) server," which it says "brings the power of Chrome DevTools to AI coding assistants." 🤖 Vercel has more details about running Next.js inside ChatGPT: > "When OpenAI announced the Apps SDK with Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, it opened the door to embedding web applications directly into ChatGPT. But there's a significant difference between serving static HTML in an iframe and running a full Next.js application with client-side navigation, React Server Components, and dynamic routing. This is the story of how we bridged that gap." 💡 _Vercel’s Next.js-in-ChatGPT integration shows that JS frameworks can run inside AI chat interfaces. If the ChatGPT apps platform does take off, Vercel wants to position itself as a dev environment for those apps._ 🤖 Interesting Fortune article about the 2025 trend for AI browsers. This about sums it up: > "The real prize for these companies isn’t web navigation; it’s control of the gateway to the rest of users’ digital lives, including a lot of other web-based software applications. Most companies are betting that the true value of AI will be unlocked when AI agents have access to a user’s entire ecosystem—emails, calendar, messages, and documents—and can perform tasks across them seamlessly." 💡 _This feels like Google's battle to win or lose, given the current dominance of Chrome (and its hold on Chromium), and the fact OpenAI seems to have pivoted to ChatGPT as the platform for apps (it had previously been rumored to be working on a browser). Still, there could be other winners here — Atlassian owns Dia now, one of these new AI browsers, so maybe that becomes a leading browser technology for enterprise AI apps._ ## Open Social Business 🦣 Why the open social web matters now; Ben Werdmuller posts the video and slides of his excellent FediForum keynote. 🦋 Leaflet, the blogging product running on AT Protocol, has a new Discover page showing off all the people using it. Accordingly, I subscribed to a bunch of leaflets; the process is a little confusing at first, but once you realize that you get a custom Bluesky feed of the sites you subscribe to (labelled "Leaflet Reader"), it makes sense! You can also read your feeds in Leaflet's product. My Leaflet Reader in Bluesky 💡 _Leaflet’s new Discover page shows early signs of a decentralized content network forming on Bluesky’s protocol — small, messy, but growing._ 🎸 Music dev Lee Martin has a post about Spotify's new API restrictions and finding practical alternatives. He explains on Hacker News: > "A lot has changed on the Spotify Web API in the past year: deprecated features, increased security, and steep new criteria for extended access, which alienates indie apps. Rather than complain about it, I've put together a report to understand these new restrictions and find practical alternatives." 💡 _Spotify’s tightening API access mirrors a pattern: when platforms mature, indie innovation gets squeezed. Open standards are the only long-term defense._ ## One More Thing 🎈 The political blog Talking Points Memo turns 25 shortly, and to celebrate it is running a series of posts on the history of digital media. I really enjoyed a post by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker.com, entitled What Made Blogging Different?. This bit near the end especially resonated with me: > “I still look for people with early blogger energy, though — people willing to make an effort to understand the world and engage in a way that isn’t a performance, or trolling, or outright grifting. Enough of them, collectively, can be agents of change.” Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging! _Feature image via Unsplash._

This week we saw the launch of a new application platform: OpenAI's ChatGPT apps, including a platform for third-party developers to submit apps to be embedded in ChatGPT. Most intriguing for web tech fans: the defining trait of OpenAI's software developer kit, Apps SDK, is its **web-based UI model**. ChatGPT apps has echoes of the great smartphone app platform launches of 2008 — both iOS and Android. Arguably, given the enormous popularity of OpenAI and the chatbot user paradigm it pioneered, this is the first mainstream application platform with a genuine chance of rivaling those two smartphone app stores. But of course, being web-based makes this fundamentally different to both the iOS and Android app platforms. Even though OpenAI’s App SDK sits a layer higher in the stack — ChatGPT has iOS, Android and browser versions — it potentially has massive pulling power as an app-distribution platform. Let's dig into OpenAI's announcement some more, then we'll get to WTN's regular sections on web platform opportunities and open social web. ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 **ChatGPT Apps —** As noted above, OpenAI introduced apps in ChatGPT at its DevDay event this week. The company is positioning this as "apps you can chat with." Essentially, these apps are embedded web experiences inside of ChatGPT. **WTN Note:** To nobody's surprise, ChatGPT is becoming an application platform — do they even need to build their own browser? What's also interesting here is that for companies like Zillow and Canva, ChatGPT will take usage away from their own native mobile apps; for example, you can create a quick Canva presentation now from within ChatGPT. Apps in ChatGPT 🤖 **Apps SDK —** Even better, OpenAI introduced the Apps SDK for third-party apps; it's built on MCP and "extends MCP so developers can design both the logic and interface of their apps." Mirroring the great smartphone app store launches of 2008 (iOS and Android), OpenAI says it will "begin accepting app submissions for review and publication" later this year. **WTN Note:** In an explanatory article on The New Stack, I looked at the nuts and bolts of Apps SDK. In short, the Apps SDK formalizes ChatGPT as a web runtime — apps are sandboxed iframes rendered inline in conversation. This subtly reframes the web as **content inside AI** , not the other way around. Developers should watch how OpenAI handles monetization and discoverability — both key levers for a viable app economy. Here are some of the other dev highlights: Good summary of Apps SDK from Maximiliano Firtman. 🤖 **AgentKit —** Also noteworthy for devs, and entrepreneurs who want to pretend they're devs, OpenAI announced AgentKit — a toolkit to build AI agents. As well as a low-code agent builder, there is ChatKit, "for embedding customizable chat-based agent experiences in your product." Sam Altman said that AgentKit is "a complete set of building blocks [...] designed to help you take agents from prototype to production." **WTN Note:** AgentKit targets developers who want to build independent agents, rather than embed directly inside ChatGPT. It complements the Apps SDK — OpenAI is now supplying both the internal ecosystem (apps within ChatGPT) and the external toolchain (agents beyond ChatGPT). This dual reach gives OpenAI influence over the entire emerging “agent economy,” from creation to distribution. 🤖 Vercel gets in on ChatGPT apps: "You can now build and deploy ChatGPT apps directly on Vercel, with full support for modern web frameworks." **WTN Note:** Vercel’s quick integration shows how AI app development is being absorbed into the modern web stack. Can we expect a full ChatGPT-based web framework at some point? ## Open Social Business 🦣 This week, I attended FediForum, a two-day virtual event, to find out what's new in open social web development. One of the themes of Ben Werdmuller's keynote was that “everything big started small.” He referenced how Twitter started as an SMS group messaging service, but obviously turned into something much bigger. The apps I highlighted in my writeup for The New Stack are all small right now, but any one of them could become something much bigger: * AltStore, an alternative app store for iOS, has launched onto the fediverse. * The team behind Bridgy Fed has announced Mastodon to Bluesky migration. * Frequency is a photo and video sharing app with an emphasis on privacy and no algorithmic engagement bait. * CrowdBucks helps creators and devs support themselves in the fediverse. **WTN Note:** With the caveat that this is still an immature market, for startups and investors it's a reminder that the next generation of social innovation may emerge from small, federated tools — not monolithic platforms. Let's hope so, anyway! 🦣 Mastodon has begun to experiment with "Packs" — its version of Bluesky's Starter Packs. In a blog post, Mastodon wrote: > "We believe that these kinds of user-generated, curated collections could help people to find their tribe more quickly when they join the Fediverse. At the same time, envisioning a similar feature that prioritises user consent, and works across a constellation of independent servers, is no small feat." **WTN Note:** Starter packs could lower onboarding friction and accelerate network effects on Mastodon. The risk, as Laurens Hof points out, is engagement-hacking and context collapse — challenges any open network must solve to scale responsibly. 📰 Hey, remember RSS? It's still alive and kicking, as this excellent deep dive into the RSS feed reader landscape shows. It's from Lighthouse, which lists itself among the SaaS products. RSS Reader landscape, by Lighthouse **WTN Note:** RSS never truly died — it’s quietly powering independent distribution again. For media and SaaS companies, owning your feed means owning your audience, a lesson many are relearning as corporate platforms like Facebook, Threads and X tighten control over distribution. 📰 Speaking of RSS, Brent Simmons explains why NetNewsWire is not a web app. Despite still bristling "at having to publish NetNewsWire for iOS through the App Store," he prefers it over web distribution. The main reasons he gives are 1) he'd have to pay "way more" for web and database hosting, and 2) it's easier for him to protect users. **WTN Note:** To put my cards fully on the table, I've always preferred and mostly used browser-based RSS Readers. From Bloglines in 2003, to Google Reader later, to Feedly now. I just like the portability of being able to view my Reader through the various computers and devices I have. But each to their own! ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌐 Quiet is a source-available user interface library for the modern Web, created by Cory LaViska (who also created Shoelace, a library of web components). Says Cory: "[Quiet] features 88 accessible, performant, localized, and interoperable components along with an optional CSS reset to streamline development of websites and apps." **WTN Note:** Native web component libraries help devs move away from heavy frameworks. This should reduce complexity and improve accessibility, without the vendor lock-in. 🌐 Meta has announced the React Foundation, "The New Home for React & React Native." It will be part of the Linux Foundation. Meta says it will "continue to invest in React and use it as our primary tool for building UI on the web and across many of Meta’s apps." **WTN Note:** Meta’s move to place React under the Linux Foundation is as much optics as openness. React’s growing complexity and performance issues have dented its reputation, while Vercel's influence has become more pronounced in recent years. Shifting governance helps Meta deflect criticism and maintain influence without owning the baggage. 🌐 Mozilla launches profile management: "Beginning Oct. 14, we’re rolling out profile management in Firefox so you can keep them separate and create distinct spaces — each with its own bookmarks, logins, history, extensions and themes." **WTN Note:** Chrome has had profiles for a while now, but Firefox says it won't collect "your age, gender, precise location, name of your profile, or other information Big Tech collects and profits from." 🌐 This month the Internet Archive celebrates "1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine." On Hacker News, IA's Jason Scott added that IA currently holds "between 150-200 petabytes of unique data, probably on the lowish end of that last I checked." 🌐 Andreas Kling posted on X that his Ladybird browser has passed the 90% threshold on web-platform-tests, which he says "is the arbitrary limit Apple says we must reach to be considered an eligible alternative browser engine on iOS. (+ other requirements)" ## One More Thing 🎈 I've been enjoying the tv show Murderbot (on Apple TV+), so I thought I'd try my hand at creating a meme relevant to this edition of WTN. Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform — that'd really help me out. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

I have lots of chunky web tech news for you this week, but first a quick note on a few changes around here. I want to make this newsletter more appealing to business people on the web (including techies!), so the site's description is now: > "Web Technology News (WTN) is your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI" My goal is to make this newsletter truly useful for **web professionals** — developers, entrepreneurs, investors, anyone whose livelihood depends on a healthy web ecosystem. Accordingly, I've added a "WTN take" note to many of the news items, so that this becomes more of a business and strategy briefing than just a list of interesting links. Finally, the three categories have changed to reflect what I aim to offer you: 1. Web Platform Opportunities 2. Open Social Business 3. AI x Web: Emerging Strategies Let me know if you have any feedback! Ok, onto the good stuff... ## Web Platform Opportunities 🌐 The W3C unveiled a new logo and tagline for its 31st anniversary. The tagline goes from ‘leading the web to its full potential’ to ‘**making the web work — for everyone** ’. Special shoutout to W3C's Coralie Mercier, who told me on Mastodon that she coined the new tagline, back in 2019. **WTN Note:** “Making the web work — for everyone” is a shift from visionary to pragmatic language. It reflects how standards bodies now need to show concrete, inclusive outcomes rather than lofty potential. I also like that the "for everyone" bit a) harkens back to Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for a "world wide" web, and b) nicely complements his new memoir ('This is For Everyone'). New W3C logo compared to the old one; image via Wakest on Mastodon 🌐 John Allsopp convincingly argues that we're in a transition period of web development, and that AI can help guide us to a less complex frontend world: > "The current front-end stack evolved and became increasingly complex and complicated to solve human challenges when developing for the web platform. AI changes the nature of those challenges fundamentally." **WTN Note:** AI coding tools were largely trained on frameworks like React and Next.js, at least for frontend code, but developers don’t have to stay locked into that legacy. By being prescriptive with prompts, you can steer LLMs toward a simpler, standards-based approach — a trend that is likely to become the norm in AI-assisted development. 🌐 Brave browser has announced it has over 100 million monthly active users. Founder and CEO Brendan Eich is emphasizing the "privacy-by-default" features in the browser. Brave also has an indie search engine, which it touts as "one of only three truly independent search engines in the western world, and the only one outside Big Tech." It's the default search engine for most Brave users, says the company. **WTN Note:** Vivaldi is another privacy-focused browser ("Privacy isn’t just a feature at Vivaldi, it’s a philosophy.") and it gets a lot of buzz on Mastodon. Mozilla's Firefox also emphasizes privacy ("Privacy isn’t just a setting — it’s your right."), so among the leading non-bigtech browsers, it's clear what the top priority is! For businesses, this shows a widening gap in user trust between Big Tech browsers and indie competitors — and an opportunity for startups to build privacy-first services that align with this trend. 🌐 Brian Kardell, a developer advocate at Igalia, has listed out things on the web platform that he thinks are under-invested in. One thing that stood out to me was his comments on testing infrastructure: > "The amount of things that we are incapable of actually testing is way higher than we should be comfortable with. The web actually spent the first 15 years or so of its life without any actual shared testing like web platform tests. Today, lots and lots of that infrastructure is just Google provided, so not community owned or anything." 🌐 Speaking of testing infrastructure, Mary Branscombe posted an in-depth story on The New Stack this week about how the Web Platform Tests (WPT) process actually works. I was the editor for this piece, and just before publication Mary emailed me a wonderful comparison: "Think of WPT as the engine for interoperability on the web." 🌐 404 Media reports that Apple has removed ICEBlock, an app that lets people crowdsource sightings of ICE officials, from its App Store. **WTN Note:** This wouldn't have happened if ICEBlock was a web app (a Progressive Web App — PWA), because of course the web has no App Store overlord. The takeaway: developers and businesses should consider PWAs when regulatory or political risks could lead to deplatforming on app stores. (hat-tip Alex Russell, one of the inventors of PWAs, who was incensed that "the tech press" failed to mention the web app alternative). ## Open Social Business 🦋 Bluesky released "a patent non-aggression pledge to ensure that everyone can build confidently on our work." **WTN take:** While the pledge may not materially change day-to-day dev work, it signals Bluesky’s attempt to position itself as a safe ecosystem for commercial builders. But the real friction point remains moderation policy, which continues to affect Bluesky and may impact mainstream adoption and brand safety. 🦣 Newsmast, a nonprofit media organization on the fediverse, announced it is "going all-in on apps." They will be creating white-label apps for other orgs. **WTN take:** By offering white-label apps, Newsmast is betting organizations want turnkey fediverse presence. If they emphasize open web apps over iOS/Android, this could become a viable B2B model for nonprofits and media groups seeking independence from app stores. 🦣 WordPress adds the ability to view fediverse accounts in the WordPress.com Reader, available in the .com service and also in the Jetpack plugin on self-hosted accounts. **WTN Note:** WordPress’s move is significant because it normalizes fediverse identity for millions of sites. For businesses, this is a signal that decentralized identity and social graph integration could soon be a standard expectation in CMS platforms. 🦋 Dan Abramov explains what we're all building towards: > "Open social frees the web we’re creating from somebody else’s boxes. Our profiles, likes, follows, recipes, scrobbles, and other content meaningfully belong to us." 🤮 Now this isn't _open_ social news, but it's worth noting OpenAI's launch of an horrendous-looking social media app called Sora (version 2 was released this week — invite-only, iOS-only), that enables users to create and consume AI-generated videos. Sigh. Sam Clemente summed it up best with his comment on Mastodon: > "Okay so with all that's going on around social media these days OpenAI decides the action they're going to take is...to make AI TikTok? > > That sounds like a great idea. Truly the best. 🫠" ## AI x Web: Emerging Strategies 🤖 WebMCP is a new standard from Microsoft and Google that lets devs control how AI agents interact with websites using client-side JavaScript. I interviewed Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the web platform at Microsoft Edge, for this article on The New Stack. **WTN Note:** It’s early days, but if MCP/WebMCP gains traction, businesses may need to design for agent compatibility the same way they currently design for SEO or APIs. As I've noted previously, I think it's great that web technology has become the foundation for internet/agent interactions. 🤖 OpenAI announces "agentic commerce in ChatGPT" with Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). It's a collab with Stripe, Etsy and Shopify. **WTN Note:** OpenAI’s new protocol, ACP, underscores the power imbalance: one vendor is effectively setting commerce standards for agents, even when prior art exists (see my TNS profile of Shopify's MCP implementation). For businesses, this means monitoring not just technical protocols but platform politics, as OpenAI consolidates influence over online transactions. 🤖 Netlify launches Agent Runners, which enables Netlify users to run AI coding tools from the Netlify Dashboard. The company held a 1-hour online launch this week, also announcing AI Gateway ("Use popular AI models in your code, without needing to manage API keys or external accounts"). **WTN Note:** In introducing the new tools, Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann also boasted about a huge rise in users on Netlify's platform, which he attributed to non-developers now being able to create apps using AI tools. So it totally makes sense for Netlify to have a dashboard with various AI tools to encourage more of this. It was also good to see that the web remains front and center at Netlify — see Biilmann's introductory slide below — even if "AX" (Agent Experience) has replaced DX (Developer Experience) as the new mantra. Matt Biilmann at Netlify's event this week. 🤖 Wikidata Embedding Project launched on Wednesday: "By leveraging advanced machine learning models and scalable vector databases, the project seeks to support the open-source community in developing innovative AI applications" (via TechCrunch) **WTN Note:** Wikidata embeddings could make open source knowledge bases more competitive with proprietary AI stacks. For businesses, it signals that open data remains a strategic asset in training and deploying models. ## One More Thing 🎈 On Mastodon, a user called Hedders posted this amusing comparison of the various types of social media user: > "X is where you find the people who think they run the Internet. > > Bluesky is where you find the people who think they ought to run the Internet. > > Mastodon is where you find the people who actually do run the Internet, and kind of wish they didn't. > > (WIth apologies to Yes, Minister)" In the comments, JonChevreau added: > "@hedders And Threads is for people who want the Internet to run THEM" If we can't laugh amongst ourselves... Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform — I'd love to eventually make this into a thriving community of webheads. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

I got to talk to one of the rock stars of frontend development this week. No, not DHH! I mean a young man named Evan You, whose Vite build tool is the backbone of many of the leading frontend frameworks of today: React, You's own Vue.js, SvelteKit, Astro, and others. As I discovered during our interview, this all happened within the space of five years. The version of Vite now used by other frameworks was first released in February 2021. The other thing I love about Evan's story is that there is a big web standards angle to this. When he first began exploring an alternative to Webpack, the previous default build tool for frameworks, it was 2019 and a new JavaScript standard had just become widely available in browsers and on Node.js. As I explained on The New Stack: > "The key, it turned out, was a relatively new feature of JavaScript called ES Modules (ECMAScript Modules). ES Modules were standardized in 2015, as part of the sixth edition of ECMAScript (ES6). But it took until 2018 for it to be broadly supported in browsers and 2019 before Node.js support arrived." Evan used ES Modules to create Vite. Interestingly, as an upcoming documentary by CultRepo will show (it's due for release on Oct. 9; I watched the screener), Astro creator Fred Schott also came up with an ES Modules based build tool around this time: Snowpack. In fact, Schott was first to launch. But ultimately Vite won out — and Schott himself uses it for Astro now. I don't know how old Evan You is, but he's much younger than me (and DHH). He's one of a new generation of web development heroes, who has built an incredible resource for today's web devs on top of a web standard. Onto the rest of the web tech news of the week... ## Web Platform 🌐 In not-so-positive web development news, there's been a ruckus in the Ruby community this week. According to the Techmeme summary, "Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent." For more context, check out Jared White's blog post. 🌐 Cloudflare has announced it is providing financial support to Ladybird, a relatively new indie browser. The main reason seems to be that Ladybird is _not_ Chromium-based; Cloudflare argues that the world needs more browser diversity, given that 65% of users on the Internet run a Chromium-based browser. 🌐 Cloudflare also announced it will sponsor "two cornerstone frameworks in the modern web ecosystem: Astro and TanStack." It's doing this in association with Webflow (Astro) and Netlify (TanStack). On the Astro sponsorship, I thought it was interesting that Cloudflare highlighted two web dev issues I've been writing a lot about: JavaScript overuse, and the performance problems of React. Here's how Cloudflare put it: > "We chose Astro because its core principles mirror our own. Its "zero JS by default" architecture delivers the raw performance and stellar SEO that a content-heavy site demands, ensuring our docs are fast and discoverable. Just as importantly, Astro is framework-agnostic, letting teams use components from React, Vue, or Svelte without vendor lock-in." 🌐 Developer Ibrahim Diallo makes a great comparison in response to the news that Chrome is now an AI browser: > "It's a TikTokification of the web. On TikTok, you don't choose what to watch; the algorithm serves you what it believes you should consume next. When Chrome browses for me, it will surface what it wants me to see, filtered through corporate priorities, advertising relationships, and engagement metrics." ## Open Social Web 🦋 Rose from the Bluesky team points to a TikTok for the AT Protocol, called Skylight Social: > "TikTok’s US operations are changing hands and will be retraining the algo on US-only data. No word yet on whether a new app is needed. Meanwhile, @skylight.social — the TikTok of the atmosphere — is seeing massive growth this week." Skylight Social promo 🦣 Meanwhile, Mastodon app developers are coming to grips with the new quote posts. I use Phanpy for my Mastodon browser app (it's awesome), and here is creator Chee Aun testing the new feature: Phanpy developer Chee Aun testing quote posts 🦣 btw, if you're wondering how to get started on the fediverse, check out Elena Rossini's Fediverse Starter Guide. Great resource if you're looking to escape the hell pits of X and Facebook (or you've been tricked into thinking Threads is the answer!). ✍️ Here's another useful resource, this time for aspiring bloggers / newsletter writers: No-Code Website Builders Compared: From Landing Pages to Ecommerce by Sia Karamalegos ## Web + AI As usual now, tons of Web + AI news this week... 🤖 Google's Chrome team announced a public preview of Chrome DevTools MCP. On Bluesky the team noted: > "With Chrome DevTools MCP, your AI agent can run performance traces, inspect the DOM, & perform real-time debugging of your web pages." 🤖 Google also launched the Data Commons Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server. My colleague at The New Stack, Frederic Lardinois, described it as "an MCP server to give AI agents access to its vast trove of public datasets." 🤖 Cloudflare has been busy on its 15th birthday. It announced a private beta of AI Index, "for domains on Cloudflare, a new type of web index that gives content creators the tools to make their data discoverable by AI, and gives AI builders access to better data for fair compensation." 🤖 Yet more Cloudflare news: it also announced "NET Dollar, a new U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant, secure transactions for the agentic web." It's described as being "programmable and can settle in near real-time across the global market." Cloudflare Net Dollar front page 🤖 There are many AI coding tools out there now, but when this pitch came into my inbox at The New Stack, I couldn't resist: what if the former head of TikTok's algorithms created one of these tools? My interview with Verdent CEO Zhijie Chen showed that he wants to change the game in AI coding too, just as he did with social media algorithms: > “What we need is not ‘human tools translated for AI,’ but purpose-built, AI-native infrastructure designed for hyper-speed software creation and iteration.” 🤖 Notion, the trendy note-taking app, has announced Notion 3.0 — "the biggest evolution of Notion yet, with Notion AI Agents at the center." The startup urges its users to "think of your Agent as a Notion power user that can handle entire workflows and access all the information you can." Note: there's a Hacker News thread about security concerns. 🤖 Matt Mullenweg lists MCP implementations in the WordPress ecosystem. 🤖 CMS expert Deane Barker wrestles with a question: "how much power should AI have over your CMS repository?" ## One More Thing 🎈 Remember when writing personal journals was how we used blogging tools in the early 2000s? My alt Mastodon a/c, Classic Web (also available on Bluesky, via Bridgy Fed), is currently showcasing some early blogs from 2000-2005. So if you're looking for design or blogging inspiration, do check it out. A blog called sikander.org on July 31, 2003 Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform — I'd love to eventually make this into a thriving community of webheads. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

This week, we may have witnessed the beginning of the end for the traditional web browser. On Thursday, Google announced a raft of new AI features in Chrome, with further “agentic capabilities” to be added in the coming months. As I noted in my report on The New Stack, essentially Chrome is now an "AI browser." I pointed out that other browsers have already turned themselves into AI browsers — Microsoft Edge most directly, but Firefox is also moving in this direction. Also, there are new AI-centric browsers like Perplexity's Comet and The Browser Company's Dia (recently acquired by Atlassian). OpenAI is almost certainly going to launch a full browser soon — they've hired two of Chrome's founding engineers, Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher. So what does all this mean? Other than yet more encroachment of AI into the web products we use every day, I think Chrome's new AI features signal the end of the browser as we know it — 35 years after Tim Berners-Lee's first browser (a read/write one!) and over 30 years after Mosaic and then Netscape emerged. This new AI version of Chrome is, in Google's own words, "fundamentally changing the nature of browsing." Of course, Google is putting a positive spin on it. According to Google Chrome GM Parisa Tabriz: > “The browser is no longer just a window to the web; it’s an intelligent partner that learns and adapts to your needs.” The new Chrome may have gained machine "intelligence," but I'd argue we're losing something fundamentally human in the daily web experience. As I put it in my TNS post: > "One has to wonder if “browser” is even the right word for what products like Chrome and Edge are evolving into. We are moving further away from curiosity-driven exploration of the web — the modern browser is becoming an automaton, narrowing what we can discover and reducing the serendipity." Let's get to the week's web technology news... ## Web Platform 🌐 Speaking of browsers, the Apple WebKit team has a blog post outlining new features in Safari 26.0. One of them is that now "every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS." The team clarified later in the post: "By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app." Of course, it would be even better if users got to choose _which_ browser opened their web app — but alas, it still has to be Safari. 🌐 This week the W3C WebDX Community Group, which is "working to improve developer experience with projects like Baseline," held an AMA on Reddit. Unfortunately they didn't get many questions, but there was this comment about AI by Rick Viscomi, Google Chrome DevRel: > "Ultimately, there's a huge potential to help developers make better decisions about adopting more modern web features, safely. I'm optimistic about AI playing a major role in that, but it's not a requirement." ## Open Social Web 🦣 Quote posts, a.k.a. quooting, has arrived on Mastodon. Quoth founder Eugen Rochko: > "If you’re on mastodon.social (or another server running nightly builds) you can begin quoting posts in your posts (quooting?) starting today. Remember, you control whether you can be quoted, and can always retract your post from a specific quote. And you can quote me on that!" 🦣 Also this week, Mastodon announced "the availability of paid hosting, moderation, and support services for organisations seeking to operate their own Mastodon servers." I love this as a monetisation path for Mastodon _and_ a way to encourage orgs to join the fediverse. 🦋 Bryan Newbold, a protocol engineer at Bluesky, announced that the company is "putting together an independent+neutral organization to house the DID PLC system, includes the directory service." The document he linked to states it will be based in Switzerland. This is a promising move from Bluesky, if only because it makes the protocol a bit less corporate. We'll have to wait and see what the org actually does, though, and who will be leading it. 🦋 I mentioned Leaflet recently; a new kind of blogging tool for the AT Protocol platform. The developer Brendan is pondering some fun-sounding features: > "STATUS: thinking about what to build next in Leaflet > > GOAL: fun, simple, composable building blocks that can enable lots of cool social experiments > > IDEAS: @-mentions, notifications, post references, tags, collections, comment permissions, $ block…" ## Web + AI 🤖 Tarek Ziadé, a machine learning engineer at Mozilla, wrote a personal blog post entitled My Vision for AI and the Web. For AI in the browser, he advocates for "powerful hybrid-based features, but always with deep care for security and privacy." He gives an example: > "...we have started adding local AI features in Firefox that respect privacy by design. For example, the PDF.js alt text generator and the Smart Tab feature both run on small models that we trained, which are downloaded to your device and executed locally. Your data never leaves your machine." 🤖 Web frameworks are adopting AI too; Angular has just announced the **Web Codegen Scorer** , a code quality tool for "vibe coders" and other AI-assisted devs. As the Angular blog explained: > "Angular of the future is a framework for builders across the spectrum — it’s for people who want to create apps by primarily using AI-powered tools (including vibe coding) as well as experienced developers who want to have a coding agent work as a partner in the development of tools. No matter the tool, we want Angular to fit into your story and make sure that LLMs produce excellent code quality for your Angular applications." Web Codegen Scorer in action. 🤖 Vercel's vibe coding report confirms that "most vibe coders aren’t developers at all." According to Vercel, which runs a vibe coding product called v0, about "63% of users exploring vibe tools are non-developers, using tools like v0 or Cursor to streamline tasks and create custom solutions to their problems." 🤖 Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, says that because of AI we are all devs now: > "For those who already call themselves web developers, this is your chance at rebirth. Evolve into designers of systems, products, and experience—or risk irrelevance. > > For those who were never allowed in: this is your invitation. The web is now open to you. > > You are now a developer." 🤖 On the other side of the coin, Microsoft's Patrick Brosset warns that AI coding tools "aren't silver bullets": > "We still need to be responsible developers and ensure the experiences we deliver are good, accessible, run fast, are secure, private, that the code adheres to our style guide and best practices, is maintainable and so on. So, like, actually do the work." ## One More Thing 🎈 25 years ago, the RSS Format Wars were just kicking off. I wrote about it this week on my internet history website, Cybercultural. But for my 'one more thing' here on WTN, I want to highlight some lovely web community action from 2000. The image below is from Anita Rowland's weblog that year, describing a meetup with fellow Seattle bloggers. It's a reminder that the web is all about human connection — and we should never forget that. Anita Rowland blog post from February 2000. Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform — the more webheads we have here, the better. Maybe even a community will form? You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

This week I have been looking closely at how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been moving to integrate AI into the web platform. In my analysis for The New Stack, I looked at a W3C group called the _AI Agent Protocol Community Group_ , whose co-chairs (both from China) spoke recently at a W3C event in Hangzhou called “WebEvolve 2025 Annual Event.” While this is all early stage, I found it interesting that these W3C members see the "Agentic Web" (their term) as the successor to the Semantic Web, which of course largely failed to take off. Gaowei Chang, co-chair of the W3C AI Agent Protocol Community Group, talking about the Agentic Web at WebEvolve in China last week. I also brought into the discussion current AI agent developments from Tim Berners-Lee's Inrupt, and the three MCP-related open source projects I've been reporting on recently: MCP-UI, NLWeb and WebMCP. The third one, WebMCP, is a new project I mentioned in WTN #4; I am currently organizing an interview with Microsoft about it. So MCP is driving a lot of 'agentic web' action currently, but TBL's Solid-based project — including his work on an AI personal assistant called "Charlie" — brings a different, more W3C-based, flavor. As I concluded in my TNS post, the Agentic Web is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. (Apologies to William Gibson and Tim O'Reilly!) ## Web Platform 🌐 Speaking of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, his memoir, This Is For Everyone, was published this week. I'd pre-ordered a signed copy and when it arrived on Wednesday, I was stunned to discover that my name is in the book! As I noted on social media, he did misspell it, but never mind...I'm just very happy and honoured to be mentioned. The read-write web lives on! 🌐 Discussion about the United States vs. Google antitrust trial continued this week, with many commentators criticizing the judge for not penalizing Google more for its search monopoly. Some have suggested that the judge should've ordered Chrome and Android to be spun out into non-profits. Meanwhile, John Newman, a professor at the University of Memphis School of Law, seemed more concerned about the massive payments Google makes to Apple and Mozilla to be their default search engine. Newman wrote on The Sling: > "A remedy order “must seek” to accomplish multiple goals, one of which is ensuring “that there remain no practices likely to result in monopolization in the future.” That instruction should have prompted, at minimum, a ban on all of Google’s current illegal payment deals." 🌐 Meanwhile, there is another Google antitrust trial about to go to the "remedies" phase — this one regarding Google's adtech. Jason Kint spotted an interesting admission from Google in its defense papers: "The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline..." As others noted, this contradicts recent comments by Google execs that "the web is thriving." via Jason Kint on X Casey Newton later reported that Google intends to "re-file a legal brief" to clarify "that they were only talking about open-web display advertising." Hmm, I think they were right the first time! 🌐 W3C: The CSS Working Group has published CSS Snapshot 2025 as a Group Note. ## Open Social Web 🦣 Emelia Smith, a fediverse developer, published a "statement on discourse about ActivityPub and AT Protocol," imploring both dev communities to play nicely together. Wouldn't you know it, the statement led to heated discussions in the comments...well, this is social media after all. Anyway, I agree 100% with the following sentiment: > "There does not have to be a “winning” protocol. We do not build a better open social web for everyone by fighting and arguing about protocol superiority. That is not how we achieve a better open social web. Instead, we must work together, cross-pollinate and share ideas, and participate within each other's communities with respect and mutual understanding. Arguing between us only emboldens those that seek to derail and destroy efforts to build an open social web." 🦋 I also liked Laurens Hof's post on why he ultimately just wants an "ethical internet" and thus supports both protocols: > "I’m not interested in ‘decentralisation’ in itself as a goal. I’m interesting in building an ethical internet, where the tools we use as a society for sense-making are not captured by oligarchs." 🌉 Speaking of playing nice together...Bridgy Fed has introduced a notifications feature, so that when unbridged users interact with your bridged Mastodon or Bluesky account, you'll get a DM (why DM? To respect user privacy). A Bridgy Fed notification I received in my Classic Web Mastodon account, which is bridged to Bluesky, telling me that someone on Bluesky interacted with a post. 📰 Techmeme, the tech news aggregator, turned 20 this week. I was one of its beta testers back in 2005 and wrote one of the first reviews; I also met and befriended the founder, Gabe Rivera, at the end of September 2005, on my first trip to Silicon Valley. But back to 2025...Fred Vogelstein spoke to Rivera on its 20th anniversary: > Techmeme looks and works exactly the same way as it always has. And it has never been more popular. Traffic is up 25 percent this year, likely driven by the explosion of interest in AI... ## Web + AI 🤖 Worrying new statistics from Tollbit: human visitors to websites declined nearly 10% from Q1 to Q2 this year. In the first quarter, 1 in 200 visitors was AI; in the second quarter, it was 1 in 50. (via Brian Morrissey) 🤖 OpenAI has added full support for MCP tools in ChatGPT. "It's powerful but dangerous, and is intended for developers who understand how to safely configure and test connectors," states the documentation. 🤖 Related: ChatGPT can now integrate with Vercel MCP. 🤖 Anthropic releases Web fetch tool, which "allows Claude to retrieve full content from specified web pages and PDF documents."; also see these safety tips from Simon Willison. 🤖 Microsoft has released MCP Interviewer, "as an open-source CLI tool (opens in new tab), so server developers can automatically evaluate their MCP servers with agent usability in mind, and users can validate new servers." 🤖 Ars Technica on RSL — Really Simple Licensing — which "makes it easier for creators to get paid for AI scraping." Clearly inspired by RSS, supporting companies include Reddit, Yahoo! and O'Reilly Media. Here's more information about the people behind it: > "The standard was created by the RSL Collective, which was founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president of products and co-creator of the RSS standard, which made it easy to syndicate content across the web." ## One More Thing 🪟 I find Apple's new "Liquid Glass" UI for iOS to be very underwhelming — I can't help but think Steve Jobs would never have let this slide. But it seems Apple designers (and the rest of us) will just have to live with it. So, with tongue in cheek, Thomas Günther has some advice for website designers. Thanks for reading **Web Technology News** (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. I'm still in the early phase of this project, so please share the newsletter on your favorite social media platform — the more webheads we have here, the better. You can get the full content of WTN via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. You can also follow WTN on social media: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. Until next week, keep on blogging!

Welcome to Web Technology News (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. This week I look at some of the moves Cloudflare has been making to help web publishers and content creators deal with AI companies that "leverage" (to put it politely) open web content. I spoke to a Cloudflare exec for a reported story on The New Stack, and I was somewhat surprised to learn the company is also heavily _pushing_ AI technology onto its customers — specifically this week, in the article I wrote, a new NLWeb feature (NLWeb is Microsoft's brand new open protocol for integrating AI chat into your website). Now, I like the sound of NLWeb and — as a Cloudflare user myself — I intend to try it out on my internet history website, Cybercultural. I do find it interesting that Cloudflare is attempting to position itself as both an AI police force and as an AI booster (at least in its own products). I think that's clever, because I too have mixed feelings about AI, as I described last week. AI is a threat to web publishers, but it's also an intriguing technology when matched up with the web platform. Cloudflare understands that a delicate balance is required. Let's get to the web tech news... ## Web Platform 🌐 The big news this week was Google avoiding the harshest penalties in a US government monopoly case against them. Reports the New York Times (this is a gift link, so anyone can open it to read the full article): > "Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday." I'm no legal expert, but I am glad Google wasn't forced to sell Chrome. By and large, Google has been a good steward of web technology innovation over the years, and it would've felt unfair to strip them of a groundbreaking web product they invented and built. Also, I would much rather Google owned Chrome than the likes of OpenAI or Perplexity! All that said, I continue to feel queezy about the massive power Google has in the web search market — clickthroughs from Google search results continue to decrease in the AI Overview era. 🌐 If you've been following the drama around XSLT, you'll want to read my TNS colleague Mary Branscombe's in-depth report on it. As well as noting that the original request to remove XSLT from the web platform came from Firefox, not Google, Mary spoke to a number of experts about the history of XSLT, its implications for the web over the years, and where this may net out. It's a great read, although you'll need to block off a bit of time as it's over 5,000 words. (disclosure: I edited this piece) Although you should read the whole post, I do want to call attention to one part. Mary rightly focuses on XLST for much of the article, but near the end she raises the bigger issue of web governance: > "...it’s also impossible to ignore the outsized impact that Google funding so much of it [i.e. the web platform], directly or indirectly, has on choices all the browsers make about prioritizing features — especially the ones that don’t fit into current development fashion and hype, whether that’s XSLT or SVG or MathML." 🌐 Meanwhile, Microsoft browser engineer Alex Russell continues his series on browser competition in typical no-punches-pulled style: > "Apple has done violence to the founding ethos of internet and web standards development. Instead of honourably withdrawing from those groups, Apple has maintained a charade of engagement, and gaslights other participants while actively sabotaging the principle of voluntary adoption that internet standards are predicated on." 🌐 Possibly related, there's a long discussion thread on Mastodon about browsers and web standards, introduced by Jen Simmons, a Web evangelist at Apple. She ran a poll that asked (in summary): > "Should [a certain] technology be considered A Web Standard — when 1 or 2 browsers implement & ship, while 1 or 2 browsers Formally Object and say no?" 12% responded yes, it's a web standard; 88% said no. 🌐 ‪In lighter news, Thomas Steiner — who works on the Chrome team — just wants to register his new washing machine: "Don't make me talk to people! They could still offer to register the machine by telephone as an alternative, but in 2025, the default for such things should just be the Web." 💯 ## Open Social Web 🦋 This week I came across Leaflet, described as "a social publishing platform for blogs / newsletters — like Substack, but more open, and frankly just nicer to use." It's being built on the AT Protocol, the same protocol powering Bluesky. One to watch. (hat-tip Boris Mann) 🧵 Meta's Threads has a new leader: Connor Hayes. In an introductory thread, Hayes said he wanted to make Threads "the most culturally relevant place for sharing perspectives and ideas on the internet." What wasn't mentioned in his thread? The fediverse, which Threads is supposedly a part of. 🤔 🦣 In actual fediverse news, WordPress has updated its ActivityPub plugin. Fairly minor updates, but as Jeff Sikes pointed out, "quite intriguing to see tooling to monitor the progress of a self destruct request." (I've had issues with deleting content via a WP AP plugin before, although I will say the main developer, Matthias Pfefferle, has always been incredibly helpful.) 🚶 Not news, but this week I discovered the concept of "internet walks", explained here by Kristoffer Tjalve in Lullaby Magazine: > "These internet walks invite people to start exploring again, which in the 90s was a real profession. You'd employ a professional surfer. Before you had search engines, you had directories and people who tried to find as many links as possible and group them. That's why you have all these terms like Safari and Netscape, inviting people to explore, though we don’t use the same words now. It feels more gated." See also: Taking an Internet Walk, by Spencer Chang & Kristoffer Tjalve. ## Web + AI 🤖 This week for The New Stack, I talked to a Cloudflare VP about its implementation of NLWeb, Microsoft's new open protocol for AI chat in websites. I also got an update on the private beta of Cloudflare's "pay-per-crawl" project, which aims to get AI companies to pay up for using the content of web publishers. Elsewhere, Matthew Prince (CEO of Cloudflare) talked to Fred Vogelstein about building a wider scale marketplace for content: > "And so you could imagine a world in which you actually have each LLM company getting kind of a preview of content, having an algorithm score how valuable it is and then tell the writer how much he’ll get for it. And the payment isn’t based on how many words you write, just by how much you are actually adding to the knowledge base." Prince noted that he wants to get Google onside for this idea, because that will prompt (no pun intended) the likes of OpenAI to get on board too. 🤞 🤖 CNBC: Atlassian has agreed to buy The Browser Co., which is behind the Arc and Dia web browsers. CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes seemed to suggest he wanted to build a new type of enterprise-focused work browser: > "Whatever it is that you’re actually doing in your browser is not particularly well served by a browser that was built in the name to browse. It’s not built to work, it’s not built to act, it’s not built to do." Note: I profiled Dia when it launched as an invite-only beta in June. I was impressed with its ability to interrogate the content of a web page, but it also didn't blow my socks off. So we'll see what Atlassian builds with it. 🤖 Sarah Perez: WordPress launches an "experimental" new AI vibe coding tool for creating Gutenberg blocks, called Telex. 🤖 Food for thought from Scott Rosenberg, writing about the web's bot-versus-bot future: "Service providers and large organizations are already preparing to roll out two different versions of each website or app they support: one for people and the other for AI agents and bots." ## One More Thing 🎈 I really liked this blog post by Sia Karamalegos, about "how to grow your tech career by engaging and contributing to tech communities through writing, speaking, open source, and more." Sia organizes Eleventy community meetups on Zoom, which I've popped into a few times. I'm usually having dinner when they happen, due to my time zone, so I lurk rather than participate! But I learn a lot and really appreciate Sia bringing the 11ty community together like this. Web communities are more important than ever in this era of bigco dominance. Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. Until next week, keep on blogging!

I've been pondering what the fate of the Web will be as we continue to progress into the AI era... (For this issue of Web Technology News (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web, I'm introducing a blog-like 'preamble' at the start. WTN is primarily a list of curated links at this point, but as Scott Rosenberg put it in an influential Salon article in May 1999, a weblog is "a window onto the mind and daily life of its creator." So I'm adding more of a window into my mind, specifically about the technology that has defined my career: the web.) ...so yes, I've been wondering if the web is going to survive the AI onslaught — to put it more plainly. On the technology side, I think the web will continue to be the default _open_ platform for internet technology. You only need to look at the recent development of MCP-UI — which is bringing web UIs to AI agents — to see that the web will continue to power AI interfaces (MCP-UI will, in time, also add mobile platform hooks — but, crucially, it started with web). Also in my report on GPT-5 and its coding abilities, I noted that GPT-5 is very much focusing on web technologies and frameworks; I have a post coming soon that gets into GPT-5's relationship to frontend development more. I've also been encouraged to see the experiments with AI that browser engineers like Paul Kinlan have been doing. So I'm not worried about the fate of web technology in the AI era. The fate of web content, though? Well, that's a different story. I worry that Google in particular, as a long-time web advocate, is starting to forget that the web is a human-powered network — and that it should remain that way. We know that co-founder and ex-CEO Larry Page has wanted Google to be AI-driven from as far back as 1999. So Google's move into AI Overviews and "AI Mode" makes sense, at least as a way to fulfil Page's dream. But what happens when Google's AI is giving out all the answers — what motivation will people like me have to contribute content to the web? Online advertising has already all but disappeared as a revenue source for bloggers and newsletter writers, and going forward there will be fewer and fewer incentives for web users to pay for content when AI will give it to them for free (even though it is based on _human-created_ content that LLMs scraped off the web). I don't have the answers to these thorny issues, but it's something I am tracking with a large dollop of concern. Ok, let's check out the web tech news from this week. ## Web Platform * The “Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?” debate continues. Eric Meyer, developer advocate at Igalia, weighed in with a post that unequivocally states his view in the headline: No, Google Did Not Unilaterally Decide to Kill XSLT. He wrote that the decision whether or not to remove XSLT is far from certain: "It’s a first step in a multi-step evaluation process that can take years to complete, and whose outcome is not predetermined." * Adam Argyle has released gradient.style out of beta, as an open source project. It offers multiple background editing. gradient.style * A new Python documentary dropped this week. One to watch across a couple of lunchbreaks. * Typepad's current owner, a company called Newfold Digital, will be shutting down the service on September 30th. * WordPress developer Matze on why React in the WordPress admin interface is a bad idea. He quotes fellow dev Glenton Samuals: > "A full React rewrite may look cutting-edge, but it threatens the broad community, the ecosystem, and WordPress’s future sustainability. Instead, modernizing via PHP + Interactivity API + modern CSS (including View Transitions) preserves backward compatibility, performance, and accessibility while delivering a polished, modern admin experience." * Meta introduces a new REST API framework, adding that "By 2026, REST will become the default for all new APIs across Meta." ## Open Social Web * Bounce, a migration tool for the open social web, has officially launched. As Sarah Perez reports: > "The cross-protocol migration tool offers a service that allows users of open social networks like Bluesky and Mastodon to move their follow graphs between their accounts, even though the networks rely on different underlying protocols." * The science community is flocking to Bluesky, reports Ars Technica: > "...while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice." * Meanwhile, Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser explains how Blacksky "grew to millions of users without spending a dollar." Writes Rudy: > "Blacksky Algorithms’ work also functions as memory work — preserving the shared narratives and collective decision-making of the largest Black community on the decentralized web." * Bluesky has decided to drop out of the Mississippi market. Ernie Smith writes that "while understandable, is a clear sign that we cannot take our digital access for granted." * Emelia on Mastodon points out that the fediverse is not above the law either: "...we are not above the laws in which we operate, just because we're the fediverse. If someone wants to provide a service to residents in the UK, then yeah, you'd need to follow OSA for those users, or in other jurisdictions' age verification or content laws." * Threads has released a "text attachment" feature that allows users to add a long glob of text to their microblogging posts. Clearly it's copying X/Twitter, but as Anuj Ahooja rightly warns, don't fall for it: > "This is just blogging, but worse. Platform-locked (no RSS, email, etc.) and drops open social web compatibility (even though receiving platforms can and do support long-form already). > FYI: Meta has tried long-form multiple times and shut down all of those projects. If you want to create long-form content, use real publishing products that provide versatile distribution tools." * Quick promo for my Cybercultural post this week, which explores how blogs and RSS began in 1999. If you're an open web fan, I think you'll like it! ## Web + AI * Patrick Brosset, a product manager on the Edge team at Microsoft, introduces WebMCP: "a proposal to let you, web developers, control how AI agents interact with your web pages." The Edge and Google teams have been working on this together and are looking for feedback. The project's GitHub page has a more specific description: > "We propose a new JavaScript interface that allows web developers to expose their web application functionality as "tools" - JavaScript functions with natural language descriptions and structured schemas that can be invoked by AI agents, browser assistants, and assistive technologies." * Speaking of MCP, in my latest post on The New Stack about MCP-UI — an emerging protocol to insert web UIs into AI agents — I talked to two Shopify engineers about how they used MCP-UI to add web components to AI agents, as part of its "agentic commerce" rollout. One of the Shopify engineers, Bret Little, admitted that "personally, I don’t think I’ve gotten to the point where I trust an agent to go buy stuff for me.” But, he added, “I think that is an amazing goal to shoot for, where we get to a point where people can trust agents to do important purchases for them. And I think Shopify is definitely trying to push in that direction.” * Brave Browser, the browser company run by JavaScript's inventor Brendan Eich, has started "a series about security and privacy challenges in agentic browsers." Its first post focuses on Perplexity's Comet browser: > "The vulnerability we’re discussing in this post lies in how Comet processes webpage content: when users ask it to “Summarize this webpage,” Comet feeds a part of the webpage directly to its LLM without distinguishing between the user’s instructions and untrusted content from the webpage. This allows attackers to embed indirect prompt injection payloads that the AI will execute as commands." * Cloudflare has announced it is combining an open standard (NLWeb) with its own infrastructure (AutoRAG) to "make your website conversational for people and agents." I have just had an interview with Cloudflare about this news, so expect a post on The New Stack next week about it. * GitHub announced that "Copilot coding agent, our autonomous background agent, now supports AGENTS.md custom instructions." ## One More Thing This cartoon by Jen Sorensen captures the existential dread of the web tech community currently. Obviously, webheads the world over are working to make sure this bleak scenario doesn't happen... Cartoon by Jen Sorensen Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. Until next week, keep on blogging!

Welcome to Web Technology News (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. As usual, I'm using the following three categories: 1. Web platform 2. Open social web 3. Web + AI ## Web Platform "Should we remove XSLT from the web platform?" That question was asked by Google engineer Mason Freed on the WHATWG GitHub account a few weeks ago. "Its role within the web browser has been largely superseded by JavaScript-based technologies such as JSON+React," explained Freed, adding that it's now a big security risk in browsers. Judging by the comments, one of the primary uses of XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is for "displaying RSS feeds pleasantly." Another commenter added that "XSLT is extensively used by podcast hosting companies to beautify their raw feeds." The discussion around this got heated, so the thread was locked to non-collaborators. A second thread _also_ got locked. In other news, Mozilla has launched a new front end for MDN: "We've intentionally targeted Baseline "Widely available" features when deciding on which ones to use, and polyfilling or progressively enhancing when using anything Baseline "Newly available"." Staying with Mozilla, its newly hired Web Dev Relations Lead, Jake Archibald, took to Mastodon to promote Firefox v142. I like the video explanations. > Post by @jaffathecake@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Let's get crazy now... I stumbled upon a couple of 'out there' ideas this week. Hyperclay is a new product pitching itself as "Google Docs for interactive code." The site further explains: > "What if web apps were as simple to edit as documents? Hyperclay makes it possible: UI, logic, and data live in one self-modifying HTML file." There's an excellent discussion about this on Hacker News. Hyperclay's developer, panphora, has also created a Markdown editor called Overtype. I liked this web dev head-mash by Chris Shank: "This may look like my personal website, but it's not served via a traditional web server. Rather it's served from a service worker that proxies all network requests to a locally cloned git repository (stored in-browser)!" Chris Shank's service worker webpage. ## Open Social Web It's great to see Bluesky starting to have alternative servers (i.e. ones not owned and run by the Bluesky company). As reported by Laurens Hof in his Connected Places blog: > "Blacksky is taking further steps towards their own community platform within the ATmosphere, and have started inviting community members on their own Blacksky PDS servers. Blacksky has their own PDS migration tooling, Tektike, to help users transfer their account to a new PDS." On the fedi side of the open social pond, Sean Tilley has written a roundup of the recent FediCon event in Canada. I was pleased to see this note from Sean: > "...there's some legitimately interesting developments happening with paying server admins, artists, and developers. I've written a bit about what Bandwagon and CrowdBucks are doing, and hopeful some collaboration can emerge between projects." CrowdBucks is fairly new to me, but the following thread told me that Charles Iliya Krempeaux — a.k.a. reiver — is behind it (Charles also organized FediCon and is an active fediverse developer). > Post by @crowdbucks@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Another cool-sounding open web app I came across this week: > Post by @pkirn@mastodon.social View on Mastodon In Mastodon news, quote-posts are officially coming: > Post by @renchap@oisaur.com View on Mastodon Finally in this section, you might be interested in my blog post this week outlining my experiences with Ghost, Substack, Eleventy and WordPress. I focus in particular on Ghost's federation (I use Ghost to publish this newsletter). ## Web + AI Vercel is proposing a convention to include instructions to an LLM directly in HTML responses as <script type="text/llms.txt">. But standards be damned...in classic 'Marc Andreessen and the <img> tag' fashion, Vercel encourages its users to just go ahead and do it anyway: "[it] doesn't need to be a formal standard. You can just start using it now." For my post on The New Stack this week, I interviewed the two creators of MCP-UI, an open source project that creates React or web components for agents. The technology is just 3 months old, but is already being used by Shopify and others. One of the founders, Ido Salomon, explained to me why it's using the HTML <iframe> element to ferry UI components to agents: > "I think MCP-UI, at its core, is fairly simple. It basically takes the building blocks of MCP [the parent protocol] — MCP has a way to respond not just with text, but with an embedded resource that can be anything. So the idea was, how do I take something like an embedded resource, get some consensus around when this embedded resource contains something. Then the host — you know, ChatGPT, whatever — can render it. And how does it run basically arbitrary code, that is unsafe, without harming the users. Iframe is kind of the only way to do that. And sandbox iframe in particular gives you an extra edge." Web UIs in agents — it's a trend to watch. I have another post coming up early next week about MCP-UI, based on an interview with two Shopify engineers. Meanwhile, Paul Kinlan from Google is calling for experimentation with hyperlinks in the AI age: > "LLMs also offer the practical tools to finally realize the promise of hypertext on the web itself. They are the enabling technology that can upgrade the humble <a> tag and make it truly “hyper.”" Launched this week: Tidewave Web for Rails and Phoenix, "a coding agent that runs directly in the browser alongside your web application, in your own development environment, with full page and code context." (via Hacker News) ## One More Thing What's the point of vibe coding if... > Post by @PastaThief@indiepocalypse.social View on Mastodon Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. Until next week, keep on surfing!

## Ghost vs. Substack, Eleventy vs. WordPress: My Experiences https://ricmac.org/2025/08/21/ghost-substack-eleventy-wordpress/

Welcome to Web Technology News (WTN), my weekly newsletter tracking what's next on the web. Lots of web platform goodies this week, plus discussions about GitHub alternatives on the Open Social Web, and GPT-5 drama in the Web + AI department. ## Web Platform Let's start with something positive. Loved this post by Deane Barker: The Joy of Mixing Custom Elements, Web Components, and Markdown. I use Markdown to publish my Eleventy website, Cybercultural. While I can't say that I find Markdown as intuitive as HTML (simply because I've been using HTML much longer!), I appreciated Deane's reminder of this quote from Markdown creator John Gruber: > "For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself." In the rest of the post, Deane explains how you can also add Custom Elements (a.k.a. Web Components) to your Markdown files. As Deane nicely puts it: > "...Custom Elements and Markdown sort of operate on the same principle from the perspective of the writer: they replace simpler stuff with more complex stuff." Now let's switch to a different type of component... Ex-Vercel VP Lee Robinson writes on the difficulties of rolling out React Server Components, which many view as a way for Vercel to get more devs onto Next.js: "...it took many years before there was a community-led effort to get RSC in other places besides Next.js, in a production-like way." (Incidentally, Robinson recently joined the AI startup Cursor, "to teach the future of coding!") Speaking of complex components, Google's Una Kravets "recaps the top highlights for CSS and Web UI shared at our events this year." Once again, JavaScript frameworks are in the firing line: > "You often have to rely on JavaScript frameworks, complex CSS tricks, and mountains of custom code to build components that feel like they should be simpler." It _should_ all come down to web performance, but currently "developer experience" seems to be the top priority in web development. However, Blaine O'Brien thinks performance might be starting to matter again (via Hacker News): > "The front-end community is slowly falling out of love with React, and even out of love with SPAs in general. Static site generators like Astro and Eleventy are getting a lot of attention because they're simple and good enough for what most people need. Those sticking with SPAs can have much better performance by using signals. I think the long, painful road of neglecting performance will eventually come to an end." Speaking of web performance... Alex Russell on how "specific companies have gummed up the works in web standards" (as he put it on Mastodon): > "It's no exaggeration to say that it is _anti-web_ to constrain which standards vendors can implement within their browsers, and implementation coercion is antithetical to the good functioning of SDOs [Standards Development Organisations] and the broader web ecosystem." Piccalilli comments on the State of CSS 2025 results: "I like seeing some really healthy usage of the new stuff. Especially `:has()`!" "What are your favorite new CSS features that you started using this year?" A few more web platform links: * Den Odell on why we keep reinventing CSS: "..._most of our styling pain doesn’t come from CSS itself_. It comes from trying to shoehorn CSS into frontend architectures that weren’t designed to support it." (Good discussion in Hacker News, too) * Un-Sass’ing my CSS by Stuart Robson. * Joe Brockmeier has discovered an "Emacs-like web browser." ## Open Social Web With the latest GitHub CEO resigning, people are talking about better, more open, models going forward, like ForgeFed: > "What made GH so popular, we should ask? Well, a ton of features and services on top of #git and a huge platform that makes exploring millions of #FOSS projects easy, are among the reasons I suppose. > > The #ActivityPub @forgefed project funded by #NGI0 via @nlnet is creating open standards to provide the same, _native_ to the #fediverse!" There's a discussion on Hacker News about ForgeFed. And for fedi-friendly developers considering their options, Terence Eden has a good discussion thread. I enjoyed this thought-provoking post from Jaz Michael-King about what "the fediverse" means. Hint: it's not a protocol, nor is it a public square. > "Most people want their own space, shaped by their needs and their values. Who you follow and who you block shapes your conversations, your values, your tone – that is your fediverse. **The fediverse is less like a single public square and more like a city full of homes, gardens, and community halls.** You can visit others, invite them over, or keep your doors shut. The foundation is choice – and that choice belongs to the people." (emphasis mine) ## Web + AI GPT-5 reaction amongst developers over the past week has been...mixed. In fact, one of the developers OpenAI featured on its launch-day promotions (Theo Browne) has done a complete 180 — he now says he was wrong about GPT-5! Questions of coding quality aside, GPT-5 raises some interesting longer term questions for web developers: **if AI can build things just using web standards, will that lead to less reliance on React and other JavaScript frameworks?** I explored this in an article on The New Stack this week. John Allsopp from Web Directions is thinking along the same lines and promises an in-depth analysis soon: > "...the rise of frameworks like React, Next.js, Vue, and Angular wasn’t simply about providing capabilities the platform lacked. It was about developer experience. However, as I’ll argue in depth in an upcoming piece, generative AI is becoming the developer experience now." Related, the browser vendors are integrating AI more and more into their products. Here's Google's Domenic Denicola (link via Theresa O’Connor): > "For the last year, I’ve been working as part of the Chrome built-in AI team on a set of APIs to bring various AI models to the web browser." But let's not forget about the underlying principles of the web. For instance, Léonie Watson, a director at TetraLogical and also Co-Chair on the W3C Board of Directors, ponders how accessibility will work on the agentic web. Other news that caught my eye in Web + AI this week: * Ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal launches Parallel Web Systems to build infrastructure for AI agents to search the web. According to Agrawal: "There’ll be more agents on the internet than there are humans around. You will probably deploy 50 agents on your behalf to be on the internet. And I think that’s going to happen soon, like next year." (via Techmeme) * Vercel rolled out a new version of its v0 AI-driven offering, changing the name from .dev to .app to reflect its new target audience: end users. (The New Stack) ## One More Thing The old way is the best way; a comic by Alvaro Montoro: Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. Until next Friday, keep on surfing! (still looking for feedback on a catchphrase for this newsletter 😄)

Welcome to the first issue of Web Technology News (WTN), a newsletter I started this week to track what's next on the web. It will be a weekly newsletter, which I'll send out every Friday. For more information about this project, see my announcement post. The format will evolve over time, but whenever I start on a new platform (Ghost CMS, in this case) I tend to begin with links + light commentary. So I will adopt that format here, across the following 3 categories: 1. **Web platform** ; focusing on the pragmatic side of building on the web (i.e. don't expect news about JavaScript framework updates). 2. **Open social web** ; news from the wonderful world of the fediverse, AT Protocol, and other emerging web standards for social networking. 3. **Web + AI** ; love or hate AI, you can't deny it's impacting web technology. I find this fascinating and so I'll be tracking the intersection of AI and the web here. Let's get to it. ## Web Platform Not a lot of non-AI web news this week (see below for all the AI stuff). But there was _one_ special anniversary to celebrate... Wednesday was the 34th anniversary of the release of the World Wide Web. > Post by @w3c@w3c.social View on Mastodon Even if AI dominates the news these days, many people continue to make cool things on the base web platform. Look no further than HTML Day, which happened last Saturday, August 2. See the highlights on Are.na. > <a> <big> thank <u> to all the organizers and everyone that attended <html> day 2❇️25 💚we felt your energy! > > — html energy (@htmlenergy.bsky.social) 2025-08-03T13:39:12.251Z And yet...the web continues to butt up against the dominant app platforms. One piece of good news this week on that front: Apple might actually be forced to open up iOS to other browser engines, at least in Japan. > Post by @slightlyoff@toot.cafe View on Mastodon ## Open Social Web Ghost 6.0 launched this week and it was great news for newsletter writers and other indie publishers. Now, Ghost is fully connected to the open social web: > "That means millions of people can discover, follow, like and reply to your posts from any supported social web client - including Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, Ghost, WordPress, Surf, WriteFreely, and many more." Media brands are trying out open social integrations too. Vox Media, which owns The Verge, has a new feature on its sports property SB Nation called "The Feed". > Anyway, last year at XOXO I heard @kissane.bsky.social say "we have to fix the fucking networks" and this is us trying as hard as we can. Go find your team, sign up, talk some shit about sports, and help us out, please ;) www.sbnation.com/communities > > — nilay patel (@reckless.bsky.social) 2025-08-06T16:25:21.554Z Often the coolest things come from indie devs, though. For example, natalie b. is building Bluesky comments for her blog (via Hacker News). Screenshot of Bluesky comments on natalie's blog. Meanwhile, on the fediverse, a small part of it met in real life: FediCon was held in Vancouver, Canada last weekend. For those of us unable to attend, the videos are becoming available: > Post by @reiver@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Couple more open social links for ya: * 🛠️ My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence; Ana Rodrigues * 💡 "Social media destroyed personal websites in a lot of ways, but one thing it’s taught us is that brief and published is often better than perfect and still-in-your-head." Chris Ferdinandi ## Web + AI This week I interviewed Oren Michels, who ran API company Mashery in Web 2.0 (a long-time ReadWriteWeb sponsor!). He's back now with a modern twist on API management: Barndoor, a control plane for agentic AI. > "If you take APIs and you take the ‘P’ out, it’s a whole lot more interesting." > **- Oren Michels** But of course the big AI news this week was OpenAI releasing GPT-05 on Thursday (Techmeme). The web angle here is that part of GPT-5's appeal, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is using it to create web apps. The announcement post states that GPT-5 "shows particular improvements in complex front‑end generation and debugging larger repositories." > GPT-5 is good at writing software. here it is making a web app to to learn french, with feature requests including a snake-like game with a mouse and cheese and french words. > > (you can probably come up with better variations of snake--please give it a try and share!) > > "voila" pic.twitter.com/23HbYCci4e > > — Sam Altman (@sama) August 7, 2025 Other news that caught my eye: * 🤦 Cloudflare claims that Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives (Cloudflare) * 🛠️ Google on Wednesday launched its AI coding agent, Jules, out of beta, just over two months after its public preview debut in May. (TechCrunch) * 🛑 Researchers have found a critical vulnerability in the new NLWeb protocol Microsoft announced just a few months ago at Build. (The Verge) ## One More Thing This post by Katie Mack nicely captures **why I favour social media products that treat hyperlinks as first-class citizens**. Bravo to Mastodon and Bluesky, BOO! to Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn and X. And btw, whenever possible I will use Mastodon and Bluesky posts in my newsletter (although sometimes, as with Sam Altman above, I'll have no choice but to use X). > You can put the link 🔗 in the VERY SAME POST as your post about the content !! There is no algorithmic penalty for links here !! We will still see your post and the original content link won't be buried in a reply !! > > — Katie Mack (@astrokatie.com) 2025-08-06T17:22:58.646Z Thanks for reading, and if you have any suggestions on news sources for Web Technology News, leave me a comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. And don't forget, you can follow WTN on those platforms too: search "@feed@webtechnology.news" on Mastodon or click here to follow on Bluesky. You can also get the full content via email (the form is on the WTN homepage) or RSS. A benefit of signing up via email is that it allows you to post good ol' fashioned comments on the URL where this post lives: i.e. on the Web. I think I need a catchphrase to end each newsletter... how about: Keep On Surfing! (I'll workshop it — comments appreciated 😀)