PRE-S: You can help shape the future of the web by ranking the Interop 2027 proposals. There are a lot of them, but they’re just asking you to pick the ones that are important to you, and rank the ones you’ve picked. I’ll probably be sharing my ranks next week.

Hello Reader,

So it turns out that Opus 5.5 is very good at decompiling things.

This has led to some mostly silly things, like Minecraft in Elden Ring and Mario in Halo, but it’s also leading to projects like AnyPS5, which isn’t an emulator but aims to port PS5 games to run natively on PCs. There are also ports of some PS3 games that run natively in the browser now, which is pretty wild.

And of course, the one probably making the most noise right now is ArtCraft, a free, open-source suite of Adobe clones.

Some of them are still quite buggy to the point of being unusable, so if you have an Adobe subscription, they probably aren’t ready to switch over to yet, but it’s the type of thing that no one would really try to do before, and now they’re reverse-engineering a suite of popular and extremely complex products with a stated goal to copy their existing features within a month.

Will they ever get to the point where they are actually a usable replacement? I’m not sure, but we’re in some crazy times for someone to even be trying.

For me, the most interesting thing will be to see how companies start reacting to all of this.

Until now, companies have been investing money into AI tools with the promises of improved productivity, and maybe even being able to replace some of their workforce with AI agents, and now those same tools are being used to potentially make their own products obsolete.

Will that happen? Some are predicting the “end of software”, while others are pumping the brakes on going too far with what’s possible. For me, it’s not even what is possible right now, but how companies start perceiving these tools as these types of stories start becoming more common.

They’re happy to invest in tools with what seems like the hope of making their employees redundant, but their tone might change when they see those tools as potentially making their business redundant. Even if that's not about to happen, upper management has clearly bought into these tools as capable of a lot, so it's more about hype and perception than reality anyway.

🙋‍♂️ What I’ve been up to this week 📺 Do we really need alpha()? ​ There were already two ways to make a color transparent in CSS, color-mix() and relative colors, and both work great. So why did CSS add a third with the alpha() function, which recently hit Baseline Newly Available? ⚡ Dark mode images without a media query ​ light-dark() isn’t only for colors anymore. Pass it two url() images, set color-scheme: light dark and your background swaps for dark mode in a single declaration. 🎙️ Are passkeys a trap? ​ Over on General Musings I dig into an article that hit the front page of Hacker News arguing passkeys are a trap, work out what attestation actually is, and explain why I’m less worried about it than the author. It’s also available as a podcast if you’d rather listen.

🔗 Other awesome stuff from around the web ​Scroll-triggered animation as the missing piece for scrollytelling on the web​ ​JPEG XL vs AVIF for web use-cases​ ​I am afraid my stuffed dinosaur will eat us all. He must be stopped​ ​HTML Can Do That​

🏁

And to close things out this week, CSS-Tricks is coming back… again.

On one hand, I’m happy that the situation has been resolved, and that Geoff is happy to get back to work there, and that the authors have all been paid for their work (I don’t have official confirmation of this, but I know Geoff wouldn’t be going back if they hadn’t been). It also is a great place for people to be able to get good exposure (while being paid for their work), and a fantastic community resource, which we need more of.

But the whole thing happening has left a sour taste in my mouth.

The first time DigitalOcean let it die was a bit of a “there goes a big corporation doing that thing they do.” It sucked when it happened, but that they said "our bad" and brought it back was such an unexpected thing. You never see corporations walk back their mistakes like that.

But then it happened again, and in my opinion, in a worse way than the first time around.

I feel like celebrating that it’s back again, especially since it’s being run by a very good person, but I'm feeling a bit hesitant.

Right now, I’ll be cautiously optimistic, and I'll share the work there to support the authors and their work more than the site itself.

Anyway, that's it for this week!

Cheers,
Kevin

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