Currently I am editing >600 presentations of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress to release the videos at the end of the month. This is frustrating and painstaking work, as both presenters and moderators didn’t quite follow some simple ideas that make a talk a good recording. Conference organisers spend a lot of time and money on […]

Exactly two months I shared that I was about to do a little "summer tour" of my a talk about refactoring CSS. And I did! I spoke at CSS Day, Middlesbrough Front End and Pixel Pioneers in three weeks and it was scary and wonderful, very similar to Brecht's experience!

I had great conversations with people afterwards and I'm super happy that my talk inspired Bart from Project Wallace to add spacing resets to the tool.

On the other hand, I am gutted that Middlesbrough Front End will not return next year. This has been an incredibly difficult time for conference organisers and I am heartbroken that the team doesn't have the support to continue. I am so lucky to have been a part of the last event.

I am now preparing for the next run of this talk at SmashingConf Freiburg. You can still buy tickets (this link includes a sweet discount)! Later in November I will also be speaking at beyond tellerrand which I am over the moon for.

I'm so happy to have had these experiences. Thank you so much to the organisers for having faith in me and every single person who came to say something nice after my talks. And, of course, thank you to my husband, Hactar folks, Jeremy alongside Clearleft friends, Jake and Paul for listening to the practise runs of my talk and giving me invaluable feedback.

Did you see my talk anywhere and have feedback? Please share in the form after this post or via email. I'm always keen to improve and learn.

I recently upgraded my home TrueNAS server and migrated 18 TB of data from a 4-disk RAIDZ1 ZFS pool to a new RAIDZ2 pool.

The neat part is that I did it with only three additional 8 TB disks and never transferred my data to external storage.

Upgrading from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 without moving data to external storage is tricky because:

About two weeks ago, I announced that I was back leading this year’s State of HTML 2025 survey, after a one year hiatus. We are grateful for all the suggestions that poured in, they were immensely helpful in shaping the survey. After two weeks of hard work from a small team spanning three continents, we are finally ready to launch!

I would urge each and every one of you that works with the web platform to fill out this survey. It’s a unique opportunity to have your voice heard in the browser vendors’ decision-making process. Survey results are used by browsers to prioritize roadmaps — the reason Google is funding this. The results from State of … surveys directly feed into prioritization for next year’s Interop project.

Time spent thoughtfully filling them out is an investment that can come back to you tenfold in the form of seeing features you care about implemented, browser incompatibilities being prioritized, and gaps in the platform being addressed. In addition to browsers, several standards groups are also using the results for prioritization and decision-making.

Additionally, you get to learn about new and upcoming features you may have missed, and get a personalized, sharable score at the end to see how you compare to other respondents!

Take State of HTML 2025 Survey

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their help in fleshing out the survey:

• Sacha Greif for actually implementing the survey and tirelessly discussing my ideas
• My apprentice Dmitry Sharabin for various fixes and improvements
• My Google contacts, Philip Jägenstedt and Kadir Topal for making my involvement possible
• And everyone who responded to my earlier call for suggestions — these were invaluable in shaping the survey, and I wish I could include them all!

FAQ

What’s new this year?

We spent a lot of time thinking about which features we are asking about and why. As a result, we added 35 new features, and removed 18 existing ones to make room. This is probably one of the hardest parts of the process, as we had to make some tough decisions.

We are also using the Web Components section to pilot a new format for pain points questions, consisting of a multiple choice question with common pain points, followed by the usual free form text list:

While this increases the number of questions, we are hoping it will reduce survey fatigue by allowing participants to skip the freeform question more frequently (or spend less time on it) if most of their pain points have already been covered by the multiple choice question.

Last but not least, we introduced browser support icons for each feature, per popular request:

Can I edit my responses?

Absolutely! Do not worry about filling it out perfectly in one go. If you create an account, you can edit your responses for the whole period the survey is open, and even fill it out across multiple devices, e.g. start on your phone, then fill out some on your desktop, etc. Even if you’re filling it out anonymously, you can still edit responses on your device for some time, so you can have it open in a browser tab and revisit it periodically.

Why are there JS questions in an HTML survey?

This question comes up a lot every year.

For the same reason there are JS APIs in the HTML standard: many JS APIs are intrinsically related to HTML. We mainly included JS APIs that are in some way related to HTML, such as:

• APIs used to manipulate HTML dynamically (DOM, interactivity, etc.)
• Web Components APIs, used to create custom HTML elements
• PWA features, including APIs used to access underlying system capabilities (OS capabilities, device capabilities, etc.)

The only two exceptions to this are two Intl APIs, which were mainly included because we wanted to get participants thinking about any localization/internationalization pain points they may have.

However, if you don’t write any JS, we absolutely still want to hear from you! In fact, I would encourage you even more strongly to fill out the survey, as people who don’t write JS are very underrepresented in these surveys. All questions are optional, so you can just skip any JS-related questions.

There is also a question at the end, where you can select that you only write HTML/CSS:

Why are some features included that are early stage proposals with no browser support?

While proposals with no browser support are not good candidates for immediate prioritization by browsers, their context chips give browser vendors and standards groups invaluable insight into what matters to developers, which also drives prioritization decisions.

However, we heard you loud and clear: when mature and early stage features are mixed together, you felt bait-and-switched. So this year, we are including icons to summarize browser support of each feature we ask about:

We are hoping this will also help prevent cases where participants confuse a new feature they have never heard of, with a more established feature they are familiar with.

Is the survey only available in English?

Absolutely not! Localization has been an integral part of these surveys since the beginning. Fun fact: None of the people working on these surveys is a native English speaker.

However, since translations are a community effort, they are not necessarily complete, especially in the beginning. If you are a native speaker of a language that is not yet complete, please consider helping out!

I found a bug, what should I do?

Please file an issue so we can fix it!

• File content issue
• File technical issue

If we're not cautious, we may accidentally feed the AI hype by talking about it in specific ways.

When we hype up the technology, we mostly help the people who put money into it. This post isn't about those people or that money, maybe they could use the help… my point is, they are irrelevant when we want to understand the merits of AI. They muddy the waters and overshadow the important questions.

There's plenty of questions to consider. Are LLM's helpful, can they solve specific problems well, should we use them? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it is no. There are grey areas, some find use and others don't.

Do they increase productivity, can they do what humans do? It really depends. And that means we should weigh the options before we hype.

When we hype up and discuss merely what is or seems great, we help the powerful billionaires who consistently pour money into the technology. In addition, we might forget to do justice to the many ethical problems inherent to the technology. Especially around the implementors and implementations it has today, where there are problems from sourcing rare metals for chips to traumatising human data classifiers, from magnitudes larger climate footprint during training and use, to the mass theft of people's creative works.

So, when do we risk accidentally overhyping AI?

Forget that it's a machine

We might say things like ‘I'll ask [tool]’, ‘he/she said’, ‘he/she came up with’, ‘he/she told me’. Or ‘he/she thinks’.

Such phrases humanise the machine. When we humanise our pets, that's cute (and not just, animal cognition is a genuine field of philosophical enquiry). When we humanise machines, we help the billionaires.

This is too important to not be pedantic: an LLM can respond to words with words based on statistical likelihood, and while that's sometimes incredibly impressive and can seem human-like, any intelligence that reveals itself is an illusion. It's unlikely to let billionaires do scientific discoveries in fields outside they don't have a background in

The term “artificial intelligence”, was made up as a way to make a branch of scientific research more attractive to potential funders. A lot of the tech we see today is neither artificial, nor intelligent. It's powerful and impressive technology, sure, but it's machines.

Say “it is inevitable”

Those who've put endless amounts of cash into the tech, like Microsoft, who put 100 billion into OpenAI, may feel AI is inevitable. They invested, they need returns and they use everything in their power to get there, including their dominance in the market.

Inevitability suggests some kind of universal appetite for the tech. And there's appetite, for sure. But the fact that a lot of software today is begging users to start using their AI features, suggests otherwise.

Like Google Workspace, that will not let you have any smart features if you don't also use their AI.

Slack offers a 50% discount if you enable AI.

AI is not inevitable for us, the people. Not at home, but also not at work, when we're making decisions about technology.

Again, AI could be helpful. Granted, AI could be the only way to achieve something. But AI could also be an unnecessary, unsuitable or needlessly extravagant solution to a specific problem. We've seen a lot of that too.

Mandate the use (without qualifying how or why)

Increasingly, C-suite is demanding AI use, without qualifying how or why (maybe they never hear no). Without substantiation and doing proper analysis of AI vs non-AI usage on a case by case basis, this is merely hype.

At Shopify, developers must use AI, their CEO said:

Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI

(From Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke's memo “Reflexive AI usage is now a baseline expectation at Shopify”, posted on 7 april 2025, on a social media site I won't link to)

The CEO of Axel Springer, the company that owns Politico and Business Insider said his employees need do explain when they don't use AI.

Microsoft President of Developer Division and GitHub, Julia Liuson, said “AI is no longer optional” and should be used in performance evaluations, emailing top management to say:

AI should be part of your holistic reflections on an individual's performance and impact.

Anecdotally, I'm hearing from friends all over big tech that they are rewarded if they do more with AI. Not doing so could be seen as bad performance and therefore threaten their jobs, especially in countries where employees aren't protected well.

Predict that “it saves time”

You'll only really know if it saved time afterwards. Predicted time savings is purely marketing, if it's not also tested in and applied to real world scenarios.

Clearly, writing a 1000 word essay takes longer than asking a chatbot to generate it, but most organisations would require a lot of editing and review before they can publish the end result. Vibe-coding a business critical app may take a few days instead of months of years, but cleaning up the (security) bugs could take longer, and cost more.

An experiment from METR, a non-profit founded by a former OpenAI researcher, showed developers who thought they were saving 24% time with AI, actually took 19% longer when using AI. Simon Willison suspects it may be due to learning curve, it will be interesting to see their next findings.

The prospect of time saving may well warrant the time and effort spent experimenting, and hearing about actual savings from organisations who did, seems valuable. Claiming time savings based on predictions alone, however, merely adds to hype.

And even with time saved…  “productivity isn't value”, as Salma explains in her post The promise that wasn't kept. Like Salma says in her post, real value is where it's at.

“You'll stay behind”

Some AI marketing suggests that those who don't use it (or not a lot), will be left behind, miss the boat. While the rest of the world moves on and enjoys technological bliss, you'll struggle without.

First, it's doubtful that the technology is just bliss, or that missing out is a struggle. Salma's post explains that, and so does Heather Buchel's thoughtful reply, asking when she can move to the more creative and fulfilling parts of her job.

Second, financially, an organisation could ‘win’ by avoiding AI (if we want to go as far as to see the world as a tournament). Third party AI prices are likely to go up, as those who invested billions will want returns.

It's unclear what level of AI adoption will get folks to stay ahead or behind. Time will have to tell. Before we know, these suggestions mostly help the hype.

Wrapping up

I agree with Declan Chidlow that we need constructive AI criticism. I'm hoping to offer that here, and, as always, I am very much open to hear what others have to say.

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Originally posted as How to avoid that your post about AI helps the hype on Hidde's blog.

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