AI generated music made it to Tidal, I saw multiple fake Hiromi albums this week. When I tried to find out how to report, to help them do what's their job, a light gray text appeared. It asked me to rephrase to “help the AI come up with a quick (sic) answer”. ready to go live off grid in the woods

✏️ 2025 in review hidde.blog/2025-review/

Delighted to contribute to the HTMLHell advent calendar. I explained how screen readers don’t always announce what’s visually on screen - through the medium of burritos: www.htmhell.dev/adventcalend... Thanks to experts @matuzo.at and @hidde.blog for making sure the burrito was structurally sound.

AI note taking seems useful, as now nobody needs to take notes. But your notes will be super long and include way too much. Finding the subtle mistakes, misattributions, and remembering what's missing will take more time than writing them yourself (I pledge to do my bit and regularly volunteer).

🔗 “you can't outsource love” — @edent.tel shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12...

today I wrote my first explainer (see the explainer explainer for what that means: w3ctag.github.io/explainer-ex...) I also reduced a 3,5 page doc to a 2 page doc. Over years and between different jobs, *writing* has continued to be a large part of my work. writing ftw

Out today: the Q4 release of the in progress Web Sustainability Guidelines. New filters, updated UX section, less overlap/duplication and more www.w3.org/TR/web-susta... Release notes: github.com/w3c/sustaina... hat tip to @alexdawsonuk.bsky.social and Rose Newell and everone else (see notes). 👏👏

🔗 “I just got back to Berlin tonight after being at Green IO, (…) I figure it’s worth sharing a few takeaways” — Chris Adams rtl.chrisadams.me.uk/2025/12/take...

I wonder if we could use the same ampersand when we talk about AI & Sustainability? Sometimes it’s the sustainability *of* AI, and sometimes it’s AI *for* sustainability, but I imagine that nuance is different in other languages, too.

excited to do another “AI & ethics” talk today at a private event. Call me a pedant, but the ampersand matters. I don't like to call it “AI ethics”, it's too opiniated as a phrase.

When talking about LLMs and sustainability, it's not enough to say “we don't know the impact, as companies don't disclose data”. There are pretty reasonable estimates. Even conservative ones say LLMs have magnitudes more climate impact than doing the same thing without LLMs.

Off to Brussels for the ITU's Accessible Europe 2025. My first event ran by an event with a .int domain, consider me excited!

“Each user agent serves its user, not any of the other constituencies.” says the @tag.w3c.social.ap.brid.gy in their latest Group Note Draft on user agents www.w3.org/TR/2025/DNOT...

Finding out the energy cost of using LLMs is tricky, sure. But this is not even trying: “it says so on Sam Altman's blog” + “I fact checked using Claude, which also looked at Sam Altman's blog”.

Dutch public news broadcaster NOS is now posting their stories on their own platform, very indieweb, love to see it! stories.nos.nl (they also left X this week 👏)

✏️ Who wins when we filter the open web through an opaque system? hidde.blog/filtered-ope... new blog post… I remembered @baldurbjarnason.com's many warnings over recent years and tried put them into the 'open web'/LLMs context.

Did an accessibility audit over the past week that had 0 (zero) conformance issues in the first pass, great apps are still built. 👏

CSS is so powerful now, it's amazing looking through older CSS and seeing what can be replaced with a one-liner. I'm on the hunt for snippets that used to be multiple lines of CSS that can now be done in one. Show me what you got!

Was in a podcast this week (in Dutch), where I did shoutouts to indieweb, W3C Process, sustainability, web accessibility regulation and human rights in standards. Also said YES to the (listener's) question “is HTML a programming language?” Thanks whoever asked it <3 www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Usv...

Highly experimental: over the weekend I started publishing a record log log.hidde.blog/records/ Data from Sanity, static site generation in Eleventy. There's no real point other than I love looking at cover art.

started out documenting record collection with @sanity.io . Inevitably, everything I thought that was a string (like artist) ended up having to be an array (because artists make albums together).

Alternative headline: Big Tech successfully lobbied the European Commission into deregulation. Including rules to contain AI risk and privacy violations.

🔗 “My entire deploy, including the extras, takes about eight seconds.” @kevquirk.com.web.brid.gy kevquirk.com/blog/why-do-...

✏️ Reflections from TPAC 2025 hidde.blog/tpac-2025/ I spent a week in-person with various W3C groups and committees. These are some things that got covered in the rooms I was in.

back in NL, starting the week with a tour of the Parliament, as part of the civil servant onboarding.

for the Wu-Tang Clan fans: Kassa Overall plays jazz interpretation of C.R.E.A.M. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAQo...

#TPAC2025 is also a great opportunity to run into former colleagues and take serious photos with them. Here's Marie-Clarie of W3C developers

are the tesla shareholders ok?

off to Kobe for #W3CTPAC

I think we do a okay job of assessing which newly designed features to prioritise (if you haven't already, check out interop-rank.jakearchibald.com). What I'm interested in is the problems _without_ proposed solutions. What are you working on where you just can't find even a proposal for?

Calling all web developers! Browsers are all meeting up next week (www.w3.org/events/tpac/...). I want your voice to be heard! Tell me your biggest problems, and tell me what you want to see from the platform. What problems are tough to solve, but could be easier?

Kassa Overall at Bird was brilliant, his new album has 8 jazz interpretations of classic hiphop tracks. #CheckTheRhyme

Emma Thompson is “intensely irritated” with AI. “[Word] is constantly saying, ‘Would you like me to rewrite that for you?’ And so I end up just going, ‘I don’t need you to fucking rewrite what I’ve just written! Will you fuck off? Just fuck off! I’m so annoyed.’” www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...

off to Utrecht for the “Measuring the (un)sustainability of AI” symposium www.uu.nl/en/events/gd...

Meta was ordered by a a Dutch court to offer a non-algorithmic timeline option, and they just got an extension as they claimed they couldn't do it within 2 weeks for tech reasons.

I appreciate Hidde’s ability to take preposterous claims by a major accessibility tooling maker and the rampant thievery of IP by LLM makers, consider their dehumanizing output, and propose this gentle, whisper-soft rebuke: hidde.blog/teaching-llm...

Belgian AI scientists are advocating *against* the use of AI in academia. “If independent thinking is no longer encouraged at university, where would it?” apache.be/2025/10/24/b...

too accurate representation of airport security youtu.be/soO9baCk5lY?...

✏️ Yes, let's teach LLMs accessibility, but also provide the companies using them with better strategies hidde.blog/teaching-llm... (longest post title I ever did, EVER)

‘Screensavers’ is so apt because all ai art/text/music does is occupy space. And we tricked ourselves into thinking all space should be occupied. We don’t need background music in a store. Your blog post is fine without an image too. A news item of one human sentence is better than ai paragraphs.

I had fun talking about "the AI puppet dance" at @hellostavanger.no today. Thanks to everyone who showed up! Slides are here: einarwh.github.io/slides/2025/...

When the AI marketing speak gets you to rage blog some notes about browser innovation blog.stephaniestimac.com/posts/2025/1...

Thanks #HelloStavanger for having me talk about creativity, art and AI! 🖼️ My slides and all the links talks.hiddedevries.nl/KrPudu/creat... ✍️ Full read along with slides: talks.hiddedevries.nl/dFZf3b/slides

At #HelloStavanger, Marianne Røsvik presented Designsystemet, the Norwegian government's design system designsystemet.no/en/

Stavanger has good rainbows

Yay, got “Deliberate misinformation or misinformation resulting from negligence, including responding with unchecked output from automated systems“ merged into W3C's Code of Conduct github.com/w3c/PWETF/pu... Feel free to adapt for your codes of conducts, to increase productivity in your community.

🇳🇴 Off to Stavanger to talk about creativity and whether computers can do it! #HelloStavanger

“the response I got was… lukewarm”—Tim Berners-Lee on when he reached out to the hypertext community to tell them about the WWW project (from: This is for everyone)

I have read a lot about generative AI the last couple of years, a lot of it very good, but this is one of the best and most articulate elucidations of why there are so many things about it that fundamentally don't sit right with me. an absolute banger of a post, I implore you to read it posthaste

✏️ Do LLMs save or waste time? Ha! Turns out, sometimes it's both: when one person saves a bit, while another loses. I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon, with examples and mitigating business strategies! hidde.blog/time-saving-...