Announcing Web Day Out

I’m going to cut right to the chase: Clearleft is putting on a brand new conference in 2026. It’s called Web Day Out. It’ll be on Thursday, March 12th right here in Brighton. Tickets are just £225+VAT. You should be there!

If you’ve ever been to Responsive Day Out or Patterns Day, the format will be familiar to you. There’s going to be eight 30 minute talks. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Like those other one-day conferences, this one has a laser-sharp focus.

Web Day Out is all about what you can do in web browsers today. You can expect talks that showcase hands-on practical uses for the latest advances in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript APIs. There will be no talks about libraries, frameworks or build tools, and I can guarantee there will be absolutely no so-called “AI”.

As you might have gathered, this is an opinionated conference.

If you care about performance, accessibility, and progressive enhancement, Web Day Out is the event for you.

Or if you’ve been living in React-land but starting to feel that maybe you’re missing out on what’s been shipping in web browsers, Web Day Out is the event for you too. And I’m not talking about cute demos here. This is very much about shipping to production.

I’ve got half of the line-up assembled already:

• Jemima Abu,
• Rachel Andrew,
• Lola Odelola, and
• Richard Rutter.

Jemima’s talk gives you a flavour of what to expect at Web Day Out:

In this talk, we’ll take a look at how to use HTML and CSS to build simpler alternatives to popular JavaScript components such as accordions, modals, scroll transitions, carousels etc We’ll also take a look at the performance and accessibility benefits and real-life applications and use-cases of these components.

Web Day Out will be in The Studio Theatre of the Brighton Dome, which is a fantastic intimate venue. That means that places are limited, so get your ticket now!

Web development tip: disable pointer events on link images

Here’s a little snippet of CSS that solves a problem I’ve never considered:

The problem is that Live Text, “Select text in images to copy or take action,” is enabled by default on iOS devices (Settings → General → Language & Region), which can interfere with the contextual menu in Safari. Pressing down on the above link may select the text inside the image instead of selecting the link URL.

Uniting the team with Jamstack | Trys Mudford

This is a superb twenty minute presentation by Trys! It’s got everything: a great narrative, technical know-how, and a slick presentation style.

Conference organisers: you should get Trys to speak at your event!

A Guide to Handling Browser Events by Sarah Chima - Front-End Developer

This is a great step-by-step explanation of event handling in JavaScript!

How I failed the <a>

I think the situation that Remy outlines here is quite common (in client-rehydrated server-rendered pages), but what’s less common is Remy’s questioning and iteration.

So I now have a simple rule of thumb: if there’s an onClick, there’s got to be an anchor around the component.

What’s the difference between JavaScript event delegation, bubbling, and capturing? | Go Make Things

I can never keep these straight—this is going to be a handy reference to keep on hand.