Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

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Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

8 July 2025

United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:

HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.

It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.

The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.

See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.

Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.

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design, history, technology, web design

How Indragie Karunaratne developed a macOS app using Claude Code

8 July 2025

San Francisco based developer Indragie Karunaratne:

I recently shipped Context, a native macOS app for debugging MCP servers. The goal was to build a useful developer tool that feels at home on the platform, powered by Apple’s SwiftUI framework. I’ve been building software for the Mac since 2008, but this time was different: Context was almost 100% built by Claude Code.

Karunaratne has extensively documented the process. Of the twenty-thousand lines of code that make up the app, he estimates he wrote about one-thousand lines. Cluade Code did the rest.

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artificial intelligence, technology

HR departments relying more on AI tools to screen job applicants

5 July 2025

Danielle Abril, writing for MSN:

Increasingly, job candidates are running into virtual recruiters for screenings. The conversational agents, built on large language models, help recruiting firms and hiring companies respond to every applicant, conduct interviews around-the-clock and find the best candidate in increasingly large talent pools. People who have experienced AI interviews have mixed reviews: surprisingly good or cold and confusing.

Pity the HR departments. It’s hard work having to draw up policies about procedures, and procedures about policies. All of that work leaves no time for their core function: recruiting staff, and managing human resources. By the way, I the find the use of the word resource a particularly odious HR practice. People are people, not resources. Instead of saying “we need to bring in a resource”, try saying “we need to hire a person for this role.”

Anyway, to reduce workloads, and ostensibly speed-up the recruiting process, some HR departments are using AI tools to screen “first-round” candidates for a role. I assume once a “second-round” list (or should that be pool?) of candidates is arrived at, an HR person becomes involved in the process.

No doubt there are large numbers of applicants for advertised roles, and some sort of screening is necessary to shortlist suitable candidates. To ease the burden though, HR staff could use AI tools to write up policies and procedures instead, so they can focus on the human side of the equation.

They could even take advantage of AI note taking apps, further reducing pressure on their time.

AI note takers standing in for online meeting attendees

5 July 2025

Lisa Bonos and Danielle Abril, writing for The Washington Post:

Clifton Sellers attended a Zoom meeting last month where robots outnumbered humans. He counted six people on the call including himself, Sellers recounted in an interview. The 10 others attending were note-taking apps powered by artificial intelligence that had joined to record, transcribe and summarize the meeting.

AI note takers attend online meetings so you don’t have to. They will record the entire meeting, and prepare a summary afterwards. Sounds convenient. Some people though have raised concerns about meeting participants not really participating in meetings, and there they might have a point.

Others are worried that note taking apps are recording the entire conversation. But if it’s a work meeting, and not a private conversation about, say, a highly sensitive matter, is that a major concern? Surely online meeting apps also record, and store, the entire contents of a meeting, even if all participants are fully present? There’s also the point such apps might spill the tea elsewhere.

It’s been a while since I was in a workplace-based situation, but I would’ve relished the opportunity to have an AI note taker stand in for me at meetings. That way I could — you know — do some actual work instead. This sounds like one to AI, I say.

Living like it is 1993 for a week, no digital technology allowed

3 July 2025

Nathan Drescher, writing for Android Authority:

For one week, I lived without modern technology unless it was absolutely necessary for work and emergencies. I carried a Discman, scribbled in a paper planner, and made phone calls instead of texting. It was chaotic at first, but oddly calming by the time it was all over.

It can be argued 1993 was pretty much the last pre-digital era year. The internet was around, but was hardly mainstream. Digital phones had just arrived in Australia, though were confined to a select few users. And that was about it. But really, I think 1993 can be left in the past, hopefully as a pleasant memory. Same goes for those (cumbersome) Discmans.

I’m all for screen-free time, digital detoxing for a few hours here and there, but otherwise often feel I belong precisely in the time I presently live in, for all its flaws. No golden age thinking here. You won’t catch me feeling sorry about the demise of the landline phone, nor feeling nostalgic for their absence. Besides, I’d much rather text, or email someone, than call them.

I could go for a paper planner if pressed, I suppose. But websites (and blogs) weren’t quite with us in 1993, though they weren’t far away, and they would be something I could not live without.

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history, lifestyle, technology, trends

Social media platforms, AI summaries, how we consume news in 2025

2 July 2025

Running since 2015, the Digital News Report, published annually by the University of Canberra, surveyed nearly one-hundred-thousand people globally, including about two-thousand Australians.

The key findings of the 2025 report are probably of no surprise to many of us. About twenty-five percent of people now source their news from social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok are the go-to platforms for news seekers aged eighteen to twenty-four.

AI is also making in-roads into the way people consume news, with nearly thirty-percent saying they like the idea of AI prepared news summaries.

When it comes to misinformation, seventy-five percent of Australians — the highest number in the world — expressed concerned about misinformation. Many are sceptical of influencers as a result.

Facebook and TikTok were identified as the biggest purveyors of misinformation. Encouragingly though, about forty-percent of people will turn to a “trusted news brand” should they be suspicious as to the veracity of a news story.

Here’s something else that’s interesting. Only about a quarter of Australians say they have received news literacy education. That is, being informed in how to use and understand news.

I have to say, it’s the first time I’ve heard the term. Is news literacy taught at school? Maybe I was absent the day that class was held.

Firefox arrived with a bang, will it die with a whimper?

20 June 2025

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, writing for The Register:

As for Firefox itself, users are reporting a growing number of technical problems that have eroded the browser’s reputation for reliability. In particular, even longtime users are reporting that more and more mainstream websites, such as Instagram, Salesforce, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp Web, either fail to load or function poorly in recent Firefox releases. In particular, Firefox seems to be having more trouble than ever rendering JavaScript-heavy sites. Like it or not, many popular sites live and die with JavaScript these days.

According to Statcounter, Firefox’s market share peaked at almost thirty-two percent in December 2009. Statcounter’s numbers only go back to the beginning of 2009, so perhaps uptake of the Mozilla made browser was even higher earlier on. I migrated to Firefox the minute it launched in late 2004, at a time when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) all but had the browser market cornered.

People desperately wanted an alternative to IE, and Firefox delivered. Despite the experiences of others today, I’m not presently having many problems. WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and Salesforce are not websites I visit. I do use the web version of Instagram (IG), where I have occasional problems logging in. Sometimes I’m greeted by a blank white screen after entering my credentials, but this is usually resolved by reloading IG and trying again. Up until now, I’d attributed this difficulty to IG.

At the moment Firefox is the only browser I’m using on my Linux Mint setup, as the Flatpaks for Opera and Chrome remain unverified (I’m aware I can still install and use the browsers nonetheless). For whatever reason I was running Firefox, Opera, and Chrome simultaneously on my old Windows 10 setup. Little point my explaining why, suffice to say each browser served different purposes.

Firefox’s market share today, again, according to Statcounter, hovers at around the two to three percent mark. It’s a sorry state of affairs for a once popular browser, and I can only wonder if Mozilla will attempt to turn things around.

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browsers, history, technology, trends

The infinite workday: more work hours and less employee privacy

19 June 2025

Microsoft is calling it the infinite workday.

Based on telemetry data, gleaned from apps including Microsoft 365, the American tech company has found the workday has been gradually becoming longer, and work-related activities are increasingly seeping into the weekend. This for people supposedly working Monday to Friday, between nine o’clock in the morning, until five o’clock in the afternoon.

According to some of Microsoft’s findings, workers are reading emails as early as six in the morning during the week. The same workers may still be on deck well into the evening, attending online meetings, called to cater for colleagues spread across multiple timezones. In addition, workers are more frequently checking email messages during the weekend.

So much for work-life balance, which I’ve always seen as a theoretical construct. Not for real. Bullshit. My workday looks tame by comparison. But the accumulation of the telemetry data used to compile Microsoft’s report is also concerning. Not only are people working longer hours, they are also being surveilled. Some degree — who knows how much precisely — of information about their use of various Microsoft software, is being gathered.

The case for adopting something like LibreOffice, an open source variation of Microsoft products such as Word and Excel, becomes all the stronger. This won’t rectify the problem of working extended hours and weekends, but at least workers won’t have large tech companies keeping tabs on them.

Nine minutes no more: iPhone users soon able to vary snooze alarm intervals

18 June 2025

It should be six-thirty in the morning, on the east coast of Australia, when this post is published, but all things being equal, I’ll be slumbering for another ninety-minutes.

And when the alarm on my iPhone starts chiming, I’ll likely press the snooze button a number of times. I’ll be productive though. Reading and replying to email, and looking at news headlines. Every nine minutes I’ll be reminded I need to start the day in the not too distant future.

But some people’s morning routines might be about to change, following the announcement at WWDC 2025 last week, that the upcoming iOS 26 update, will allow people to set snooze intervals from anywhere between one to fifteen minutes.

I’ve been thinking about the potential of being able to change the length of the snooze interval, but am not sure if it’s for me. Anything less would be too often, and anything longer might be a little too spread out. But I think being able to change the interval period, even if only to a maximum of fifteen minutes, will be welcomed by more than a few people.

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smartphones, technology, trends

Linux, LibreOffice, offer an escape from Windows 11 and Microsoft

18 June 2025

KDE, developers of free and open source software, have launched a campaign encouraging Windows 10 (Win10) users to migrate to a Linux Operating System (this article is a good starting point), rather than moving to the Windows 11 (Win11) Operating System (OS).

Win11 stands to render many older, but still perfectly functional computers useless, after Microsoft recently changed the operating specifications for the OS. This means some older devices may no longer have sufficient capacity to operate Win11. The message from Microsoft seems clear: buy a new computer, or go without one all together. That could be a confronting choice for some people.

But as Sayan Sen, writing at Neowin, points out, there is another option, one that is also being backed by The Document Foundation, maker of LibreOffice, a suite of productivity applications similar to Word and Excel:

“You don’t have to follow Microsoft’s upgrade path. There is a better option that puts control back in the hands of users, institutions, and public bodies: Linux and LibreOffice. Together, these two programmes offer a powerful, privacy-friendly and future-proof alternative to the Windows + Microsoft 365 ecosystem.”

The Document Foundation also suggests Win11 is not quite as cost-free as is believed:

“The move to Windows 11 isn’t just about security updates. It increases dependence on Microsoft through aggressive cloud integration, forcing users to adopt Microsoft accounts and services. It also leads to higher costs due to subscription and licensing models, and reduces control over how your computer works and how your data is managed. Furthermore, new hardware requirements will render millions of perfectly good PCs obsolete.

They leave the best for last:

The end of Windows 10 does not mark the end of choice, but the beginning of a new era. If you are tired of mandatory updates, invasive changes, and being bound by the commercial choices of a single supplier, it is time for a change. Linux and LibreOffice are ready — 2025 is the right year to choose digital freedom!”

Regular readers of disassociated will know I migrated to Linux Mint about a year ago, and have been using Writer and Calc, the LibreOffice versions of Word and Excel, since. I won’t sugarcoat it: the move had its bumps, and I needed to make several tweaks to my laptop before the system stability I’d enjoyed on Win10 returned.

I also needed to start using some new apps, and had to give up on one or two I couldn’t find Linux compatible versions of (despite trying to use various Windows emulators), but was able to figure out workarounds. Today, I barely notice the difference. I open my laptop every morning and get working pretty much as usual.

If you’re having a problem getting started on — as it was in my case — Linux Mint, the Linux Mint Forums were a great help in the migration process. Chances are someone’s already run into whatever problem you’re having, and found a solution, which you can try. Otherwise, you can post a question asking for help.

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