Vale.Rocks
Declan Chidlow
Long-form writings spanning an assortment of topics, though oft technical in nature.
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- browsers
- site
- design
- accessibility
- examining
- html
- reality
- china
- twenty
- under
All posts (80)
Team Fortress 2 is a great game. It is also a deeply unserious one. I’m not sure how much value can be extracted from the gameplay statistics of an online multiplayer experience where it is not uncommon to killbind for a laugh or to decide not to kill anyone for an entire match and instead chill with the enemy. Team...
The ebbs and flows of the web have gotten us to where we stand today. We simply wouldn’t have the web we do without the journey it has taken us to get here. However, some of the steps it has taken to get here have been interesting to say the least. CSS is how we style things on the web, but since its inception it...
When HTML was first created, a document could be very simple indeed. A valid document could look like this: <TITLE>HTML document</TITLE> <H1>Heading</H1> <P>This is a paragraph with a <A HREF="https://example.com/">link</A>. It wasn’t until HTML 2.0 – the first formalised standard – that a proper document structure...
With ever-changing devices, browsers, operating systems, form factors, specifications, personal preferences, tooling, and corporate interests, the web is in a constant state of flux. As a result, so is the HTML we write. For every line of the HTML specification itself that has changed since the language’s inception,...
I am not what one would call the greatest player of Halo to ever grace this planet. If you can believe it, I am rather mediocre. I have moments of greatness, but I’m also very much a casual player. Halo is a game I can pick up and play for leisure without too much effort or consideration. That said, I love data. I...
Minecraft: Pi Edition is a modified port of the game Minecraft to the Raspberry Pi, a hobbyist single-board computer. It is a bit of an oddity, because it differs greatly from other editions of Minecraft, is completely free, saw only fleeting support from Minecraft’s developer Mojang, and is obscure, despite being a...
In 2019 three students in their mid-teens – Paul Makles (Insert), Rene Vinter (Nizune), and Martin Löffler (FatalErrorCoded) – established Riot (stylised RIOT), an online chat platform targeting gaming communities. Funded by donations on Patreon, Riot operated at a small scale and ultimately ceased development in...
Web3, the ‘era’ of the web supposedly ushering in blockchain technologies and other such fluff, has undoubtedly been a bust. Perhaps not for the bank accounts of manipulators, but a bust in general. Blockchain has very few legitimate applications. NFTs went down like the Hindenburg, and cryptocurrencies have...
Hacker News is a popular news aggregator and web forum created and run by United States-based venture capital firm Y Combinator. The site officially launched on the 20th of February 2007 as ‘Startup News’. The idea of the site was for potential founders to establish themselves and become known to Y Combinator before...
Head-mounted virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality devices have received many browsers over the years. Fundamentally, these browsers present a different user experience to browsers on other devices. They’re a very different medium, requiring different considerations and with very different...
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