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About

One person, one opinion, once a month

I’m Yann. I run minimal design (opens in a new tab), a one-person studio, and I have been building for the web for over twenty years. Cleared is the newsletter I wanted and could not find.

Why this exists

Why a newsletter about deleting code

Every publication covering the web platform is additive. Here is what’s new, here is another thing to learn, here is a feature you should be using. All useful, all pointing one direction. Almost nobody covers the opposite motion, which is that a maturing platform means your codebase can get smaller. Fewer polyfills. Fewer fallbacks. Fewer scripts doing what CSS now does natively.

The other missing thing is a ruling. Baseline answers “can I use this?” comprehensively and for free. The question it leaves open is “should I bother?”, and nobody with a vendor’s megaphone can answer it, because they cannot write “skip it” about their own features. Answering it takes one person willing to sign a verdict and be wrong in public now and then. That is the job here. (And yes, my studio is called minimal design. The bias toward taking things away is not a rebrand.)

The practical version: “:has() is newly available” means maybe start experimenting. “clip-path passed 30 months of support” means go delete your fallback today. The second one changes a codebase this week, and nobody was sending that email.

The deal

The deal

Every issue

  • Three to five things. Never more, however busy the month.
  • A verdict on each: Cleared, Hold or Skip, with the evidence.
  • A standing bias toward deletions: when a fallback can finally come out, it leads. When a month offers nothing worth acting on, the issue says so in two sentences instead of padding.
  • Ten lines of code at most per item, before and after.
  • Under five minutes to read.
  • First Monday of the month. If a month is quiet, it still arrives, and it says so in two sentences.

Never

  • A sponsor email, a course, a webinar, a second list.
  • Your address shared, sold, or moved anywhere else. My studio’s client enquiries and this list never mix, in either direction. My studio site promises “no newsletter, no follow-up sequence, no pressure” and that promise stays true because these two things stay separate.
  • A tracking-based follow-up. I ignore open rates, so you will never get a “just checking you saw this”.
  • Anything behind an email gate. Every issue is on this site, free, forever.
Who is writing

Credentials, such as they are

Twenty-plus years building for the web, a decade of that hand-coding sites for small businesses, five years in-house at a fast-growing startup, and now minimal design (opens in a new tab) again. I maintain mCSS (opens in a new tab), an open-source CSS framework other developers build with, and I make Sifter (opens in a new tab) and T7 Speed Restore (opens in a new tab). I write code, so when I tell you a deletion is safe, I have usually done it.

The relevant qualification is smaller and more specific than any of that: I read the test data underneath the label before I tell you to delete something. Once, that changed my own verdict from Hold to Cleared the day before publishing.

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