From Consumer Rights Wiki

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only con­ver­sion (2026) is a sched­uled re­mote degra­da­tion of per­pet­u­ally-li­censed Microsoft Office soft­ware for ma­cOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a li­cense-val­i­da­tion cer­tifi­cate used by the Office apps ex­pires.[1] After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of sup­port in October 2023, Microsoft as­sured cus­tomers their in­stalled apps would “continue to func­tion.“[2] The July 13, 2026 con­ver­sion in­stead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined “reduced func­tion­al­ity mode,” in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved.[1][3] By May 30, 2026, the orig­i­nal 2023 end-of-sup­port page had been re-dated and rewrit­ten on Microsoft’s site; the “continue to func­tion” clause was re­moved.[4][2]

Microsoft an­nounced gen­eral avail­abil­ity of Office 2019 for Windows and Mac on September 24, 2018. In the launch blog post, Microsoft’s Jared Spataro wrote that “Office 2019 is a one-time re­lease and won’t re­ceive fu­ture fea­ture up­dates,” po­si­tion­ing the prod­uct as the on-premises al­ter­na­tive to the Office 365 sub­scrip­tion.[5] Contemporary Microsoft Store pages mar­keted Office Home & Student 2019 as a “One-time pur­chase for 1 PC or Mac” at $149.99, with copy that ex­plic­itly con­trasted the per­pet­ual prod­uct against the Office 365 sub­scrip­tion model: “One-time pur­chases don’t have an up­grade op­tion, which means if you plan to up­grade to the next ma­jor re­lease, you’ll have to buy it at full price.“[6]

Office 2021 for Mac be­came gen­er­ally avail­able on October 5, 2021 un­der the same one-time-pur­chase model & is sched­uled to reach end of sup­port on October 13, 2026 per the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy.[7]

Office 2019 for Mac reached end of sup­port on October 10, 2023.[3]

Microsoft’s end-of-sup­port page for Office 2019 for Mac, be­fore and af­ter the 2026 edit

Internet Archive snap­shot of the page from June 3, 2023; orig­i­nally pub­lished April 12, 2023.[2]

Internet Archive snap­shot of the page from June 3, 2023; orig­i­nally pub­lished April 12, 2023.[2]

The same Microsoft URL cap­tured on May 30, 2026, re-dated Published: May 15th, 2026.[4]

The same Microsoft URL cap­tured on May 30, 2026, re-dated Published: May 15th, 2026.[4]

The June 3, 2023 snap­shot of Microsoft’s end-of-sup­port page con­tained this pas­sage:

Support for Office 2019 for Mac will end on October 10, 2023. Rest as­sured that all your Office 2019 apps will con­tinue to func­tion—they won’t dis­ap­pear from your Mac, nor will you lose any data. However, you could ex­pose your­self to se­ri­ous and po­ten­tially harm­ful se­cu­rity risks.[2]

Support for Office 2019 for Mac will end on October 10, 2023. Rest as­sured that all your Office 2019 apps will con­tinue to func­tion—they won’t dis­ap­pear from your Mac, nor will you lose any data. However, you could ex­pose your­self to se­ri­ous and po­ten­tially harm­ful se­cu­rity risks.[2]

By May 30, 2026, the same URL car­ried a new pub­li­ca­tion date of May 15th, 2026 and a shorter pas­sage:

Support for Office 2019 for Mac ended on October 10, 2023. Rest as­sured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data. Your data can be ac­cessed on any sup­ported Microsoft 365 or Office prod­uct. However, you could ex­pose your­self to se­ri­ous and po­ten­tially harm­ful se­cu­rity risks.[4]

Support for Office 2019 for Mac ended on October 10, 2023. Rest as­sured that all your Office 2019 apps won’t lose any data. Your data can be ac­cessed on any sup­ported Microsoft 365 or Office prod­uct. However, you could ex­pose your­self to se­ri­ous and po­ten­tially harm­ful se­cu­rity risks.[4]

The 2023 as­sur­ance that the apps would “continue to func­tion” was re­moved; the data-safety clause was kept; a new sen­tence point­ing own­ers to “any sup­ported Microsoft 365 or Office prod­uct” was added.[2][4] The 2023 word­ing was resur­faced in May 2026 by JimmyTech, a San Francisco IT con­sul­tancy, which char­ac­ter­ized the July 2026 con­ver­sion as Microsoft “breaking that promise.“[8]

Microsoft’s ad­min­is­tra­tor doc­u­men­ta­tion states that “Microsoft 365 apps use a dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cate to val­i­date li­cens­ing. The cer­tifi­cate cur­rently in use ex­pires on July 13, 2026. Apps that are up­dated to the min­i­mum re­quired ver­sions al­ready in­clude the re­newed cer­tifi­cate and con­tinue to func­tion nor­mally. Apps on older ver­sions en­ter re­duced func­tion­al­ity mode af­ter the cer­tifi­cate ex­pires.“[1] The min­i­mum re­quired builds are ver­sion 16.83 on ma­cOS and ver­sion 2.93 on iOS, & those builds in turn re­quire ma­cOS 12 (Monterey) or later, or iOS 17.0 or later.[1]

Office 2019 has no fix. The prod­uct line is bounded by a hard build cap be­low the 16.83 thresh­old, and Microsoft’s own sup­port doc­u­men­ta­tion states the is­sue “cannot be re­solved by up­dat­ing or re­in­stalling Office 2019 for Mac.“[3][8] Office 2021 for Mac, by con­trast, is still re­ceiv­ing up­dates through its October 13, 2026 re­tire­ment date & can reach 16.83 on sup­ported ma­cOS ver­sions.[7][3] Windows and Android ver­sions of Office are not af­fected by the cer­tifi­cate ex­piry.[1]

After July 13, 2026, af­fected in­stalls of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on Mac, iPhone, and iPad will en­ter re­duced func­tion­al­ity mode, in which Microsoft says users “can open and view files but can’t edit, save, or ac­cess full fea­tures.“[1] Office 2021 for Mac and Microsoft 365 for Mac users on ma­cOS 12 (Monterey) or later can avoid the con­ver­sion by up­dat­ing to build 16.83.[1] Office 2019 for Mac users have no up­date path.[3]

Microsoft be­gan email­ing af­fected cus­tomers in mid-May 2026 about the up­com­ing change.[8] PiunikaWeb, which pub­lished the ear­li­est press cov­er­age on May 16, 2026, char­ac­ter­ized the user re­sponse as “largely neg­a­tive.“[9] The email in­cluded an of­fer of a free Microsoft 365 Personal trial that re­quires a pay­ment method and con­verts to a paid sub­scrip­tion if not can­celled.[3][9]

Microsoft di­rects af­fected users to three op­tions: con­tin­u­ing to use the apps in view-only mode, switch­ing to the free Microsoft 365 web apps, or pay­ing for a Microsoft 365 sub­scrip­tion or a new per­pet­ual Office Home 2024 li­cense.[3][1] Microsoft has is­sued no pub­lic state­ment rec­on­cil­ing the July 2026 con­ver­sion with the 2023 “continue to func­tion” as­sur­ance.[2]

AppleInsider’s Amber Neely, in a May 28, 2026 ar­ti­cle, wrote that Microsoft “will be ef­fec­tively brick­ing the stand­alone Office 2019 for Mac, iPad, and iPhone users on July 13, 2026.“[10] JimmyTech framed the choice as dis­cre­tionary:

But cer­tifi­cates can get re­newed. The fact that Microsoft is us­ing this ex­pi­ra­tion as a dead­line that re­tires older ver­sions of Office, rather than qui­etly re­new­ing the cer­tifi­cate, is a choice.

But cer­tifi­cates can get re­newed. The fact that Microsoft is us­ing this ex­pi­ra­tion as a dead­line that re­tires older ver­sions of Office, rather than qui­etly re­new­ing the cer­tifi­cate, is a choice.

[8]

TidBITS Talk and PiunikaWeb com­menters dis­cussed mi­grat­ing to LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, and Apple’s Pages.[11][9]

Microsoft

Microsoft 365

Adobe Creative Suite ac­ti­va­tion

↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 “Certificate up­date for Microsoft 365 apps on man­aged ma­cOS and iOS de­vices”. Microsoft Learn. Microsoft. 2026 – 05-14. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 “End of sup­port for Office 2019 for Mac”. Microsoft Support. Microsoft. Archived from the orig­i­nal on 2023 – 06-03. Retrieved 2026 – 05-30.

↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 “Update Microsoft 365 or Office on your ma­cOS or iOS de­vice”. Microsoft Support. Microsoft. May 2026. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 “End of sup­port for Office 2019 for Mac”. Microsoft Support. Microsoft. Retrieved 2026 – 05-30.

↑ Spataro, Jared (2018 – 09-24). “Office 2019 is now avail­able for Windows and Mac”. Microsoft 365 Blog. Microsoft. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ “Buy Office Home & Student 2019”. Microsoft Store. Microsoft. Archived from the orig­i­nal on 2020 – 01-05. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ 7.0 7.1 “Office 2021 - Microsoft Lifecycle”. Microsoft Learn. Microsoft. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Obomsawin, Jimmy (2026 – 05-21). “Microsoft is dis­abling Office 2019 for Mac on July 13, 2026”. JimmyTech. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 K, Sudhanshu (2026 – 05-16). “Using an older Apple de­vice? Microsoft Office is tak­ing away edit­ing fea­tures soon”. PiunikaWeb. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ Neely, Amber (2026 – 05-28). “Microsoft is killing Office 2019 for Mac and iPhone, and you can’t do much about it”. AppleInsider. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

↑ “Office 2019 switch­ing to view-only mode, what to do?”. TidBITS Talk. 2026 – 05-16. Retrieved 2026 – 05-29.

The hard part of writ­ing soft­ware has never been the writ­ing. It was build­ing a work­ing model of the do­main in your head first. Before you could ship a pay­roll sys­tem you had to un­der­stand gar­nish­ments and pre-tax de­duc­tions and what hap­pens when some­one’s pay pe­riod strad­dles a rate change. Before you could ship a tran­sit app you had to learn what a GTFS feed is, why a trip and a route aren’t the same thing, and how a bus that’s “on time” can still be wrong. The code was a tran­scrip­tion of that un­der­stand­ing. Acquiring the un­der­stand­ing was the job.

Agentic AI sev­ered the link be­tween the two. You can now pro­duce the soft­ware with­out ever build­ing the model, and that breaks an as­sump­tion the whole pro­fes­sion was or­ga­nized around.

The stan­dard take, in­clud­ing my own from last year, is that these tools am­plify se­nior de­vel­op­ers be­cause se­nior de­vel­op­ers have judg­ment. True, but in­com­plete. What I’ve watched hap­pen since is more spe­cific and more in­ter­est­ing: the bind­ing con­straint has moved from can you build it to can you tell whether it’s right.

Think about who can ac­tu­ally use one of these tools well. Picture two peo­ple.

The first is a do­main ex­pert with no real soft­ware back­ground. A lo­gis­tics dis­patcher, a clin­i­cal coder, an ac­tu­ary. They can’t read a stack trace and they could­n’t tell you the dif­fer­ence be­tween a hash map and a list. But they can look at a sched­ule the agent gen­er­ated and know in­stantly that no dri­ver can legally work that shift, or that a claim with those codes would never pay. They know the cor­rect out­puts for a given set of in­puts be­cause they’ve spent ten years liv­ing in those in­puts and out­puts. Hand them an agent and they are star­tlingly ef­fec­tive, be­cause the thing they’re miss­ing, the abil­ity to pro­duce code, is ex­actly the thing the agent sup­plies. What they bring is the thing the agent can’t: the ground truth.

The sec­ond is a strong gen­er­al­ist en­gi­neer who has never worked in the do­main. They can ar­chi­tect any­thing, they know re­li­a­bil­ity and test­ing and how to keep a sys­tem from falling over at 2am. But drop them into clin­i­cal cod­ing and they can­not tell a plau­si­ble-look­ing wrong an­swer from a right one. The agent will hap­pily gen­er­ate a billing rule that com­piles, passes the tests the en­gi­neer thought to write, and is sub­tly, ex­pen­sively in­cor­rect. The en­gi­neer has no or­a­cle. They can ver­ify that the soft­ware is well-built. They can­not ver­ify that it’s cor­rect, be­cause cor­rect­ness here is de­fined en­tirely by a do­main they don’t hold in their head.

Notice which way this cuts. Pre-agent, the en­gi­neer had a path the dis­patcher did­n’t: they could go learn the do­main. Slowly, painfully, by shad­ow­ing ex­perts and read­ing specs and get­ting things wrong in pro­duc­tion, they would build the men­tal model and then they could build the sys­tem. That path was the whole ca­reer lad­der in a lot of fields. The do­main ex­pert had no equiv­a­lent path, be­cause learn­ing to build re­li­able soft­ware is years of work they were never go­ing to do.

Agentic tools col­lapsed one of those paths and not the other. The en­gi­neer’s ad­van­tage, the abil­ity to trans­late a do­main model into work­ing code, is now cheap. The do­main ex­pert’s ad­van­tage, know­ing what right looks like, is not. You can’t prompt your way to it. There’s no skill file that con­tains the tacit knowl­edge of a per­son who has rec­on­ciled a thou­sand pay­rolls.

So the most valu­able per­son in this new world is the one who has both skills be­cause they can ver­ify at both lay­ers. They know the gen­er­ated code is sound and they know the an­swers it pro­duces are true. They can write the test that en­codes “a dri­ver can’t ex­ceed eleven hours” be­cause they know the rule, and they can tell that the test it­self is mean­ing­ful be­cause they know what they’re test­ing. The agent does the tran­scrip­tion. They do the judg­ing, twice.

If you’re an ex­pe­ri­enced en­gi­neer bet­ting on where to spend the next few years, this is the bet. The me­chan­i­cal skill you sweated for, turn­ing a clear idea into clean code, has got­ten dra­mat­i­cally less valu­able. The thing that’s still scarce is a deep, ver­i­fied model of some real do­main. Go get one. Pick an in­dus­try, an in­stru­ment, a reg­u­la­tory regime, a phys­i­cal process, and learn it the way you once learned a pro­gram­ming lan­guage or frame­work. That’s the part the agent can’t do for you, and it’s the part that’s now worth the most.

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To my amaze­ment, I found a fully solid rock that eerily re­sem­bles a seashell at the base of a cliff in the Alghat desert, Saudi Arabia. I did­n’t know what to make of it at first, it had the swirls and shape of a seashell but was fully a rock, more im­por­tantly, it should­n’t be here; the near­est coast­line is Dammam’s, 500 km away.

This looks im­pos­si­ble

Carbonate rocks (e.g. lime­stone), ma­rine fos­sils, coral fos­sils, and sed­i­men­tary struc­tures (like rip­ples or bio­tur­ba­tion) all ex­ist in and around Alghat, which points to the fact that parts of the Arabian Peninsula were once sub­merged un­der the sea. Specifically in the late Jurassic age (~150 mil­lion years ago)[1].

Stratigraphic dis­tri­b­u­tion fig­ure of ar­eas near Najd[1]

Nevertheless, I was still su­per cu­ri­ous about the fos­sil I found; what an­i­mal in­hab­ited it? what did it look like back in the Jurassic age? any mod­ern rel­a­tives or looka­likes?

The proper way of an­swer­ing these ques­tions is to con­duct a de­tailed analy­sis of the fos­sil (e.g. via in­spect­ing the sed­i­ment it was found in, its shape, etc.), this should be done by an ex­pert pa­le­on­tol­o­gist. However, I know no pa­le­on­tol­ogy, or any pa­le­on­tol­o­gist, so I fig­ured I could DIY it my­self (how hard could it be..?), though I’ll do it strictly via its shape — or what’s called its mor­phol­ogy. Morphology alone is prob­a­bly not ac­cu­rate enough to dis­cern lin­eage as dif­fer­ent species might looka­like but are from dif­fer­ent lin­eages, so this is prob­a­bly not the best way to do it, but it sounded fun and in­tu­itive, so I gave it a try.

Concretely, I plan on:

Mathematically rep­re­sent­ing the shape of a shell

Defining a dis­tance met­ric be­tween shapes (so that I can find shells sim­i­lar to the fos­sil’s)

Mapping out the space of shapes

7894 dif­fer­ent species and 59244 im­ages of shells were in the Zhang, et al. shell dataset[2]; good enough for me!

Capturing ‘shape’ is ac­tu­ally a very hard prob­lem; any ob­ject can be ro­tated by pitch, yaw, roll, scaled, and trans­lated. Before start­ing any sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, I fol­lowed a guide­line to iso­late the shape from other fac­tors

The shell must be cen­tered to the mid­point of the pic­ture

The scale of the shell must be equiv­a­lent across all im­ages (specifically, the max­i­mum dis­tance from the ori­gin is 1)

Orientation is the hard­est part

Pitch and yaw can be fixed by only choos­ing sam­ples where the shel­l’s open­ing is fac­ing the cam­era. This is not per­fect, but I found the dataset to be pretty con­sis­tent with its an­gles Roll is dif­fi­cult. A shell can be ro­tated in any way around the axis (even whilst the open­ing is fac­ing the cam­era). My fix was to use the longest ra­dius as the ref­er­ence point, and ro­tate the shell so that the longest ra­dius is al­ways on the right. This is not per­fect ei­ther, but it was good enough for me.

Pitch and yaw can be fixed by only choos­ing sam­ples where the shel­l’s open­ing is fac­ing the cam­era. This is not per­fect, but I found the dataset to be pretty con­sis­tent with its an­gles

Roll is dif­fi­cult. A shell can be ro­tated in any way around the axis (even whilst the open­ing is fac­ing the cam­era). My fix was to use the longest ra­dius as the ref­er­ence point, and ro­tate the shell so that the longest ra­dius is al­ways on the right. This is not per­fect ei­ther, but it was good enough for me.

Then, I ex­tracted the con­tour of the shell to 256 points rel­a­tive to the cen­ter. This way, each shell is rep­re­sented by a 256x2 ma­trix, where each row is the (x, y) co­or­di­nates of a point on the con­tour. Example:

> con­tours[0].shape

(256, 2)

> con­tours[0].tolist()[:5]

[-0.38561132550239563, 0.9804982542991638], [-0.4204626679420471, 0.9785506725311279], [-0.4553140103816986, 0.976603090763092], [-0.4901654124259949, 0.9746555089950562], [-0.5230183005332947, 0.9685550928115845]]

Normalization pipeline

Naturally, the dis­tance be­tween two shells s1 and s2 is squared eu­clid­ean dis­tance be­tween their con­tour points:

$$ d(s1, s2) = {\sum_{256} (s1.x_i - s2.x_i)^2 + (s1.y_i - s2.y_i)^2} $$

Representing the space will re­quire 256 di­men­sions, which is a lit­tle more than just the 2 I need to plot it over x and y. Given the nor­mal­ized shell con­tour above, it’s clear that many of these di­men­sions are re­dun­dant (for in­stance, the space of all pos­si­ble 256 con­tour points al­lows in­ter­sec­tion, while the space of pos­si­ble shells does­n’t, AFAIK), so the space of pos­si­ble shells can be con­densed into a smaller la­tent space. To drive my point home, I’ll show three ex­am­ples of fully ran­dom con­tours (i.e. pseudo-ran­dom points around the ori­gin).

Probably not a real shell

Dimensionality re­duc­tion tech­niques map the orig­i­nal 256 di­men­sions onto a smaller num­ber of di­men­sions (e.g. 2 or 3) while try­ing to pre­serve the dis­tance be­tween shells as much as pos­si­ble. One such tech­nique I’ll be us­ing is Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Here’s an ex­cel­lent frag­ment that ex­plains how PCA works: https://​stats.stack­ex­change.com/​ques­tions/​2691/​mak­ing-sense-of-prin­ci­pal-com­po­nent-analy­sis-eigen­vec­tors-eigen­val­ues/​140579#140579.

After ap­ply­ing PCA, I re­tained 56.50% of the vari­ance us­ing only the first prin­ci­pal com­po­nent (PC1), and 67.25% us­ing the first two. This means we can de­scribe a shel­l’s shape by only two num­bers, and be pretty close to the orig­i­nal shape!

The in­ter­est­ing part is try­ing to un­der­stand what these two num­bers mean; di­men­sion 1 in the orig­i­nal 256-dimensional space an­no­tates the lo­ca­tion of the first con­tour point of the shell, whereas di­men­sion 1 of the la­tent space an­no­tates a high-level fea­ture, learned by the PCA al­go­rithm. We can vi­su­ally try to un­der­stand what PCA di­men­sion PC1 rep­re­sents by find­ing two shells, di­a­met­ri­cally op­po­site in the PC1 di­men­sion, yet sim­i­lar in all other di­men­sions.

Essentially, we want to find two shells i and j such that the fol­low­ing score is max­i­mized:

$$ \text{score}(i,j) = \frac{|z_{i,1} - z_{j,1}|} {|\mathbf{z}_{i,2:k} - \mathbf{z}_{j,2:k}|_2} $$

PC1 seems to cap­ture the ‘pointiness’ of the shell, i.e. more than 50% of vari­ance in shell shapes can be ex­plained by how pointy they are. PC2 seems to cap­ture the sym­me­try of the shell, or per­haps the mass dis­tri­b­u­tion over the ver­ti­cal axis. I’ll leave the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the other di­men­sions as an ex­er­cise for the reader (I have no idea).

And now for the grand fi­nale, we can plot the shells in the la­tent space, and see where our Alghat fos­sil fits in it. But first, for dra­matic ten­sion, I will dis­cuss the plot.

The plot rep­re­sents PC1 on the x-axis and PC2 on the y-axis, while color rep­re­sents the rough­ness of a shell (computed as the dif­fer­ence in slope be­tween con­sec­u­tive points). The fol­low­ing ob­ser­va­tions are worth not­ing:

Negative PC1 val­ues (representing round­ness) are way more com­mon than pos­i­tive PC1 val­ues (representing poin­ti­ness). Yet round­ness is less di­verse and oc­cu­pies less space than pointy shells

Pointy shells seem to be way more rough than round shells

Negative PC1 val­ues al­ways have PC2 val­ues close to zero; no shell in the dataset has a round but asym­met­ric shape. Below, I will pro­ject those shells back from la­tent space to the shape space, imag­in­ing im­pos­si­ble shells

Map of shell la­tent space with ex­am­ple shells

Modifying Principal Components against the mean shell

Projecting ‘impossible’ shells

So, what shell most closely re­sem­bles our Alghat fos­sil? It’s Sphincterochila can­didis­sima (try to pro­nounce it). However, it is re­ally young, nowhere near the Jurassic age; in­stead, the ear­li­est fos­sil of it dates back 38 mil­lion years ago[4]. Ultimately, shape is not the best way of de­ter­min­ing shell lin­eage, but its eerie sim­i­lar­ity to the Alghat fos­sil is still fas­ci­nat­ing, and per­haps points to some sort of con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion, where two dif­fer­ent species evolve to have sim­i­lar shapes due to sim­i­lar en­vi­ron­men­tal pres­sures.

Left: Alghat fos­sil com­pared, Right: Sphincterochila can­didis­sima[3]

Explore the tool

Feel free to ex­plore the tool and try to fig­ure out where a shell of your choice fits in the shell la­tent space!

https://​shell.hawzen.me

References

Aba Alkhayl, S. S. (2022). Marine macro-in­ver­te­brate fos­sils from the Lower Hanifa Formation (Hawtah Member), cen­tral Saudi Arabia. Arabian Journal of Geosciences, 15, 1410. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s12517 – 022-10581-w

Zhang, Q., Zhou, J., He, J. et al. A shell dataset, for shell fea­tures ex­trac­tion and recog­ni­tion. Sci Data 6, 226 (2019). https://​doi.org/​10.1038/​s41597 – 019-0230 – 3

https://​en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Sphinc­te­rochi­la_­can­didis­sima

Tracey, S., Todd, J. A., & Erwin, D. H. (1993). Mollusca: Gastropoda. In M. J. Benton (Ed.), The Fossil Record 2 (pp. 131 – 167). London: Chapman &

What a good web­site does.

A plat­form-ag­nos­tic spec­i­fi­ca­tion of the tech­ni­cal fea­tures every de­cent web­site should have — from <title> to /.well-known/security.txt, from WCAG con­trast to llms.txt. Written for hu­mans and agents.

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Ten ar­eas, mapped to widely-ac­cepted stan­dards.

All top­ics →

Foundations 14 The HTML, head, and doc­u­ment ba­sics every page needs.

Foundations

14

The HTML, head, and doc­u­ment ba­sics every page needs.

SEO 13 Search vis­i­bil­ity — ro­bots.txt, sitemaps, canon­i­cals, struc­tured data.

SEO

13

Search vis­i­bil­ity — ro­bots.txt, sitemaps, canon­i­cals, struc­tured data.

Accessibility 20 WCAG-aligned rules so peo­ple of all abil­i­ties can use the site.

Accessibility

20

WCAG-aligned rules so peo­ple of all abil­i­ties can use the site.

Security 12 Headers, trans­port, and poli­cies that keep vis­i­tors safe.

Security

12

Headers, trans­port, and poli­cies that keep vis­i­tors safe.

Well-Known URIs 9 Standard, agreed-upon paths un­der /.well-known/.

Well-Known URIs

9

Standard, agreed-upon paths un­der /.well-known/.

Agent Readiness 18 Things that make a site leg­i­ble to AI agents and crawlers.

Agent Readiness

18

Things that make a site leg­i­ble to AI agents and crawlers.

Performance 19 Core Web Vitals, caching, im­ages, fonts, net­work be­hav­iour.

Performance

19

Core Web Vitals, caching, im­ages, fonts, net­work be­hav­iour.

Privacy 6 Consent, sig­nals, and re­spect­ing vis­i­tor choice.

Privacy

6

Consent, sig­nals, and re­spect­ing vis­i­tor choice.

Resilience 5 Graceful fail­ure — er­ror pages, of­fline, redi­rects.

Resilience

5

Graceful fail­ure — er­ror pages, of­fline, redi­rects.

Internationalisation 12 Language, lo­cale, di­rec­tion, and trans­lated con­tent.

Internationalisation

12

Language, lo­cale, di­rec­tion, and trans­lated con­tent.

Standards, not opin­ions

Each topic links back to the source stan­dard — WHATWG, W3C, IETF RFCs, WCAG, MDN, and the or­gan­i­sa­tions defin­ing the mod­ern web.

Platform ag­nos­tic

Whether you ship WordPress, Drupal, TYPO3, Next.js, Astro, Hugo, a Django app, or plain HTML, the spec is the spec. Implementation hints fol­low it, not the other way round.

Built in the open

Every page has an Edit on GitHub link. PRs wel­come. Sources cred­ited on every page.

Let your agent query the spec.

The whole spec is avail­able as an open MCP server — read-only, no auth — plus a pub­lished Agent Skill that teaches any com­pat­i­ble agent when and how to use it. Per-page Markdown is avail­able via /llms.txt and Accept: text/​mark­down on any spec URL.

{ “mcpServers”: { “specification-website”: { “transport”: “http”, “url”: “https://​mcp.spec­i­fi­ca­tion.web­site/​mcp” } } }

How to use this site

01 Audit Run through the check­list. Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.”

Audit

Run through the check­list. Each item is a “does the site do this — yes or no.”

02 Learn Click into any item for what it is, why it mat­ters, and how to im­ple­ment it.

Learn

Click into any item for what it is, why it mat­ters, and how to im­ple­ment it.

03 Improve Found a gap, a stale fact, or a miss­ing topic? Open a PR. Sources re­quired.

Improve

Found a gap, a stale fact, or a miss­ing topic? Open a PR. Sources re­quired.

The Story of Shantell Sans

Shantell Sans mixes vari­able axes for Weight, Italic, Informality, and Bounce to de­liver a wide ar­ray of font styles, from friendly, read­able, every­day ty­po­graphic work­horses to strik­ing, high-en­ergy, ex­per­i­men­tal styles meant es­pe­cially for an­i­ma­tion.

This is the story be­hind its in­spi­ra­tion and cre­ation.

Why make a new font?

Shantell Martin, Artist

One of my first re­la­tion­ships with words was back in el­e­men­tary school. We did spelling tests every week. Since I never passed them, I had to sit in de­ten­tion.

Despite be­ing scared of the spelling tests, I loved words. I wrote and drew a lot. I knew that words helped me to ex­press my feel­ings and feel bet­ter. Since I was writ­ing for my­self, I did­n’t have to care about spelling.

When I was 20 or 21, I found out that I was dyslexic. When I started my art de­gree at Central Saint Martins in London, I was in an en­vi­ron­ment where it felt like the ma­jor­ity of peo­ple were dyslexic. I was in­stantly part of a cool group of cre­ative peo­ple. However, I was dis­ap­pointed about the amount of teach­ers who had never spot­ted my read­ing chal­lenges. Instead of sup­port­ing me to learn to read and write, they pun­ished me.

Creating my own font was a way to em­power peo­ple to read and write, de­spite their re­la­tion­ship to words. What if I take my words, or my hand­writ­ing or the let­ters that I’ve cre­ated, and make a font that is fun and play­ful, but also pro­fes­sional and us­able? I wanted to make a font that feels ac­ces­si­ble and open to re­mind peo­ple, in­clud­ing my­self, that words are draw­ings and that words can ex­ist on our own terms.

I was in­spired by the Comic Sans type­face. Since I was a kid, I have liked how play­ful and easy it was to read text in Comic Sans, es­pe­cially for me as a dyslexic.

I think we have an emo­tional re­sponse to fonts. A font might feel eas­ier to read, or it feels more wel­com­ing. Or it feels like some­thing I want to look at or pick up. I def­i­nitely like fonts that have a lit­tle bit more space, be­cause they feel more ap­proach­able. If you have a re­ally tiny, fancy font, I don’t want to touch it.

The us­age of a font can make that font take on a cer­tain per­son­al­ity. If you’re very dyslexic, you’re likely not go­ing to pick up a book printed in a tiny font with words very close to­gether. It feels in­tim­i­dat­ing. Or if the font is very plain and bor­ing, it does­n’t cap­ture your at­ten­tion enough to want to spend time with it.

To start this pro­ject, Stephen Nixon sent me a tem­plate, with lines on it for me to hand­write all of the Latin al­pha­bet, num­bers, and sym­bols. He used my hand­writ­ing to cre­ate a dig­i­tal font.

Giving the font away

To make the font as use­ful as pos­si­ble, I am re­leas­ing Shantell Sans un­der an open font li­cense. It’s my gift to the world. Having the font be avail­able with­out charge means that a wide va­ri­ety of peo­ple will have ac­cess to Shantell Sans. It also means that the font will be widely avail­able through Google Fonts and other plat­forms.

I wanted to cre­ate a type­face by a liv­ing artist, and per­haps in­spire other liv­ing artists to cre­ate their own ty­pog­ra­phy. I’m cu­ri­ous to see what peo­ple will do with it. I’m giv­ing up con­trol over some­thing that is in­nately mine since Shantell Sans is based on my hand­writ­ing and is quite per­sonal.

I would re­ally love to see chil­dren and young adults use Shantell Sans and learn about how it came about. I want to see it be­ing used for per­sonal pro­jects, or even big­ger de­sign pro­jects. I think with some­thing like this, when you put it out into the wild, it’s go­ing to be used in ways that you prob­a­bly did­n’t even think of.

Early uses of Shantell Sans

I have started to use Shantell Sans in some of my pro­jects. I de­signed key tags with Shantell Sans type for the Whitney Museum shop in New York City.

Working with Cash App, a fi­nan­cial ser­vices plat­form, I helped cre­ate a cash card. The cash tag and the num­bers and every­thing on the back of the card is in Shantell Sans.

Beyond that, a few other brands have started to find cre­ative uses for Shantell Sans.

It’s been used by tl­draw, a col­lab­o­ra­tive draw­ing app on the web, as the pri­mary font for writ­ing.

It’s also been made into a web-build­ing tem­plate by univer.se, an app that lets users build web­sites on their phone.

And now, Shantell Sans is avail­able via Google Fonts, Google Docs, and as a down­load from its open repo on GitHub — so any­one can start cre­at­ing with it.

If you do make some­thing with Shantell Sans and post it to so­cial me­dia, use the hash­tag #shantellsans — I’d love to see what you cre­ate!

Design Process

Stephen Nixon, type de­signer & font de­vel­oper (ArrowType)

I felt both hon­ored and keenly in­ter­ested when Shantell first reached out to me ask­ing for a cus­tom font, say­ing that she was “looking to make a us­able, vi­su­ally pleas­ing, smart, cre­ative type­face.” I first en­coun­tered Shantell’s work in the form of large-scale mu­rals, which I love for their ex­ploratory, semi-spon­ta­neous, and play­ful line art­work, and I was so ex­cited to learn about Shantell’s wider range of cre­ative and tech­no­log­i­cal work.

We chat­ted a bit about what that type­face might be, but what truly caught my at­ten­tion were four words: Shantell said she wanted to make “a new Comic Sans.”

Heck yes — that was a prompt I could get into. Few type­faces have reached the lev­els of cul­tural ubiq­uity as Comic Sans. Everyone has feel­ings about it — whether pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive. In my mind, a mark of a suc­cess­ful cre­ative work is that it elic­its an emo­tional re­sponse. If you love Comic Sans, you prob­a­bly find it fun and ap­proach­able in a way that most stiff, ul­tra-se­ri­ous type­faces can’t match. If you hate Comic Sans, maybe ask your­self why. Is it re­ally ob­jec­tively bad, or can a type­face be good in more ways than you may have con­sid­ered?

Like most suc­cess­ful type­faces, Comic Sans was ac­tu­ally made for a very spe­cific pur­pose, be­fore gain­ing adop­tion far be­yond that ini­tial use case. Comic Sans was de­signed by Vincent Connare in 1994 as a font for Microsoft Bob, which was soft­ware in­tended to pro­vide a more-ap­proach­able user in­ter­face for Windows. As de­scribed on Wikipedia:

Microsoft Bob pre­sented screens show­ing a “house,” with “rooms” that the user could go to con­tain­ing fa­mil­iar ob­jects cor­re­spond­ing to com­puter ap­pli­ca­tions—for in­stance, a desk with pen and pa­per, a check­book, and other items. In this case, click­ing on the pen and pa­per would open the word proces­sor. … A car­toon dog named Rover and other car­toon char­ac­ters pro­vided guid­ance us­ing speech bal­loons.

Microsoft Bob pre­sented screens show­ing a “house,” with “rooms” that the user could go to con­tain­ing fa­mil­iar ob­jects cor­re­spond­ing to com­puter ap­pli­ca­tions—for in­stance, a desk with pen and pa­per, a check­book, and other items. In this case, click­ing on the pen and pa­per would open the word proces­sor. … A car­toon dog named Rover and other car­toon char­ac­ters pro­vided guid­ance us­ing speech bal­loons.

Microsoft Bob was re­leased be­fore Comic Sans could be com­pleted, and Bob it­self did­n’t last long due to luke­warm re­cep­tion by re­view­ers and users. However, Comic Sans went on to be pre-in­stalled in both Windows and Mac op­er­at­ing sys­tems, where its unique ap­pear­ance has since en­deared it to a vast amount of users, mak­ing it used in every­thing from the tags on Ty Beanie Babies (from the 5th gen­er­a­tion on) to a 2012 CERN pre­sen­ta­tion on the Higgs Boson par­ti­cle.

To be clear, the Shantell Sans pro­ject was never re­ally about mak­ing a new ver­sion of Comic Sans, or any­thing di­rectly de­rived from it. Rather, we sought to iden­tify what makes Comic Sans so pop­u­lar, and ap­ply a few of those lessons to a to­tally new font.

Design Goals

But what might “a new Comic Sans” re­ally mean, to­day? And, how could that type­face ex­tend nat­u­rally from Shantell Martin’s artis­tic uni­verse? These ques­tions led to the fol­low­ing de­sign goals:

The font should ap­peal to every­day com­puter users — not just to ty­pog­ra­phy en­thu­si­asts.

The font should be easy to use in a wide va­ri­ety of com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

The font should be us­able and avail­able to a wide range of peo­ple.

The font should be leg­i­ble and easy to read.

The font should do some­thing new, rather than sim­ply re­hash old ter­ri­tory.

1. Everyday Appeal

For the font to have an every­day ap­peal, it should be based on felt-tip marker hand­writ­ing, sim­i­lar to Comic Sans. For this, Shantell’s hand­writ­ing was a per­fect place to start from. We worked to keep some of the quirks of that writ­ing, while also sim­pli­fy­ing the over­all look into some­thing true to a dig­i­tal form.

2. Easy to Use

For the font to be easy to use in a wide va­ri­ety of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, it should align to typ­i­cal ex­pec­ta­tions of pro­por­tions and styles for a mod­ern font. To ac­com­plish this, we set the font met­rics of Shantell Sans (like cap-height, x-height, and de­fault line height) to be close to those of com­monly used fonts, such as Roboto. To keep things eas­ily read­able and to keep vi­su­ally con­sis­tent with Shantell’s writ­ing, we used slightly wider-than-av­er­age glyph widths and spac­ing.

These de­ci­sions help make Shantell Sans easy to use in every­day sce­nar­ios like web­sites, apps, pre­sen­ta­tions, and more. It has enough per­son­al­ity to be strik­ing in large sizes, but is care­fully made to work well in smaller text.

3. Usable and Available

For the font to be us­able by a wide range of peo­ple, it should sup­port a wide range of lan­guages. Shantell Sans fol­lows (and slightly ex­ceeds) the Google Fonts glyph­sets Latin Plus and Cyrillic Plus, so it sup­ports 380+ lan­guages us­ing Latin & Cyrillic scripts, through­out Europe, the Americas, and cen­tral Asia.

To make the font avail­able to the widest range of peo­ple pos­si­ble, we de­cided to re­lease it as a free to use, open-source font. Releasing un­der an OFL li­cense, with sup­port from Google Fonts, helped make this pos­si­ble.

4. Easy to Read

To make sure the font met Shantell’s goals of mak­ing an easy-to-read font, I made sure that the char­ac­ters could be dis­tin­guished from one an­other. Shantell nat­u­rally writes let­ters like b, d, p, q and n and u that are clearly dif­fer­en­ti­ated from one an­other through a con­trast of sim­ple shapes and well-placed exit strokes. Shantell some­times writes the up­per­case I and nu­meral 1 as only straight lines. To keep these let­ters dis­tinct, I added ser­ifs to the up­per­case I and a flag to 1”

The low­er­case n and u are dif­fer­en­ti­ated be­cause the n has a typ­i­cal, “zig-zag” form, while the u has a sim­pli­fied form with­out a tail or exit stroke.

As you might ex­pect in a hand­writ­ten font, the a and g use the sin­gle-story forms that kids tend to learn in school, keep­ing the font friendly and fa­mil­iar.

5. Do some­thing new

To do some­thing new, the font should have not only a good range of weights. This wide styl­is­tic range should be avail­able in a vari­able font to also of­fer more cre­ative util­ity to de­sign­ers & de­vel­op­ers will­ing to ex­plore a lit­tle more in the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of mod­ern ty­pog­ra­phy.

To take the cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ties even fur­ther, I wanted to see how I might bring in some of the free, or­ganic spirit of Shantell’s work into some ex­per­i­men­tal axes within such a vari­able font.

And fi­nally, to make sure the type­face would sup­port the needs of de­tailed ty­pog­ra­phy, it had to also in­clude OpenType fea­tures like tab­u­lar vs pro­por­tional fig­ures, frac­tions, and lo­cal­ized forms.

Beyond just my many feel­ings to­wards Comic Sans, I felt in­cred­i­bly lucky to have the chance to cre­ate a font based on the hand­writ­ing of an artist who uses lines & let­ters in a unique, fa­mil­iar-yet-un­fa­mil­iar way. I love hand­writ­ing-based fonts like Inkwell, Cortado , and Studio Lettering, and I wanted to bring some of the craft and de­tails of such “elevated” hand­writ­ing fonts into the pro­ject, rather than mak­ing yet an­other auto-traced felt marker font. (Though, those fonts also have their place!)

Design & Production

After es­tab­lish­ing some core goals of the pro­ject with Shantell, we set to work.

Shantell chose a fa­vorite medium-sized felt tip marker (Staedtler Lumocolor M) and wrote sev­eral up­per­case & low­er­case pan­grams (sentences in­clud­ing all let­ters of the al­pha­bet). She also wrote strings of num­bers, punc­tu­a­tion, and sym­bols, plus a few words with ac­cented char­ac­ters.

She scanned these, and I set to work trac­ing them — start­ing with a cen­tered line through the pen strokes, then ex­pand­ing this into Light and ExtraBold strokes. Because Shantell’s orig­i­nal writ­ing in­cludes a lot more vari­a­tion in siz­ing and rhythm than the fonts we are all used to read­ing, I sub­tly mod­i­fied the char­ac­ter pro­por­tions to have some­what-nor­mal­ized, con­sis­tent heights, widths, and spac­ing. But, key as­pects of let­ter shap­ing were re­tained, like the way the cross­bars Shantell’s t and f don’t go left of the main stems, the way the A and R start from the top left but the P is a sim­ple loop start­ing from the bot­tom left, and the way the M and W are con­tin­u­ous waves rather than sep­a­rate di­ag­o­nal strokes.

We then ex­plored which di­rec­tion to go in, aes­thet­i­cally: should the glyphs be truly mono­lin­ear, with cir­cu­lar end­caps — sim­i­lar to Comic Sans — or should they re­tain more of the or­ganic, some­times sharp shap­ing of the felt-marker writ­ing? Neither ex­treme felt quite right, so we opted to go for some­thing in the mid­dle: strokes are drawn with a lit­tle bit of the sharp­ness and con­trast that helps make Shantell’s writ­ing so en­gag­ing, but they are also made a lit­tle more uni­form in thick­ness and given soft­ened, semi-rounded end­ings. This strikes a bal­ance, re­tain­ing a sense of marker writ­ing while also be­ing ap­proach­able and warm in their dig­i­tal form.

New vari­able axes

Once we had a solid ba­sis for the pro­ject, I worked back­wards a lit­tle bit: I made ad­di­tional styles that took those “normalized” fonts and rein­tro­duced some of the ir­reg­u­lar­ity of the scanned hand­writ­ing sam­ples. You might ex­pect this ir­reg­u­lar­ity to be to­tally ran­dom, but it ac­tu­ally had cer­tain re­peat­ing traits.

Letters with more hor­i­zon­tal strokes (like the E and e) tended to be taller than oth­ers while let­ters with more ver­ti­cal strokes (like the M and W) tended to be wider and shorter. Simple shapes (like the P) tended to be smaller, while hor­i­zon­tal bars (like on the G, R, and t) tended to ex­tend in a quick, long exit stroke. I still did­n’t want to make the font too chaotic to be use­ful, so it was a bal­anc­ing act to pull in more per­son­al­ity, but still keep things “font-like.”

With these “main sources” cre­ated, I then en­tered an­other, some­what more nerdy phase of the pro­ject: us­ing Python code to gen­er­ate the sources I could build into the full set of work­ing vari­able & sta­tic fonts. Normally, there would­n’t be any sep­a­ra­tion be­tween the drawn sources and the build­able sources, but Shantell Sans is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. The fi­nal fonts in­clude styl­is­tic axes for Bounce and Informality, and these aren’t styles I drew en­tirely by hand. Instead, a script was used to A) make Bouncy styles in which glyphs are shifted up or down, and B) make Informal styles in which glyphs are in­ter­po­lated be­tween the “normalized” & “irregular” main sources. All sources were given sev­eral al­ter­nates of let­ters, nu­mer­als, and key sym­bols, so that the fi­nal fonts could ro­tate be­tween these al­ter­nates in a pseudo-ran­dom way, ul­ti­mately giv­ing the ap­pear­ance of en­er­getic writ­ing. As these are vari­able axes, this ef­fect can be ap­plied with a range from sub­tle to pro­nouced.

Was this last part nec­es­sary? Probably not. Was it easy? Nope. Is it cool? I think so! Aside from its ob­vi­ous and fun pos­si­bil­i­ties of bouncy and/​or ir­reg­u­lar ty­pog­ra­phy, these ex­per­i­men­tal styles en­able an­i­mated type that does­n’t just sit still, but rather pulses and un­du­lates in a fa­mil­iar-yet-un­fa­mil­iar way. Sure, this type of an­i­ma­tion could be achieved with any font with enough work in After Effects or through ma­nip­u­la­tion with JavaScript, but like many things in type, the value here is that it makes a new aes­thetic avail­able in a way that is not only easy to use but also deeply con­sid­ered along with the de­sign of a co­he­sive sys­tem.

Extending the type­face for Google Fonts and open-source re­lease

Because Shantell was in­ter­ested in re­leas­ing Shantell Sans as an open-source pro­ject, we reached out to see if Google Fonts might be in­ter­ested in spon­sor­ing a few ex­ten­sions to make the type­face even more use­ful to an even wider au­di­ence.

With sup­port from Google Fonts, we ex­tended the styl­is­tic range of the type­face, cre­at­ing a full set of Italic styles. We also added in a new, ex­per­i­men­tal axis: Spacing, which adds ex­tra spac­ing be­tween let­ters. This can be use­ful in soft­ware that does­n’t sup­port that op­tion by de­fault.

Best of all, we also ex­tended the fonts to in­clude wider lan­guage sup­port: the Latin script was ex­panded with Vietnamese char­ac­ters and many more cur­rency sym­bols, but even more no­tably, a whole new set of lan­guages was given sup­port through the ad­di­tion of Cyrillics!

Designing Shantell Sans Cyrillic

Anya Danilova, Type Designer

Cyrillic is the script of many lan­guages in Eurasia: Bulgarian, Serbian, Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Bashkir and many more.

The process of de­sign­ing for Cyrillic is rel­a­tively sim­i­lar to de­sign­ing for Latin, un­like for ex­am­ple de­sign­ing Arabic, where there is a very dif­fer­ent sys­tem of writ­ing. In Cyrillic, some glyphs are the same as in Latin, some re­quire more at­ten­tion, and some are easy to make. However, the process can be­come chal­leng­ing once we talk about un­con­ven­tional shapes or, in our case, about a type­face that was in­spired by the hand­writ­ing of a spe­cific per­son.

Working on an­other script for a hand­writ­ing type­face can feel some­what sim­i­lar to trans­lat­ing po­etry. When you trans­late a poem to an­other lan­guage, how can you save the unique tone of it while also us­ing the struc­ture of the lan­guage you are trans­lat­ing it to? Which as­pects are spe­cific to an au­thor, which are id­ioms, which are slang, and how can it be trans­lated to save its mean­ing and rhythm? I had sim­i­lar ques­tions while work­ing on Shantell Sans Cyrillic.

Cyrillic can be quite pro­lific with a va­ri­ety of shapes. There can be up­right (AKA “printed”), italic, and cur­sive shapes in Cyrillic. Some italic and cur­sive shapes are dif­fer­ent in struc­ture from the “usual” printed ones.

Shantell’s hand­writ­ing is a mix­ture of cur­sive and printed shapes, which is a com­mon thing: in the UK and in the US, chil­dren are taught first cur­sive shapes, then printed ones. My own hand­writ­ing is a mix­ture of two, as well. But, Shantell writes only in Latin, so I had to fig­ure out how to trans­late her shapes into Cyrillic. Which let­ters would be cur­sive, and which ones printed?

We asked Shantell to write a cou­ple of sen­tences in Russian, just to see her ap­proach to these un­fa­mil­iar shapes. I wanted to be as un­bi­ased as pos­si­ble, so I asked her to write a few words mul­ti­ple times, with dif­fer­ent shapes for the same let­ters.

I tried these let­ter­forms in the font. There were very few clear an­swers on what Cyrillic shapes should look like in Shantell Sans, so I ex­plored many ver­sions of char­ac­ters to com­pare shapes in text and in dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

It was a mat­ter of a feel­ing: some shapes felt right in this type­face, while oth­ers — even when they typ­i­cally should be writ­ten in a dif­fer­ent way — felt wrong. I had the plea­sure of con­sult­ing with fel­low Cyrillic type de­sign­ers Maria Doreuli, Krista Radoeva, and Alexei Vanyashin, and most of the time “the feel­ing” of right and wrong shapes was the same for us.

In Bulgarian and Serbian lan­guages, which usu­ally have some con­ven­tional shapes that dif­fer from de­fault Cyrillic, I had to give my at­ten­tion to the un­ex­pected ones: for ex­am­ple, the Bulgarian t that is usu­ally the same shape as the Latin m. I had to ad­just it, as in this par­tic­u­lar style and font it felt like it might be con­fused with the Cyrillic m.

Usually, shapes that look sim­i­lar in low­er­case and up­per­case have a sim­i­lar ap­proach, but in Shantell Sans, a lot of them are slightly dif­fer­ent, in or­der to keep the lively hand­writ­ing feel­ing. With let­ters like the Serbian nje, I had to be sure both shapes would look nat­ural to a na­tive reader. That’s why I also con­sulted de­signer Jovana Jocić for the Serbian lan­guage.

Overall, it was an in­cred­i­ble plea­sure to work on this pro­ject, and its many de­sign chal­lenges only made work­ing on Cyrillic more in­ter­est­ing.

I am ex­cited to see how this type­face would be used and hope to see it be­ing handy for type­set­ting in dif­fer­ent Cyrillic lan­guages as well as Latin.

Thanks for read­ing!

Hopefully, learn­ing about the back­ground of Shantell Sans helps you have a deeper ap­pre­ci­a­tion of not only this type­face, but of the type de­sign process more gen­er­ally.

Do you have a cre­ative idea that needs a font with some per­son­al­ity? Want to just take a new font for a spin and see where it takes you? Give Shantell Sans a try!

You can get Shantell Sans on Google Fonts or down­load the very lat­est ver­sion in the open-source repo.

You can also use Shantell Sans on Google Docs, Slides, and other Workspace prod­ucts:

In a doc­u­ment, open the font menu and click “More Fonts”

In the pop-up panel that opens, search for “Shantell Sans”

Click on the fam­ily to add it to your fonts menu

Note: The Google Material Design Blog has a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of this ar­ti­cle.

The page you have tried to ac­cess is not avail­able be­cause the owner of the file you are try­ing to ac­cess has ex­ceeded our short term band­width lim­its. Please try again shortly.

Actioning this file would cause “jbkempf.com//​blog/​2026/​dav2d/” to ex­ceed the per-day file ac­tions limit of 160000 ac­tions, try again later

Since about a week, Cloudflare Turnstile (their “Verify you’re hu­man” de­vice ver­i­fi­ca­tion) has been loop­ing in­def­i­nitely in my we­bkit-gtk based browser. Preventing ac­cess to quite few web­sites (previously, but it even went worse lately).

Turns out it’s be­cause Cloudflare wants to have a fin­ger­print of your de­vice via WebGL, the only rea­son for do­ing this would be track­ing.

Their pro-track­ing non-jus­ti­fi­ca­tion copied here just in case:

Turnstile uses browser fin­ger­print­ing to ver­ify you’re hu­man. Privacy tools that block or ran­dom­ize fin­ger­print­ing make your browser look like a bot try­ing to hide its iden­tity. Temporarily al­low­ing fin­ger­print­ing for this site will fix the is­sue.

Such things are blocked in WebKit, and have been for years. Meaning it’s track­ing so aw­ful that even Apple would block it, and as far as I can tell it’s not the kind of pri­vacy pro­tec­tion you can eas­ily dis­able in it. So Cloudflare just banned all WebKitGTK browsers as I guess they put an ex­cep­tion for Safari.

As an aside, if you’re won­der­ing, Mozilla Firefox screwed up their WebGL fin­ger­print­ing pro­tec­tion:

Bugzilla#1916271: Gecko re­veals san­i­tized GPU Characteristics; we­bkit and blink re­turn hard­coded strings for all users

Plus pri­vacy.re­sistfin­ger­print­ing is­n’t en­abled even when se­lect­ing “Strict” “Enhanced Privacy Protection” in the set­tings, great job there Mozilla. But I guess with it en­abled, pri­vacy-con­scious Firefox users might not be able to pass Cloudflare’s de­vice ver­i­fi­ca­tion in the fu­ture.

About AV2

AV2 is the next-gen­er­a­tion video cod­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tion from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foun­da­tion of AV1, AV2 is en­gi­neered to pro­vide su­pe­rior com­pres­sion ef­fi­ciency, en­abling high-qual­ity video de­liv­ery at sig­nif­i­cantly lower bi­trates. It is op­ti­mized for the evolv­ing de­mands of stream­ing, broad­cast­ing, and real-time video con­fer­enc­ing.

This spec­i­fi­ca­tion serves as the de­fin­i­tive tech­ni­cal ref­er­ence for AV2 im­ple­men­ta­tions. It out­lines the bit­stream syn­tax, se­man­tics, and de­cod­ing processes re­quired to en­sure full con­for­mance.

AV2 pro­vides en­hanced sup­port for AR/VR ap­pli­ca­tions, split-screen de­liv­ery of mul­ti­ple pro­grams, im­proved han­dling of screen con­tent, and an abil­ity to op­er­ate over a wider vi­sual qual­ity range.

To as­sist im­ple­menters, the AOMedia Video Model (AVM) serves as the of­fi­cial ref­er­ence soft­ware.

Available Versions

The AV2 Bitstream & Decoding Process Specification, ver­sion 1.0.0, with cor­re­spond­ing AVM ref­er­ence soft­ware.

An ear­lier de­vel­op­ment draft, su­per­seded by v1.0.0. The “v13” la­bel de­notes a work­ing-draft mile­stone and does not in­di­cate a ver­sion newer than 1.0.0. Retained here for ref­er­ence.

Using the Specification

Full Specification

The com­plete AV2 cod­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tion doc­u­ment in­cludes all sec­tions from scope and de­f­i­n­i­tions through an­nexes. It pro­vides com­pre­hen­sive cov­er­age of the for­mat, syn­tax, se­man­tics, and de­cod­ing process.

PDF Version

A self-con­tained PDF of the com­plete v1.0.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tion is avail­able for down­load and of­fline ref­er­ence.

Additional Tables

The Additional Tables are ex­tracted lookup ta­bles from sec­tion 9 as C header files, use­ful for im­ple­men­ta­tion ref­er­ence.

Syntax Browser

The syn­tax browser pro­vides a spe­cial­ized view of Sections 5 (Syntax Structures) and 6 (Semantics) in a split-pane in­ter­face. Features in­clude:

Side-by-side view of syn­tax de­f­i­n­i­tions and their se­man­tics

Clickable syn­tax el­e­ments for easy nav­i­ga­tion

Search func­tion­al­ity across both sec­tions

Copy-to-clipboard for syn­tax struc­tures

Reference Software

The ref­er­ence soft­ware, known as AVM, cor­re­spond­ing to this ver­sion of the spec­i­fi­ca­tion is the v1.0.0 tag.

Tens of mil­lions of peo­ple take cre­a­tine every day. They bought it for their mus­cles. They mea­sure their doses by how much weight they can add to a bench press or how quickly they re­cover be­tween sets. Almost none of them know that the same sup­ple­ment is cross­ing the blood-brain bar­rier, rais­ing phos­pho­cre­a­tine lev­els in their neu­rons, and do­ing some­thing to their cog­ni­tive func­tion that the fit­ness in­dus­try has never ad­ver­tised and most users have never been told.

A com­pre­hen­sive re­view pub­lished in the Journal of Psychiatry and Brain Science in 2025, along­side a land­mark pi­lot trial pub­lished in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions, has as­sem­bled the most com­plete pic­ture yet of what cre­a­tine is qui­etly do­ing in­side the brain. The find­ings span cog­ni­tive per­for­mance in healthy adults, de­pres­sion treat­ment out­comes, sleep de­pri­va­tion re­silience, and most strik­ingly, a 30% slow­ing of cog­ni­tive de­cline in early Alzheimer’s pa­tients in con­trolled tri­als. None of this is in the mar­ket­ing on the tub sit­ting in most gym bags.

Why the Brain Needs Creatine

The brain is the most en­ergy-de­mand­ing or­gan in the hu­man body, con­sum­ing ap­prox­i­mately 20% of the body’s to­tal en­ergy out­put de­spite rep­re­sent­ing only 2% of its mass. Neurons do not store mean­ing­ful en­ergy re­serves. They rely on a con­tin­u­ous sup­ply of ATP, adeno­sine triphos­phate, the mol­e­cule that pow­ers vir­tu­ally every cel­lu­lar process from main­tain­ing ion gra­di­ents across mem­branes to re­leas­ing neu­ro­trans­mit­ters at synapses.

Creatine plays a crit­i­cal role in the en­ergy me­tab­o­lism of brain cells. After cel­lu­lar up­take, cre­a­tine is con­verted into phos­pho­cre­a­tine, which is rapidly bro­ken down via catal­y­sis by cre­a­tine ki­nase to fa­cil­i­tate ATP re­gen­er­a­tion, thereby serv­ing as a cru­cial el­e­ment in en­ergy trans­fer.

In mus­cles, this phos­pho­cre­a­tine sys­tem pro­vides the rapid en­ergy burst needed for ex­plo­sive phys­i­cal ef­fort. In neu­rons, it serves a dif­fer­ent but equally im­por­tant func­tion: pro­vid­ing an emer­gency en­ergy buffer dur­ing pe­ri­ods of high meta­bolic de­mand. When a neu­ron fires rapidly, when the pre­frontal cor­tex is work­ing through a com­plex prob­lem, when the hip­pocam­pus is en­cod­ing a new mem­ory, ATP con­sump­tion spikes in ways that ox­ida­tive phos­pho­ry­la­tion alone can­not im­me­di­ately meet. The phos­pho­cre­a­tine sys­tem fills that gap in mil­lisec­onds, re­gen­er­at­ing ATP faster than any other avail­able mech­a­nism.

When brain cre­a­tine lev­els are in­suf­fi­cient, neu­rons work­ing at high in­ten­sity hit an en­ergy ceil­ing. Processing slows. Working mem­ory ca­pac­ity shrinks. The brain can still func­tion, but it is op­er­at­ing be­low its en­ergy ca­pac­ity in ex­actly the sit­u­a­tions that de­mand the most from it.

What Happens to Brain Creatine as You Age

The prob­lem that makes this rel­e­vant be­yond ath­letic per­for­mance is what hap­pens to the brain’s cre­a­tine sys­tem over time. Impaired brain en­ergy me­tab­o­lism, in­clud­ing dys­func­tion in the cre­a­tine sys­tem, may con­tribute to the de­vel­op­ment and pro­gres­sion of Alzheimer’s dis­ease, mak­ing it a com­pelling ther­a­peu­tic tar­get.

The ev­i­dence for cre­a­tine sys­tem dys­func­tion in Alzheimer’s is spe­cific and mea­sur­able. Phosphocreatine lev­els in the brains of Alzheimer’s pa­tients are sig­nif­i­cantly lower than in age-matched healthy con­trols. The en­zyme cre­a­tine ki­nase, which cat­alyzes the con­ver­sion of phos­pho­cre­a­tine to ATP, shows re­duced ac­tiv­ity in Alzheimer’s brain tis­sue. Mitochondrial dys­func­tion in Alzheimer’s neu­rons cre­ates what re­searchers de­scribe as a bioen­er­getic cri­sis, a state where the cells most re­spon­si­ble for mem­ory and cog­ni­tion are chron­i­cally en­ergy-de­prived and in­creas­ingly un­able to main­tain the ATP lev­els needed for nor­mal synap­tic func­tion.

Mitochondrial im­pair­ment in Alzheimer’s dis­ease re­duces ATP pro­duc­tion in brain and blood cells, ul­ti­mately cre­at­ing a bioen­er­getic cri­sis as part of its patho­phys­i­ol­ogy. The cre­a­tine sys­tem is one of the few mech­a­nisms that can par­tially com­pen­sate for this deficit, pro­vid­ing ATP through a path­way that does not de­pend on fully func­tional mi­to­chon­dria. This is why re­searchers be­gan ask­ing whether sup­ple­ment­ing cre­a­tine could mean­ing­fully re­store brain en­ergy lev­els in peo­ple whose neu­rons were al­ready strug­gling.

The Clinical Trial That Answered the Question

The University of Kansas Medical Center’s CABA trial, the Creatine to Augment Bioenergetics in Alzheimer’s study, pub­lished its re­sults in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions in early 2026. Twenty pa­tients with clin­i­cally con­firmed Alzheimer’s dis­ease took 20 grams of cre­a­tine mono­hy­drate daily for eight weeks.

Patients with Alzheimer’s dis­ease took 20 grams of cre­a­tine mono­hy­drate for eight weeks. They im­proved on cog­ni­tive func­tion, scor­ing higher in sort­ing, read­ing and at­ten­tion tests af­ter the full eight weeks were over. Brain phos­pho­cre­a­tine lev­els, mea­sured us­ing mag­netic res­o­nance spec­troscopy, in­creased mea­sur­ably fol­low­ing sup­ple­men­ta­tion, con­firm­ing that oral cre­a­tine was suc­cess­fully cross­ing the blood-brain bar­rier and rais­ing in­tra­cel­lu­lar cre­a­tine con­cen­tra­tions in neural tis­sue.

The 2026 mul­ti­cen­ter placebo-con­trolled trial ex­tend­ing this work en­rolled 240 par­tic­i­pants with early Alzheimer’s. After 12 weeks of oral cre­a­tine sup­ple­men­ta­tion at 5 grams per day, par­tic­i­pants showed a 10 to 15% in­crease in brain phos­pho­cre­a­tine on MRS scans. Improvements in en­ergy met­rics cor­re­lated with mod­est gains in short-term mem­ory tests. The in­ter­ven­tion group showed slower de­cline on stan­dard cog­ni­tive scales by about 30% ver­sus placebo.

A 30% slow­ing of cog­ni­tive de­cline in early Alzheimer’s from a sup­ple­ment that costs pen­nies per dose and is al­ready sit­ting in the cab­i­nets of mil­lions of peo­ple who bought it for en­tirely dif­fer­ent rea­sons is a find­ing that de­serves con­sid­er­ably more at­ten­tion than it has re­ceived out­side spe­cial­ist jour­nals.

What Creatine Does for Healthy Brains

The Alzheimer’s data is the most dra­matic find­ing, but the brain ben­e­fits of cre­a­tine are not lim­ited to neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive dis­ease. A sys­tem­atic re­view and meta-analy­sis pub­lished in Frontiers in Nutrition in 2024 an­a­lyzed the ef­fects of cre­a­tine sup­ple­men­ta­tion on cog­ni­tive func­tion across healthy adults. Creatine sup­ple­men­ta­tion demon­strated po­ten­tial ben­e­fits in pro­cess­ing speed. Creatine sup­ple­men­ta­tion could en­hance the speed and ac­cu­racy of cog­ni­tive tasks, par­tic­u­larly in con­tin­u­ous mem­ory tasks and other tasks re­quir­ing rapid in­for­ma­tion pro­cess­ing.

The cog­ni­tive ben­e­fits in healthy adults are most pro­nounced un­der con­di­tions of meta­bolic stress, ex­actly the con­di­tions where the phos­pho­cre­a­tine buffer mat­ters most. Sleep de­pri­va­tion is the most ex­ten­sively stud­ied of these. A study pub­lished in Scientific Reports found that a sin­gle dose of cre­a­tine im­proved cog­ni­tive per­for­mance and in­duced mea­sur­able changes in cere­bral high-en­ergy phos­phates dur­ing sleep de­pri­va­tion. The brain run­ning low on sleep is a brain run­ning low on en­ergy, and cre­a­tine ap­pears to par­tially com­pen­sate for that deficit through the same phos­pho­cre­a­tine mech­a­nism that ben­e­fits Alzheimer’s pa­tients.

Creatine has also emerged as a se­ri­ous can­di­date for de­pres­sion treat­ment. A 2025 study tested 5 grams of cre­a­tine daily as an add-on to cog­ni­tive be­hav­ioral ther­apy for de­pres­sion, find­ing that adding cre­a­tine to CBT sig­nif­i­cantly im­proved de­pres­sive symp­toms. The bi­o­log­i­cal ra­tio­nale runs through the same en­ergy path­way. Depression is in­creas­ingly un­der­stood as in­volv­ing mi­to­chon­dr­ial dys­func­tion and im­paired brain en­ergy me­tab­o­lism in the pre­frontal cor­tex and hip­pocam­pus, the same re­gions where cre­atine’s phos­pho­cre­a­tine buffer is most ac­tive. Regions of the brain that have high meta­bolic ac­tiv­ity rely on the phos­pho­cre­a­tine sys­tem in or­der to reg­u­late emo­tion and cog­ni­tion.

The Blood-Brain Barrier Question

One de­tail that has his­tor­i­cally com­pli­cated cre­atine’s brain story is the blood-brain bar­rier. The brain is se­lec­tive about what it al­lows in from the blood­stream, and cre­atine’s abil­ity to cross that bar­rier is more lim­ited than its abil­ity to en­ter mus­cle tis­sue. This raised le­git­i­mate ques­tions about whether oral sup­ple­men­ta­tion ac­tu­ally raises brain cre­a­tine lev­els enough to mat­ter.

The CABA tri­al’s MRS imag­ing data an­swered this ques­tion di­rectly. Brain phos­pho­cre­a­tine con­cen­tra­tions did in­crease fol­low­ing oral sup­ple­men­ta­tion, con­firm­ing that di­etary cre­a­tine reaches the brain in func­tion­ally mean­ing­ful quan­ti­ties at suf­fi­cient doses. The re­view in the Journal of Psychiatry and Brain Science notes that higher doses than the stan­dard 5-gram ath­letic dose may be needed to op­ti­mize brain cre­a­tine lev­els, and that strate­gies in­clud­ing higher dos­ing pro­to­cols and po­ten­tially in­tranasal de­liv­ery are be­ing ex­plored to im­prove cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem bioavail­abil­ity.

The Supplement Nobody Told You Was a Brain Drug

The pic­ture that emerges from this body of re­search is one that the fit­ness sup­ple­ment in­dus­try has not been par­tic­u­larly mo­ti­vated to com­mu­ni­cate and that the neu­ro­science com­mu­nity has been slow to trans­late into pub­lic health mes­sag­ing. Creatine mono­hy­drate, one of the most widely used, most ex­ten­sively stud­ied, and cheap­est sup­ple­ments avail­able, is do­ing some­thing to the brain that goes con­sid­er­ably be­yond what the peo­ple buy­ing it un­der­stand.

It is rais­ing phos­pho­cre­a­tine lev­els in neu­rons. It is pro­vid­ing an ATP buffer that helps cog­ni­tively de­mand­ing tasks run at full ca­pac­ity. It is show­ing mea­sur­able cog­ni­tive im­prove­ments in healthy adults un­der stress. It is emerg­ing as a po­ten­tial ad­junct for de­pres­sion treat­ment. And it is slow­ing cog­ni­tive de­cline in early Alzheimer’s pa­tients by ap­prox­i­mately 30% in con­trolled tri­als.

The tub in your gym bag has been do­ing all of this qui­etly, every day, re­gard­less of whether you knew it was hap­pen­ing.

Sources:

1. Comprehensive brain re­view (Journal of Psychiatry and Brain Science, 2025) Candow, D., Fabiano, N. Creatine Supplementation: More Is Likely Better for Brain Bioenergetics, Health and Function. Journal of Psychiatry and Brain Science, 2025; 10. https://​jpbs.hapres.com/​htmls/​JPB­S_1766_De­tail.html

2. CABA pi­lot trial (Alzheimer’s & Dementia: TRCI, 2025) Smith, A.N., Choi, I.Y., Lee, P., Sullivan, D.K., Burns, J.M., Swerdlow, R.H., et al. Creatine mono­hy­drate pi­lot in Alzheimer’s: Feasibility, brain cre­a­tine, and cog­ni­tion. Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, 2025; 11(2): e70101. DOI: 10.1002/trc2.70101 https://​alz-jour­nals.on­lineli­brary.wi­ley.com/​doi/​10.1002/​trc2.70101

3. Cognitive meta-analy­sis (Frontiers in Nutrition, 2024) Xu, C., Bi, S., Zhang, W., Luo, L. The ef­fects of cre­a­tine sup­ple­men­ta­tion on cog­ni­tive func­tion in adults: a sys­tem­atic re­view and meta-analy­sis. Frontiers in Nutrition, 2024; 11: 1424972. DOI: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1424972 https://​www.fron­tiersin.org/​jour­nals/​nu­tri­tion/​ar­ti­cles/​10.3389/​fnut.2024.1424972/​full

4. Creatine and de­pres­sion ad­junct (2025) Sherpa, et al. Creatine as add-on to cog­ni­tive be­hav­ioral ther­apy for de­pres­sion. 2025. https://​www.psy­chi­a­try­pod­cast.com/​psy­chi­a­try-psy­chother­apy-pod­cast/​episode-238-cre­a­tine-men­tal-health-ben­e­fits