Blog
Jens O. Meiert (Google, W3C, O’Reilly) on professional web design, web development, accessibility, and usability. Researching and documenting what makes the perfect website since 1999.
How to Order CSS Selectors, a Draft
There are a number of ways to write style sheets. The domain of style guides, many of them go into some detail. What I, despite my work on a number of style guides, including the Google HTML and CSS style guide, have so far missed, is a conclusive reference to sort selectors and rules…
The CSS Problem
CSS is growing too large while CSS 2 has not nearly been understood by authors. This non-sustainable growth is a big problem for CSS.
HTML and Non-Script Styling
If you are to style a document differently based on whether certain technology is available, you should keep two things in mind: HTML itself is static and separation of concerns is important for maintainability …
On Maintainability
To make this a little story, for a long time in my career I wasn’t very concerned about maintainability. I was maintaining projects but didn’t really have an idea about whether what I maintained was actually effective to maintain. I got a sense that things weren’t quite right …
window.scrollTo() or: When to Stay Clear of User Agents
If you were to ask me whether you as a web designer or developer should tackle user agent issues, my answer was “no.” It’s not your responsibility. You may lack important insight into decisions made on the user agent side. You’re going to inherit technical debt. …
My Year in Activities, 2011
Or: 43 things that make someone who has no idea about anything he’s doing look like he knows everything, the 2011 edition.
On Semantics in HTML
As web developers we like to talk about “semantic markup,” a somehow inaccurate short form for “markup that is meaningful and used how it’s supposed to be used.” But where is all that meaning coming from? Let’s take a look.
Help Lower the Cost of CSS Validation
Validation is a baseline quality attribute. I have emphasized this in the past and recently shared a bit more about the reasons and how you can use validation on Google’s Webmaster Central blog. There are several things you can validate, way beyond HTML and CSS …
Opinions
Everybody is entitled to an opinion but opinions are weak when they are not based on facts or arguments. Debates can only be resolved by presenting sound arguments with supporting evidence …
Print CSS, Showing URLs, Caution
Print style sheets are awesome and easy to write. Site owners and developers caring about print typically have a feel for what to do. Alas there’s one thing that’s getting done rather the wrong than in any right way …
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