Jens Oliver Meiert

Articles and books on the craft of web development, with a focus on HTML and CSS minimization and optimization.

Building Websites and Building Websites Well

On exercises, orthogonality, and—choice.

Published on March 12, 2024, filed under .

The Next Adventure

On leaving Germany again, and the next big chapter of my life.

Published on March 5, 2024, filed under and .

How to Counter Provocation and Rumor

Are there effective responses to being provoked, picked on, blamed, attacked? Absolutely—but they’re not all being taught or shared a lot. A few quotes that I’ve found useful.

Published on February 25, 2024, filed under .

“Web Design as a Process” in Charts: Maintenance, Decay, Tech Debt, and Big Bang Launching

Web design is a process. This process relates to the quality and completeness of a given website, as observed over time. We can chart and understand different types of this process.

Published on February 19, 2024, filed under .

Why I Like Scrumban

Over the past years, I’ve become a fan of Scrumban, a mix of Scrum and Kanban. But what is Scrumban here, and what is there to like about Scrumban?

Published on February 13, 2024, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXII

Web design is a process, running our own websites is awesome, and together it means there’s always something to tweak and improve and optimize. Select things I’ve done over the last few months.

Published on February 4, 2024, filed under and .

On the Well Astonishing Verdicts on Social Media

We may speak anything from 470,000,000 to 860,000,000 words in our lifetime. The tiniest fraction may be too much.

Published on January 21, 2024, filed under .

Performance and Stay Questions in 1:1s

On a set of questions that are useful to ask every few weeks, for close alignment and connection, as well as well-being.

Published on January 15, 2024, filed under .

My Web Development Wishlist 2024

Respect, UX before DX, quality output that starts with conformance, running one’s own website, and adding as much as necessary, but as little as possible to web standards—five wishes to benefit our field, our users, and us as professionals.

Published on January 7, 2024, filed under .

Stop Closing Void Elements

Some developers believe in closing all HTML elements. Some have to close all HTML elements. Others don’t believe in doing so, or aren’t forced either way. In Upgrade Your HTML IV, I wrote a little about closing void elements.

Published on January 3, 2024, filed under .

2023

My professional and personal highlights from the last year. (Happy 2024!)

Published on January 1, 2024, filed under .

Incident, Mitigate, Learn

We can’t just pick two.

Published on December 28, 2023, filed under and .

“HTML First” Is Not HTML First

On what is and what isn’t “HTML First.” (It’s not just a hunch: It should start with HTML.)

Published on December 21, 2023, filed under .

Something to Know About Defensiveness

“The first rule of effective debate, argument, or heated conversation is to never, ever, get defensive.” On what we label as defensiveness, and a story that appears more complete and empathetic.

Published on December 17, 2023, filed under .

26 Other Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of

From ActionScript (psst) to linearizability to the Z shell.

Published on December 12, 2023, filed under .

Why Online Communication Is So Not-Great

Why is online communication so, meh? An approach that considers context, training, and world views, for a much more complicated topic.

Published on November 26, 2023, filed under and .

The 9 HTML Elements That Have an Attribute of the Same Name, or: The 9 Attributes That Have an Element of the Same Name

There are nine HTML elements that have an attribute of the same name. You’ll never guess what follows next.

Published on November 20, 2023, filed under .

Letter and Spirit of Web Development

In the realm of law, there is the notion of letter and spirit of a law. It seems we could benefit from letter and spirit in web development, too.

Published on November 14, 2023, filed under .

14 Tips for Becoming an Indie Author

After a few books with a publisher and a few more as an independent author, some tips and thoughts on how to publish your own books (if that’s what you’re excited about doing, too). From starting with ebooks to not writing overly much to not using AI tools—all sorts of advice you would or wouldn’t expect to get.

Published on November 8, 2023, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXI

Who hasn’t had enough of style sheet reviews, editor performance optimizations, ad removals, CTA revisions, pseudo-class refactorings, blocked AI crawlers, custom search engines, social graphics, or server log configs.

Published on November 4, 2023, filed under and .

2023: 0 of the Global Top 100 Websites Use Valid HTML

The latest analysis of HTML and CSS conformance of the most popular websites. The situation is only going to get better once we set higher expectations for the code we ship.

Published on October 31, 2023, filed under .

Existence and Experience

How can something-exists experience itself?

Published on October 22, 2023, filed under .

On the Uniting Power of a Commitment to HTML Conformance

HTML is the language of the Web, there’s a quality standard—expectation—for HTML, but we don’t make use of it, yet if we would, it would come with several advantages, one of them being that it could unite and propel us to master more important challenges, which would be good again for our field and the Web.

Published on October 18, 2023, filed under .

What Happened to Separation of Concerns in Frontend Development

On a story that began around 2010, and in which web standards make separation of concerns easier—and frameworks make it harder.

Published on October 5, 2023, filed under .

The Most Minimal Valid HTML Document

—isn’t that exciting, isn’t even new, but can use repeating in times of conformance neglect and AI-assisted coding.

Published on October 2, 2023, filed under .