Jens Meiert

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 …

¶ January 31, 2012, filed under Web Development.

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. …

¶ January 24, 2012, filed under Web Development, Usability.

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.

¶ October 26, 2011, filed under Web Development.

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 …

¶ September 22, 2011, filed under Web Development.

CSS: On Risk-Taking, Mirroring, Layouts, Resets, and Hacks

A collection of CSS-related posts I published on Google+. I don’t exactly know how to deal with those yet.

¶ August 24, 2011, filed under Web Development.

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 …

¶ June 14, 2011, filed under Web Development, Design, User Experience.

Web Development Principles: Develop for What Is, Not What Could Be

For any given project, web developers fare best when focusing on what is, not what could be. To fend off the first misunderstandings, that focus includes what will be …

¶ June 7, 2011, filed under Web Development.

Exposing Reset Style Sheets

A cute Chrome extension to indicate CSS misconceptions.

¶ May 15, 2011, filed under Web Development.

HTML, @width, and @height

As the width and height attributes are to remain part of HTML, try to limit their use. The reason to avoid @width and @height is that they have to be considered presentational and hence constitute potential maintainability issues …

¶ February 17, 2011, filed under Web Development.

CSS Validation Will Soon Be More Realistic

A brief update on making use of vendor-specific CSS extensions warnings, not errors: the development version of the CSS validator contains an update that doesn’t penalize for use of such extensions …

¶ January 25, 2011, filed under Web Development.