Jens Oliver Meiert

Web Development × Engineering Management × Philosophy (11)

Articles and books on the craft of web development (with a focus on HTML/CSS optimization and maintainability), engineering management, and philosophy.

Animated Traffic: My 10 Favorite Travel Photo Animations

Last December I launched Animated Traffic. Animated Traffic is an experiment in which I play with photo animations that feed off my eternal journey, of which I’ll share the results. The material, as of this moment, made for 302 posts covering 4 continents…

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On Web Documents and Web Apps

I’ve just elaborated about research and production code, and why that distinction matters. And I hinted at but put off another distinction: that between web documents and web apps. Pronounced distinction seems important to protect existing document practices…

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All Code Is Not Equal: On Research and Production Code

Web development is at a point at which we need to make more fundamental distinctions. One of them is a more determined one between web documents and web apps, another one is between research and production code.

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The Law of Travel

The longer you travel, the lighter you should pack.

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On Writing

Frankly, on fears.

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5 Questions Web Developers Always Need Answers For

In web development, just as in other fields, it can easily appear as if there are clear-cut solutions for everything. That’s at least the case for many of us neurotic perfectionists, as our world is built on clear-cut solutions. Alas, there aren’t always, and here are five general questions to consider.

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The 6 Most Useful Books I’ve Ever Read

I love reading, and over time I’ve been lucky to read many useful, and then a handful quite extraordinary books. Here I like to share my current non-fiction favorites: The Nature of Personal Reality, Getting More, Public Opinion, and, you can tell, three more.

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On Links and Accessibility

Hyperlinks and the underlying ubiquitous <a> elements are what make the Web. Just a few weeks back, Christian Heilmann wrote a little about why and how links are important; here it’s about accessibility aspects.

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CSS: When to Use Generated Content

Generated content means a special option in CSS to embed content in documents. It’s achieved through the content property. Fast forward, generated content should only be used for non-critical content; there it can be a very sharp instrument.

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Everyday Adventures: Cost, Fun, and Risk Ratings

100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer contains one hundred activities that I share my experience with, but that I also rate in terms of cost, fun, and risk. However, the book doesn’t make it easy to rank and compare the different activities…

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Lessons From Writing a Dream Journal

I love dreaming. I love dreams. Dreams are fascinating. I’ve learned that dreams are realities just as real as this one, physical reality. I’ve learned that much when it comes to dream memory depends on one’s own beliefs with respect to dreaming…

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A Word on Contemporary Web Design

These days, and as juror for Design Made in Germany I see a lot of websites, many a designer knows how to make a page appear spacious, even grandiose. Alas, as many appear to have forgotten how to use space effectively…

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HTML Explained in 123 Tweets: The Google #htmltuesday Archive

Did you know that Google’s Webmaster Team tweeted short statements about all HTML elements, every week, for two and a half years? It was called “#htmltuesday” and ran from 2011 to 2013. All of these tweets are now available in one place: here.

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How to Just Quit and Travel the World

A couple of months ago I quit at Google and left the United States to travel the world. I thought it might be interesting to share a bit about how to do something like this, calling it quits and heading out there, with no set itinerary whatsoever.

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My Year in Cities, 2013

Traditionally I post a list of all the new places I visited during a year in some sort of year-end review, too. This year is no exception.

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My Year in Activities, 2013

The same procedure as every year: a brief look back at new things I tried.

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On Writing a Book With Google Docs and Amazon KDP

Google Docs is okay to write short books and when making limited use of the comment feature. Amazon KDP’s HTML format is a technical disgrace, and Amazon needs to fix it. A few thoughts and tips on completing a book using either.

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How to Become an Everyday Adventurer

In “100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer” I’m not just sharing my own view on one hundred different activities and things I tried, but also some ideas and tips on what I think it takes to become a more adventurous person. That part is something I like to…

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Travel, Photos, Art?

I started another side project. It’s about taking a ton of photos of street scenery, working some magic that I talk about in this very post, and putting the results up on Tumblr. On the one new travel tumblr art installation that I call Animated Traffic.

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CSS, HTML, and the Problem of Spec Fragmentation

We have not one but two fundamental problems with CSS. One is unrestricted growth and complexity leading to poor understanding and poor code. Another one is spec fragmentation, also an issue with HTML, which results in inefficiencies. We should look for a better balance.

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No to DRM in HTML

It’s been quiet around DRM lately so I like to share my opinion, in brief: DRM doesn’t belong into nor anywhere near HTML. For one, HTML is a language to describe documents and, since HTML 5, applications. I don’t deem DRM in scope for HTML…

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Cover: 100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer.

New Book! “100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer”

I wrote a new book! Not about web development, again, not about philosophy or social sciences, yet, but about all the different activities I’ve been doing over the last few years, in all my infinite free time. And what I learned in one hundred of them.

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How I Read 10 Books a Month

I read 10–15 books a month. As I’ve been doing this for a few years and thus developed a routine, I thought it could be interesting to share a few notes, tips, and quirks—I remember how hard it can be to even read 1 book a month.

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The Curious Case of Breadcrumbs in HTML

We had an interesting thread about breadcrumbs on W3C’s public-html the other day. At first just targeting delimiters, it spawned a debate about the appropriate markup. Here’s my view on breadcrumbs in HTML.

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About Cost in Web Development

Cost is an interesting topic. Oftentimes we think of cost as in “this costs so-and-so much.” Like, the software license costs $2,500. Or three man hours cost $450. I’m not an economist but I like to think of this as something like primary cost. Yet, there’s more…

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A Social-Philosophical Journey in 25 Quotes

I was reviewing my Google+ posts the other day. In there I rediscovered a good number of quotes. What connected most of them were my studies. And when I looked at them I found they sort of tell a little story.

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9 Tips to Become a Better Driver

What makes a good driver? I don’t know whether I know. I’ve driven much, have deepened my skills, I fit stereotypes—and I’ve also screwed up. What I do know is that I’m a driver who cares. A few ideas on what could make people better drivers.

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The Art of Saying Thank You, One Thousand Times

But not here, on onethousandthankyous.org.

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A URL Policy for Web Projects

Do your projects suffer from URL inconsistencies? I just noticed how mine do. I also noticed that I did some unnecessary things, like omitting protocols when they were actually useful. And I noticed that I’ve seen similar problems in corporate projects before. So I jotted down a quick “policy.”

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Surveillance Kills Democracy

I meet people who think that mass surveillance, as with NSA and GCHQ spying, is okay because they don’t have anything to worry about. The argument is either that they don’t have anything to hide or that what they’re doing is not important enough…

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The Meanings of Googliness

The words “googley” and “googliness” are not found in common language. Even at Google, where they’ve been coined, it’s not clear to everyone what these words mean. And that’s no surprise: You don’t get a handout with a description…

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Object-Oriented HTML, and OOCSS

“Object-oriented CSS” is the idea of treating page elements as objects, giving all these objects classes, treating objects’ classes as single entities in style sheets, and taking it from there. I reviewed the old OOCSS site and Smashing Magazine’s introduction.

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Goodbye Google, San Francisco, California, and United States

I’m resetting my life. I’ve quit at Google, I’ve quit my apartment in San Francisco, I’ve sold most of what I own and put the rest in storage. I’m now about to backpack the world to pursue my studies and goals and to build a new life somewhere else. Here’s a little story.

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How to Order CSS Selectors

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 guides, have so far missed, is a reference to sort selectors and rules, as proposed here.

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My Year in Activities, 2012

48 more ways to use one’s time.

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My Year in Cities, 2012

Beside working and growing and trying new things, I’ve been in the great position to also travel a little. I’m very grateful. This year I visited 5 continents, more than 20 different countries, and probably more than 50 different cities…

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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.

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On Browser Testing

The primary goal for cross-browser testing is to make sure that documents are usable and consistent across different user agents and devices. Even if you understand this to include both functionality and design, the definition of “usable” is interesting.

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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…

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Maintainability: One Story and Three Concerns

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 have an idea about whether what I maintained was actually effective to maintain. I got a sense that things weren’t quite right…

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“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 do anything about user agent issues, my answer was a clear “no.” It’s not your responsibility. You may lack important insight into decisions made on the user agent side…

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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.

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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.

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Print Style Sheets and URLs

Print style sheets are awesome. They’re easy to write, too. Site owners and developers who care about print typically know what to do. Alas there’s one thing that’s done rather the wrong than in any right way: printing URLs…

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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 absolutely will be.

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Exposing Reset Style Sheets

Finally, a Chrome extension to highlight alternative approaches to CSS.

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Driving: Tips and Thoughts

It’s time for a heart-warming post about driving.

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On Correct Punctuation

Let’s speak the unspeakable: Correct punctuation, here referring to the use of the correct characters for quotation marks, apostrophes, dashes, and ellipses, will forever remain a dream online…

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HTML, “@width”, and “@height”

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

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My Year in Activities, 2010

31 activities, 0 vacation days. Mr Meiert’s guide on how to make good use of your time and make 1 year feel like 3.

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