Jens Oliver Meiert

Web Development × Engineering Management × Philosophy (12)

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

CSS: How to Host Right-to-Left Styling

For international projects, don’t use separate style sheets for right-to-left (RTL) styling: use natural (@dir) or artificial (@id, @class) hooks instead. The only exception are unbearable performance issues due to hundreds of RTL rules…

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On Solutions

Solutions require problems. If you don’t have a problem, you don’t need a solution. This is exactly why you should, whenever someone proposes a solution—which includes design and technical changes—ask what problem that solution solves…

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CSS Validation and Vendor Extensions: Throw Warnings, Not Errors

If you understand valid code as a quality baseline, you validate your code. If you validate style sheets, you come across errors like “Property -moz-border-radius doesn’t exist’”…

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Real Web Developers Don’t Need Debugging Tools

Bottom line: Try to limit your use of web dev debugging tools—like Firebug or Chrome’s Developer Tools—in order to grow your skills.

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How to Relocate, the Alternative Guide

If there’s one area of expertise I’m only involuntarily linked with, it’s moving. I moved 25 times so far, spanning cities, countries, and now continents; my career stats mean .81 relocations per year, or 1.24 years per relocation. Some lessons I learned.

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“px” Is Dead, Long Live “px”

It’s over. There is no ban on px anymore. The only reason why we as web developers had to adjust coding practices were user agents that failed to meet user agent accessibility guidelines.

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How to Become a Solid Web Developer, the Short Version

Every once in a while people ping me on how to master web development and design. Given how much there’s still to learn for me this makes me blush. Chronically short on time I typically reply in just a few sentences…

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WDR #4: Having Conversations in HTTP

The Web Dev Report, issue #4.

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My Year in Cities, 2009

From Amsterdam to Berlin to Cardiff… all the way to Zurich. The same procedure as at least last year.

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SUS: How to Easily Grade Your Site’s Usability

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a Likert scale-based questionnaire to grade the usability of systems, which John Brooke created back in the 80s. SUS results yield a score between 0 and 100, with 100 indicating “best” usability…

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HTML/CSS Frameworks: Useful, Universal, Usable, Unobtrusive

A high quality HTML/CSS framework needs to have four attributes: useful, universal, usable, and unobtrusive. The four U’s.

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The 3 Ground Rules for Writing HTML

The fundamentals every web developer should know: on respecting syntax and semantics, avoiding presentational and behavioral markup, and leaving out everything that is not absolutely necessary.

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Product of the Environment

Philosophy, live from Zurich airport.

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HTML, CSS, and Web Development Practices: Past, Present, and Future

Articles with a title consisting of more than 15,000 characters don’t need an introduction.

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Website Optimization Measures, Part VII

In this episode: Unquoted attribute value syntax, q elements, Google Friend Connect, feed styling, work/life balance. Served in no time.

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“HTML 5” or “HTML5”?

It’s “HTML5,” not “HTML 5,” declares the most recent post on the WHATWG blog. A seemingly trivial matter, yet it’s inconsistent.

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The True Advantage of CSS

Despite CSS being around for a long, long time, there are still some myths around it. Reading Mike’s post on CSS evangelism again I couldn’t only relate to Mike’s concerns, I also felt reminded of…

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My Top 15 Android Apps

This is a serious post, not one of those “the 1,000 best blah” ones. I think. I’m an Android user for a bit longer than December 2008, and I love my HTC Magic as much as the HTC Dream (aka G1)…

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Diagnostic Styling Reloaded

Eric cultivated the concept of “diagnostic styling,” meaning using CSS to track down problems within HTML documents. I’ve been working with diagnostic style sheets for general quality assurance…

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WDR #3: Optional Tags, Unquoted Attribute Value Syntax

The Web Dev Report, issue #3.

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Microformats, Key Flaws

I like the idea behind microformats, but I’m not convinced of the way that idea is brought to life. I see three major flaws that appear to make microformats stand in their own way.

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XHTML, RIP

Let’s end this week of morbid posts: The XHTML 2 Working Group is expected to stop their work end of 2009. “Today the Director announces that when the XHTML 2 Working Group charter expires as scheduled at the end of 2009…”

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“handheld” Media Type, RIP?

Website authors don’t use handheld as it’s barely supported; mobile device manufacturers don’t support handheld because it’s barely used. This is kind of the situation I think we’re facing, and it’s a problem.

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Let’s Make The Web Faster

Two weeks after my last outcry regarding slowness on the Web there’s a more proactive response: Google launched code.google.com/speed, subtitled “let’s make the Web faster.”

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Maintainability Guide

Maintainability is important in order to deal with change. Good maintainability means making change easier and more affordable, and avoiding change that is not necessary…

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Punctuation Cheat Sheet

Developing and working with international sites is an interesting challenge, not just because of right-to-left contents. Typographically, there are differences between many locales. To improve punctuation in Google translations I’m using a localization aid…

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CSS: The Maintenance Issue #1 and How You Can Avoid It

The biggest—as most unnecessary—maintenance issue in web development is, as my recent research shows, style sheet naming and integration. Web developers use inadvisable style sheet names and inadvisable ways to integrate style sheets that force them…

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The Result of Maturity Is Simplicity

“Finally, it doesn’t lack some irony considering that web design gets often enough protected by the credo ‘the end justifies the means’ and pragmatism’s paid homage to. The question is whether you’re talking about unhealthy, sanctimonious pragmatism or—”

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Notes on XML, Elements, and Attributes

Knowledge of the design of markup languages is something I consider beneficial for my job as a web professional. A few notes on XML design, inspired by internal and external documentation.

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Why CSS Needs No Variables

CSS variables and constants are one of the top features web developers are asking for in web development fora, magazines, blogs, and on W3C’s www-style. Following a concept written by Daniel Glazman and Apple’s Dave Hyatt, the WebKit rendering engine…

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The Stupidest Style Sheet Name Ever

The last name you want to pick for your style sheet is “style.css”. Why is “style.css” such a poor CSS file name? The main reason is maintenance…

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CSS: Style the Non-Obvious

One of the qualities you have to acquire as a web developer is to see the non-obvious, and to use that skill to your code’s advantage. Let me explain by two simple examples.

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Presenting… the Google Shoe

They finally arrived, long longed for Google shoes, in this case the “Google j9t” model based on the Adidas ZX700. They’re not for sale but I might share the configuration I used to design them. The “Google j9t” may only be worn for dynamite fishing and important launches.

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Performance of CSS Selectors Is Irrelevant

…if you like to have a strict read of Steve Souders’ recent research. We’ve still got few but now a few more numbers backing up what we always suspected, that merely optimizing selectors is micro-optimization.

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Website Optimization Measures, Part VI

In this episode: On the utilization of Google Friend Connect, maintenance of Google Analytics, sanity checks, type attributes, charset rules, cite elements, and ICRA labels. Fresh and sexy.

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When to Split Style Sheets

Three factors influence whether it makes sense to split style sheets: probability, meaning (aka semantics), and granularity.

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Another Survey (Including Website Usability Scale Template)

I’m doing it again: Do you have another 15 seconds to answer a couple of questions? The survey is based on the System Usability Scale (SUS) John Brooke presented in the 80s. Which means nothing less than that there’s another experiment taking place with me testing SUS.

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Performance and RFC 2396

RFC 2396 specifies that relative URIs like //foo get resolved as http://foo. This means, if you link a resource like https://example.com/, @ href may as well just point to //example.com/.

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Arial, Helvetica

An extension of my post on Arial and Helvetica: For those who want or have to use Arial as their standard font, there is no point in mentioning Helvetica anywhere in the code, as in arial, helvetica, sans-serif.

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The Two Great Things About Validation (and Conformance)

There are two great things about validation: Validating helps technical understanding and thus contributes to awareness of respective specifications, and writing valid code is a sign of professionalism.

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Browser Support: The Two Metrics That Count

There are two things that matter to determine what user agents—browsers—to support on a given site: First, what popularity (percentage of market) makes a browser important to support? Second, what browsers pass that threshold?

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5 Cool Ways to Support the W3C

I recently got a mail by someone interested in supporting the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) similar to how I do it. While replying I noticed that the information I was about to share might not be obvious to everyone, but still important…

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My Year in Cities, 2008

Following Anne; I couldn’t resist.

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HTML vs. XHTML: Why HTML Wins

Document types are cool, and there are plenty of them. There are plenty, countless discussions about the “right” document type, too. Alas, these discussions may deal with irrelevant details or miss the point.

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5 Tips To Deal With Right-to-Left Projects

Know what goes into your markup and what goes into your style sheets. It’s actually simple: When available, you should always use dedicated bidi markup to describe your content. CSS may not be available, and the specs actually say that…

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The Greatest Secret in Web Design

Alright I cheated, this isn’t a secret. Or an open secret. Or whatever. It’s that web design is a process. Good web design is an ongoing endeavor.

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WDR #2: Web Developers Needed for a Website

The Web Dev Report, issue #2, this time featuring a classic situation.

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How to Uncover Pseudo-Standardistas

There’s a growing group of developers that doesn’t help our attempts for faster, more accessible, more maintainable, and generally quality-oriented web development: pseudo-standardistas.

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WDR #1: Versioned Style Sheets

Ladies and gents, all I present’s… the Web Dev Report, issue #1.

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5 CSS Tips Every Web Developer Should Know About

Of all the tips this site shares, the following ones may be special. Let’s quickly run through what might be essential for every web developer to know about CSS. Main focus: maintainability, though differently.

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