Jens Oliver Meiert

Web Development × Engineering Management × Philosophy (7)

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

Optional “@lang”

The lang attribute is one of HTML’s global attributes. If one doesn’t simply take it for granted, it begs a number of questions—and these suggest to drop W3C requirements around it, and to demand software to do the job.

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Highlights From “Free Thought and Official Propaganda” (Bertrand Russell)

“Our system of education turns young people out of the schools able to read, but for the most part unable to weigh evidence or to form an independent opinion.”

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What Happened on Google+, the Web Development Archives

Following a few philosophy posts to be archived, here are past entries related to web development. Nothing more, nothing less.

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What Happened on Google+, the Philosophy Archives

Google+ is shutting down, pulling everything with it. I’ve used Google+. And although I’ve changed and would put a few things differently now, I decided to archive a few of the somewhat philosophical Google+ posts.

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HTML and Performance: Leave Out Optional Tags and Quotes

As experts we should know what code is optional and leave it out, and our production systems should do a better job assisting us with that. After all the years of neglecting basic HTML optimization, let’s think about taking the next step and not ship optional HTML markup.

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Google Lighthouse and PWA

A review of Lighthouse’s PWA audits and the PWA category as a whole. Just in time to see it be superseded by Lighthouse 4, the major update that solves some (unfortunately not all) of those issues.

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2018

A retrospective.

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Survival of the Primitive

Is ours a highly evolved culture?

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7 Questions for Jens Oliver Meiert About the GDE and Chrome Dev Summits 2018

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On Visions for Performance, or: Performance Optimization Is a Process

It’s smart to have a vision for what one wishes to achieve for the performance of a site or app. Yet even the soundest approaches to performance visions have their problems, and in them we recognize that performance, or performance optimization, is indeed a process.

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Should Designers Code

Arguments for a “no” to a recurring question: Why we may want to give designers all freedom in the world, not to be limited in what they’re trained to do best.

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Highlights From “Flatland” (Edwin Abbott Abbott)

“Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.”

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Performance Rule #1: Do What You Need to Do—But Not More

Web Performance has over the age of the Web not only turned into a discipline by itself, but also a complex one at that. While important much less so for revenue but for user experience and accessibility reasons, there’s a particular angle at performance that makes the matter very simple: the pragmatic angle.

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How to Configure Lighthouse for Balanced Quality Websites

Google’s Lighthouse is a great tool even though it has some issues. Fortunately, it’s possible to configure Lighthouse to one’s own views on what matters. Here’s the config that I like to use.

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The One Thing We May Really Want to Research

My back-burner philosophical work revolves around one idea: that what creates and makes for our reality, in quite practical terms, is what we believe. That idea is profound and requires more: research.

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Highlights From “The Communist Manifesto” (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)

“This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”

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A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development

There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.

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Web Development and the GDPR

Who shares or presents code has a special responsibility, because for both the uninitiated and the quality-minded such code should be of a considerable standard. European privacy legislation ups the ante.

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37 Theses on CSS and Web Development

CSS Optimization Basics ends with a list of key ideas. From acknowledging that we don’t always write perfectly efficient and maintainable and understandable code to leading by example.

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AMP, a Strategy

There are problems with AMP. My recommendations: Avoid AMP; or use it, exclusively, on the most relevant pages; or go all-in, for AMP-only.

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The Craft of CSS

When we type down CSS like we’ve done 20 years ago, and when we work with ever more abstractions, what does that mean for our craft?

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Why Being a Digital Nomad Sucks (to Me)

For countless years has it been a thing to romanticize the lifestyle of digital and global nomads, of people who live and work remotely. I believe there’s also much to question.

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The Dangers of Being a Web Developer

Video, slides, and resources for my talk at beyond tellerrand in DĂźsseldorf.

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Cover: CSS Optimization Basics.

CSS Optimization Basics

My latest little book, covering mindsets needed for writing effective style sheets, optimization options during operation and for production, and useful resources to aid and inform the work with CSS.

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User-Centered Web Development

When we think of user focus we easily think of usability tests, following a usually strong wish to produce something that’s actually useful. For us as web developers, focus on the user has a tendency to appear distant though…

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HTML, CSS, and Dependency Direction

Adam Wathan wrote one of the most interesting web development articles I’ve read in the last few months: CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns.” At least until “Phase 3” there’s much to learn about current web development…

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How Declaration Repetition Developed Over Time, a Statistically Insignificant Sample

We know that there’s excessive declaration repetition in the Web’s style sheets, that each declaration is on average repeated 2–3 times, often needlessly. We know that this repetition is a little less bad on tech sites…

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Highlights From “Advice to Young Men” (William Cobbett)

“The first thing to be required of a man is, that he understand well his own calling, or profession; and, be you in what state of life you may, to acquire this knowledge ought to be your first and greatest care.”

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On Loyalty

We should be protective of our greatest possession—our values.

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The Compact Guide to Web Maintainability: 200 Tips and Resources

The result of reviewing, normalizing, rephrasing, sorting, and testing 134 responses to a maintainability survey that yielded more than 500 data points, to form a new guide, a new and more definite guide to web maintainability.

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Oh WTF My Tone, or: On Germans Speaking English

Anecdote. When I was working at Google, shortly after I had made one of my first bigger contributions, I experienced one of my more memorable performance reviews. You’ll never guess what happened next.

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Highlights From “The Elements of Style” (William Strunk Jr.)

“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”

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On Material Design

When Google introduced Material Design back in 2014, I was happy; I was happy for the team and I was happy for Google to mark another milestone on the long way of improving the aesthetics of their products. But, I was also concerned.

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The Two Extremes of Writing CSS, and What We Can Learn From Them

Extremes can be useful. In practice they help get the maximum out of a given approach, and in theory they can show what we’re headed to. Compare two ways of writing CSS—like Tachyons or Atomic CSS, and 2000’s idealistic engineering.

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On Meeting and Leaving People

Humans are social. Cooperation got us where we are. There are several ways to get to know new people, and, in relationships, to leave them. A few thoughts.

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What We Know

On some days, if you asked me about what we know, with absolute certainty, I’d respond with “only that something exists.” And if you asked me what that meant, then I’d add “to appreciate and work with what exists.”

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On Writing 1,000 Poems

A story of venturing into an entirely different genre.

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Privacy Experiments: How to Auto-Generate Random Web Traffic

I believe that privacy, which has never been about “hiding something,” is a fundamental civil right, one that is but must not be infringed on; so I once more played with randomizing personal web traffic.

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Expert Web Development: A 3rd Key Differentiator

As web developers we have decisions to make and our decisions depend on a few variables. Two that have become much more important over the years are the one of code for research or production, and the one of web site or app…

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An Ode to Smashing Magazine

Excitement about a success story.

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Performance of CSS Selectors Is Still Irrelevant

From my upcoming book on CSS optimization: Selector performance is not something to optimize for as the price we pay for it is terrible: We micro-manage our work for gains that aren’t noticeable.

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On Big Picture Thinking in Web Development

Thoughts on thinking outside the box, in tech, with examples ranging from selector performance to a general development vision, to illustrate how very different issues can all reach beyond their perimeter.

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CSS: The Reason Why Selectors Should Be Ordered, Too

We’ve talked a lot about declarations as declarations are at the heart of our work with direct consequences for the quality of our style sheets. We’ve not talked much about selectors, though, and that may be a mistake.

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Static Site Generation With Grow: How to Set Up Syndication Feeds

Grow is a static site generator that I’ve slowly been switching to on my own projects. Here I wish to lay out how to do something with Grow that’s not overly difficult, but also not well-documented—to set up syndication feeds.

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The Scientific Irony

There’s no proof that life has meaning; therefore, life is meaningless. Wait, what?

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DRY CSS: How to Use Declarations Just Once, Effectively

Using declarations just once is one way to control repetition in style sheets. It’s not a silver bullet, as we’ve seen with recent data, but it’s so powerful as to make for a key style sheet optimization method.

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5 Reasons Against Resets, Normalizers, Reboots

A word about one of CSS’s horsemen of the apocalypse.

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The 3 Levels of Code Consistency

Consistency is a factor for code quality and one of the key reasons why we need coding guidelines. Interestingly enough there are three levels of consistency: individual, collective, and institutional.

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Understandable-Simple vs. Minimal-Simple Code

Code simplicity seems to be a goal quite worthwhile, contributing to better understanding, greater robustness, and higher quality. That’s at least what comes to my mind when looking at the matter…

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On Enforcing Coding Guidelines

Surprisingly a snippet from The Little Book of Website Quality Control, not the one of HTML/CSS coding guidelines, a few thoughts on enforcing coding standards.

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