Development

My 18-Months Rule for Open-Source Contributions

You make a good-faith contribution to an open-source project. There’s never a response. What do you do? On a rule I’ve established for my own open-source work, and the reasons behind it.

Published on January 16, 2025, filed under .

An Overview of the 50 Highest-Ranking Web Design and Development Glossaries

If you want to look up terms, there are dozens if not hundreds of tech glossaries. However, a search quickly shows differences in how comprehensive and therefore useful these glossaries are—and doesn’t show whether the glossaries are being updated. A view at the glossary landscape.

Published on January 7, 2025, filed under and .

CSS: How to Indicate Container Overflow, When There Is Overflow

You have a block of text that you can’t shorten and yet that you don't want to give too much space, so as not to draw attention away from other content. It’s useful metadata that you like to show. On a stopgap option using scroll-driven animations.

Published on December 28, 2024, filed under and .

The CSS Reset Contradiction

Re-publishing my article for SitePoint, discussing what I think we miss in our conversations: Notably, what are the premises for CSS resets? What’s the reality—or are the realities? And, how could we also approach resets?

Published on December 19, 2024, filed under .

HTML Conformance: A Comparison of 6.5 npm Validator Packages (With 1.5 Recommendations)

What do you do if you want to make sure you’re not writing and shipping fantasy HTML, but choose to or have to avoid the web-based W3C HTML validator?

Published on December 17, 2024, filed under .

When We Need Systems, Processes, and Conventions

Oh the bore.

Published on December 11, 2024, filed under and .

What Is HTML Optimization? What Is It Not?

Is HTML optimization as well-defined as we need it to be? A look at what’s out there and an attempt to be clearer.

Published on December 5, 2024, filed under .

How to Add WebGlossary.info as a Search Engine in Your Browser

In short, you can search the glossary via “https://webglossary.info/search/%s”.

Published on December 3, 2024, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXVIII

What is it this time? Medium links, font smoothing, Eleventy templates, Bluesky handles and support, post automation, front matter quotes, and Twitter/X links. In this order.

Published on November 29, 2024, filed under .

The Image Compression Challenge Results

How many projects cannot losslessly be compressed further, how much would I donate for the challenge I invited to?

Published on November 27, 2024, filed under .

Where Has All the Valid HTML Gone

When we look at the state of HTML… how much of it actually is HTML?

Published on November 21, 2024, filed under .

8 AI Tips for Web Developers (and Their Careers)

AI is everywhere and comes with many problems and challenges. Yet as web developers, we need to adapt to a reality with AI. A few ideas on how we can make use of AI to the benefit of our work and our careers.

Published on November 12, 2024, filed under .

The Image Compression Challenge (Donating Money for Excess-Free Projects)

Here’s a frontend challenge. Run an image compression tool capable of near-losslessly compressing PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP, and AVIF images over one of your main projects. Share if nothing could be compressed. I donate money for each of such projects.

Published on October 30, 2024, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXVII

On improvements involving Eleventy (3), Lightning CSS, Imagemin Guard, early hints, ads, creator metadata, and custom/programmable search engines.

Published on October 24, 2024, filed under .

Boring Web Development

Web development is boring—or should be more boring. On us tending to celebrate the wrong side of web development.

Published on October 15, 2024, filed under .

HTML/CSS Frameworks, in Their Own Words (by Word Cloud)

Checking in on Bootstrap, Tailwind, Foundation, Bulma, Milligram, Pure, and UIkit.

Published on October 11, 2024, filed under .

JS Frameworks, in Their Own Words (by Word Cloud)

Handing the microphone to React, Vue.js, Angular, Svelte, Express, Meteor, and Next.js.

Published on October 11, 2024, filed under .

Automatable Defensive Core Image Compression With Imagemin Guard 4 (Now With No Imagemin)

The Imagemin Guard package was just updated to move away from the unmaintained Imagemin family, and to improve code, tests, documentation, and usability. If you like to avoid unnecessary image payload, even in your repos, especially in environments where not everyone pays attention to it, this is a good update to try.

Published on October 9, 2024, filed under .

Untrained Engineering Managers

Web development has always had a developer training issue, but it also has one on the management and leadership side. On a challenge we’re all familiar with but rarely talk and do something about.

Published on September 27, 2024, filed under and .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXVI

Optimizations related to the Google docs viewer, dependency management, English terms in German copy, Prettier, AWS, SEO bots, Eleventy, and DreamHost.

Published on September 19, 2024, filed under .

On Ticket Management

Issue tracking tools like Jira, GitHub Issues, or Bugzilla are essential for managing bugs and tasks (that is, issues). However, not everyone finds ticket management convenient or convincing. A perspective on why tickets matter, and how they can be used well.

Published on September 17, 2024, filed under and .

2024: 0.5% of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML

The annual HTML conformance analysis, validating 200 home pages of the most popular websites. Despite improvements, there is no signal of commitment to valid output as a quality baseline to benefit end users as well as web development as a profession.

Published on September 11, 2024, filed under .

The HTML History and Optimization Cheat Sheet

Compare elements and specifications, check on void elements and optional tags.

Published on September 5, 2024, filed under .

Notes on Setting Up a Static Website With AWS (Route 53, S3, ACM)

…and whether doing so is worth it. (There are pos and cons, and they all seem pretty dramatic.)

Published on September 4, 2024, filed under .

Notes on Hooking Up a Website With Cloudflare

I played around with Cloudflare.

Published on September 3, 2024, filed under .

If you like what you see here, consider the ebook version of all 2005–2015 posts on web design and development: On Web Development.
Interested in web development news and tools? Visit one of my projects, Frontend Dogma, for news and tools for frontend developers.