Development

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 .

Why I Don’t Block AI Scrapers

“The Tortoise and the Hare,” human/AI edition.

Published on August 29, 2024, filed under and .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXV

On caching headers, capitalization, social graphics, download priorities, logical properties, Cloudflare, viewport metadata, obsolete markup, and calls to action.

Published on August 21, 2024, filed under and .

A Web Development Term a Day…

…on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Twitter/X. (With a queue lasting 10 years and growing.)

Published on August 19, 2024, filed under .

AI Paradox

Have you outrun your headlights yet?

Published on August 18, 2024, filed under and .

The cover of “Rote Learning HTML & CSS.”

Now Available: “Rote Learning HTML & CSS,” the Most Boring Free Ebook Ever

The book you never thought you wanted. The rough and raw skeleton of HTML and CSS. Elements, attributes, selectors, properties. No explanations, no examples, no context. Not a New York Times bestseller (it’s free).

Published on August 14, 2024, filed under .

A Node and Command Line Tool to Find Obsolete HTML

Ever wondered if and where you have obsolete HTML in your code base? Of course, there’s a tool for that.

Published on August 12, 2024, filed under .

On Mapping the World of Frontend Development

What if we had easy access to many—thousands—of the most useful, interesting, influential frontend development posts from 2000–2019? If you took care of it, how would you go about it, what challenges would you face, what would excite you? Here are some impressions, doing this work, for Frontend Dogma.

Published on July 30, 2024, filed under .

Thoughts on CSS in 2024

What I appreciate, what I don’t need (so far)—light and casual and certainly subjective notes on contemporary CSS.

Published on July 15, 2024, filed under .

Transitive Optimization Considered—Interesting

Transitive optimization means that if we improve A to optimize B, and optimizations of B also optimize C, then improving A should also lead to an optimization of C. But now what?

Published on July 10, 2024, filed under .

Know the “search” Element

Let’s talk about element #112.

Published on June 19, 2024, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXIV

On AVIF tests, book prices, AI experiments, Eleventy performance, IE scripts and styles, domain registrations, site headers, and (old) document functionality that can better be handled by native HTML elements than by handmade scripts.

Published on June 11, 2024, filed under and .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XXIII

Affiliate marketing and ads and Brave Rewards. HTML elements and dotenv and Git. Spellings and designs and stuff.

Published on May 29, 2024, filed under and .

We Need to Talk More About Conformance, if We Want to Stop Fantasy HTML

Conformant and valid HTML is the exception on websites and in apps, even though valid output is a sign of professional web development. Given how rarely the topic is being discussed these days, we benefit from raising more awareness for HTML conformance and validation.

Published on May 21, 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.