Jens Oliver Meiert

Web Development

Living Websites, Living Books

To me, websites are living objects. They require regular care and maintenance. Such care starts with monitoring, from uptime control to visual site tests, demands technical quality controls, and ends with content checks…

Post from August 17, 2017, filed under and .

Website Optimization Measures, Part VIII

Eight years. Eight years has it been since the last episode of this series, “Website Optimization Measures.” In October of 2009, I last talked about more or less random things I did on my own websites…

Post from August 8, 2017, filed under .

Web Development: How Making Our Own Lives Difficult Is More Important Than We Think

Many moons ago I wrote that web developers wouldn’t need debugging tools. I was half joking and half serious. We were just coming out of the dark ages of web development, so to speak, undernourished of useful tools, frameworks, libraries…

Post from August 1, 2017, filed under .

Frameworks, Libraries, and the Modern Web Developer: Web Development, Overdone

We are raising tool-dependent rather than self-reliant developers. Aren’t we.

Post from July 28, 2017, filed under .

What I Learned Building Google’s Web Frameworks

On building Google’s Go and Maia HTML/CSS frameworks, and succeeding and failing as a tech lead.

Post from July 25, 2017, filed under .

Boyscout Code

Of course, always leave code better than you found it.

Post from July 20, 2017, filed under .

Stop Using Resets: Visual Examples of the Practical Nonsense of Resets and Normalizers

Or, when Jens found out that he could just collect websites that use reset style sheets and the like, disable those style sheets, document the results and write a post with the diffs for visual evidence. All because “we ran after this mirage for more than a decade.”

Post from July 13, 2017, filed under .

Two Paradigms of Web Development

On a sunny Tuesday in Düsseldorf a few weeks back, at Beyond Tellerrand, I had a pleasant recorded conversation with the team of Working Draft. In our discussion we briefly touched on the idea of web development paradigms…

Post from June 19, 2017, filed under .

The Great Web Maintainability Survey Results

Four weeks ago I started a survey about good and bad practices when it comes to the maintenance and maintainability of websites. Participation was amazing, and here are the first results.

Post from June 16, 2017, filed under .

70% Repetition in Style Sheets: Data on How We Fail at CSS Optimization

Looking at data for some of the most popular websites, we repeat ourselves too much in CSS; using declarations just once is often one solid avenue to avoid repetition; together, we need to put more focus on style sheet optimization.

Post from May 31, 2017, filed under .

The Great Web Maintainability Survey

The maintenance and economics of websites is a much-neglected topic in the web development community. Here are three questions for developers, to gather practices as well as resources.

Post from May 14, 2017, filed under .

Web Development and Philosophy

When “eh?” is just a natural reaction.

Post from May 2, 2017, filed under and .

Principles of Web Development

Web development, at more than 20 years of age, is becoming an increasingly mature profession. Web development is also subject to constant change, and the field produces more of that change, out of itself. More technological standards…

Post from February 16, 2017, filed under .

HTML Statistics: 5 Take-Aways

A few quick comments on Catalin Rosu’s interesting follow-up analysis of his sampling of eight million websites. Some practices are wonderful to note, others have been commented on, yet one or the other point drowned.

Post from February 13, 2017, filed under .

On Quality and Logistics

Clearly, quality requires quality thinking. But then it requires a lot more, like definitions, criteria, tools, planning, enforcement, &c. pp. And it relies on some organizational foundation.

Post from January 12, 2017, filed under .

Apocryphal Apostrophes

Oh, typography. How have you been.

Post from January 8, 2017, filed under and .

CSS Shorthand Syntax Considered Important

CSS shorthands are no anti-pattern, just as little as universal selectors, just as little as !important, and just as little as no-js would not be one. Now we learn that shorthands were an anti-pattern. No, they’re not. Yes, they are! No they’re not.

Post from December 21, 2016, filed under .

Why I Don’t Use CSS Preprocessors

A tribute to Roger Johansson as well as the craft of web development.

Post from December 14, 2016, filed under .

About the Mindset for Quality

In my view, quality starts with quality thinking. Quality thinking is broad, but it quickly leads to a quality mindset. This mindset, now, I’ve long regarded as critical…

Post from November 17, 2016, filed under .

Stop Using the Old “Clearfix”

I had thought the old method of clearing through “.clearfix:after { clear: both; content: ''; }” long dead, but then I spotted it quite alive and even being taught to developers.

Post from November 14, 2016, filed under .

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Last update: August 17, 2017.

“If there is any secret, it is missed by seeking.”