Web Development

48 Laws, Rules, and Principles of Web Development

In anticipation of the upcoming release of The Web Development Glossary 3K, here are four dozen laws, rules, and principles related to web and software development.

Post from June 7, 2023, filed under .

HTML Concepts: Kinds of Elements

There are six kinds of elements in HTML: void elements, raw text elements, escapable raw text elements, the template element, foreign elements, and normal elements.

Post from May 31, 2023, filed under .

Website Issues: On the Relevance of Audience Size and Impact

Website issues—relating to conformance, security, accessibility, performance, content, others—are usually treated with a particular priority, but that priority may not always be understandable, and may also be off. On the perspective we obtain when we consider and chart audience size and impact.

Post from May 19, 2023, filed under .

CSS Naked Day and the Lost Wikipedia Page

CSS Naked Day has a message—separation of concerns. The event has been around for nearly 20 years, thousands of developers have participated, and it’s still alive. It may not be an event significant enough for Wikipedia, for which this post had been a draft—but it does seem significant for our field.

Post from May 2, 2023, filed under .

Two Underused Arguments for Writing Documentation

Validating our thinking and allowing to scale may not get enough attention.

Post from April 30, 2023, filed under and .

HTML Concepts: Customized Built-In Elements

HTML allows to define custom elements, elements which enable authors to “build their own fully-featured DOM elements.” One special type of custom element is the customized built-in element—a custom element built on an existing HTML element.

Post from March 25, 2023, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XVIII

Random improvements as always, this time covering ARIA roles, Apache module checks, <guid> elements, CLS rules of thumb, Eleventy, block lists, site licenses, and compression settings.

Post from March 6, 2023, filed under .

Conformance and Accessibility

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 are going to obsolete Success Criterion 4.1.1, which had been WCAG’s nod towards conformant HTML output. This is understandable, and it may even be good—to strengthen accessibility as well as conformance.

Post from February 28, 2023, filed under .

My CSS Wishlist

Trim it.

Post from February 11, 2023, filed under .

26 Additional Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of

Web Development has its own, special vocabulary that consists of several thousand terms. No one knows all of them. (Or do they?) Here are 26 more terms you may or may not have heard of—perhaps including AAAA or MAM or YMYL.

Post from February 9, 2023, filed under .

Challenge Yourself, Even When It’s Art

The paradox of CSS art may suggest an artist had a free pass for the quality of their code. Or does it? I believe there are three possible answers to this.

Post from January 10, 2023, filed under and .

A Problem With Link Relationships

It’s easy to get excited about link relationships and similar types of metadata. But link relationships are invisible information, and some invisible information is notoriously hard to maintain—especially on things that decay, describing attributes that change.

Post from December 23, 2022, filed under .

A Brief History of UITest.com

UITest.com just merged with Frontend Dogma, which is asking for select and random screenshots and facts about a site that I ran for 19 years to provide “web-based and free tools for web development and design.”

Post from December 20, 2022, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XVII

Encoding declarations. Conditionals. Ahrefs. ErrorDocument directives. Mastodon links. Mastodon citizenship. Bitbucket. Eleventy. Action.

Post from December 15, 2022, filed under and .

The cover of “Upgrade Your HTML IV.”

Upgrade Your HTML IV

HTML forms the heart of the Web. The beautiful thing is, HTML is easy to learn. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to master. In the Upgrade Your HTML series, I’m taking examples of HTML, discuss these examples, and make them a little better. I’m excited to announce the fourth book of the series.

Post from November 27, 2022, filed under .

HTML Concepts: Unstyled Documents

There’s unstyled and there’s fully unstyled. And then there’s also styled “in a manner that is useful for a developer.”

Post from November 22, 2022, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XVI

Spaces, HTTP headers, site generator exports, cite elements, variable fonts, social logos, no-break spaces, metadata—life is never boring when you run your own websites.

Post from November 12, 2022, filed under .

Minimal Dark Mode

What’s the easiest and fastest way to set up dark mode? Depending on the setup, something from one declaration to two rules.

Post from November 4, 2022, filed under .

Vegan Web Developers

If you’re a vegan and a web developer, why not join us on a humble list of vegan web developers?

Post from October 24, 2022, filed under and .

Redo Websites Less Often (to Become a Better Developer)

You want to redo websites: The advantages are great, and the ability to put a website on a new foundation is a useful one to acquire. But—you also want to iterate, which means to constantly make small improvements over long periods of time. On how a bias for iteration contributes to becoming a better developer.

Post from October 18, 2022, filed under .

HTML 2022: 20 Additional Observations from Analyzing the Web Almanac Data

After the initial analysis for the HTTP Archive’s 2022 Web Almanac, here are 20 more observations about HTML as it’s being used today. From (no) doctypes to conditional comment zombies to verbose form markup to viewports to javascript: links.

Post from October 10, 2022, filed under .

Website Optimization Measures, Part XV

Automated lossless image compression, mini dark modes, favicon references, prerender, flat image folders, modest product promotions, compact navigation, theme colors—improvements to my own projects, maybe (or maybe not) of interest to your own.

Post from October 4, 2022, filed under .

HTML Concepts: Browsing Contexts

Welcome to another episode of HTML Concepts! Today, browsing contexts—what is that?

Post from September 30, 2022, filed under .

0 of the Global Top 100 Websites Use Valid HTML (in 2022)

When you looked at the top websites in 2021, you learned that 98% of them included invalid HTML. When you do the same for the Top 100 globally, this year, would things have improved? Updated data, with a look at our field’s inability to produce valid HTML output.

Post from September 12, 2022, filed under .

An Attempt at Outlining the Many Factors Influencing Developer Experience

When looking at DX naively, it can seem that it depends on only one factor—DX = Ć’(x). But Developer Experience depends on many factors, and needs to be approached holistically. A quick attempt at sketching just what factors, each of which can tip the scale.

Post from September 6, 2022, 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 development.