200 Web-Based, Must-Try Web Design and Development Tools

A couple of web-based and free tools to test and improve accessibility, performance, security, conformance, colors and images and typography, SEO and SEM and—more. With an opinion about link lists, and appreciation for well-maintained tool collections.

Published on August 8, 2023, filed under Development and Design.

The Web Development Glossary 3K—More Than 3,000 Terms and Concepts for the Well-Rounded Developer

Announcing the new edition of The Web Development Glossary, including almost a thousand additional terms as well as major usability updates, like improved source and cross-reference navigation—to provide an overview of web development unlike any other book or site.

Published on July 27, 2023, filed under Development.

Good Code Is—

On a question everyone does and does not have an answer for.

Published on July 23, 2023, filed under Development.

Frameworks and Libraries and Leaky Abstractions

“Abstractions save us time working, but they don’t save us—”

Published on June 30, 2023, filed under 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.

Published on June 7, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on May 31, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on May 19, 2023, filed under Development and Management.

CSS Naked Day and the Missing 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.

Published on May 2, 2023, filed under Development.

Two Underused Arguments for Writing Documentation

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

Published on April 30, 2023, filed under Development and Management.

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.

Published on March 25, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on March 6, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on February 28, 2023, filed under Development.

My CSS Wishlist

Trim it.

Published on February 11, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on February 9, 2023, filed under Development.

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.

Published on January 10, 2023, filed under Development and Design.

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.

Published on December 23, 2022, filed under Development.

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.”

Published on December 20, 2022, filed under Development.

Website Optimization Measures, Part XVII

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

Published on December 15, 2022, filed under Development and Everything Else.

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.

Published on November 27, 2022, filed under Development.

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.”

Published on November 22, 2022, filed under Development.

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.

Published on November 12, 2022, filed under Development.

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.

Published on November 4, 2022, filed under Development.

Vegan Web Developers

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

Published on October 24, 2022, filed under Development and Everything Else.

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.

Published on October 18, 2022, filed under Development.

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.

Published on October 10, 2022, filed under Development.