Web Development (6)

Print Styling, the 3 Basics

Many sites are not prepared for print, and yet our users print, and they save through print. Therefore: Have a print style sheet, and be it a negative one. Hide what’s not usable or useful. Always test, and tweak when you want better.

Published on April 5, 2019, filed under and .

Optional “@lang”

The lang attribute is one of HTML’s global attributes. If one doesn’t simply take it for granted, it begs a number of questions—and these suggest to drop W3C requirements around it, and to demand software to do the job.

Published on March 21, 2019, filed under .

What Happened on Google+, the Web Development Archives

Following a few philosophy posts to be archived, here are past entries related to web development. Nothing more, nothing less.

Published on March 9, 2019, filed under and .

HTML and Performance: Leave Out Optional Tags and Quotes

As experts we should know what code is optional and leave it out, and our production systems should do a better job assisting us with that. After all the years of neglecting basic HTML optimization, let’s think about taking the next step and not ship optional HTML markup.

Published on January 29, 2019, filed under .

Google Lighthouse and PWA

A review of Lighthouse’s PWA audits and the PWA category as a whole. Just in time to see it be superseded by Lighthouse 4, the major update that solves some (unfortunately not all) of those issues.

Published on January 17, 2019, filed under .

On Visions for Performance, or: Performance Optimization Is a Process

It’s smart to have a vision for what one wishes to achieve for the performance of a site or app. Yet even the soundest approaches to performance visions have their problems, and in them we recognize that performance, or performance optimization, is indeed a process.

Published on December 4, 2018, filed under .

Should Designers Code

Arguments for a “no” to a recurring question: Why we may want to give designers all freedom in the world, not to be limited in what they’re trained to do best.

Published on November 23, 2018, filed under and .

Performance Rule #1: Do What You Need to Do—But Not More

Web Performance has over the age of the Web not only turned into a discipline by itself, but also a complex one at that. While important much less so for revenue but for user experience and accessibility reasons, there’s a particular angle at performance that makes the matter very simple: the pragmatic angle.

Published on November 13, 2018, filed under .

How to Configure Lighthouse for Balanced Quality Websites

Google’s Lighthouse is a great tool even though it has some issues. Fortunately, it’s possible to configure Lighthouse to one’s own views on what matters. Here’s the config that I like to use.

Published on October 15, 2018, filed under .

A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development

There’s an art and even a bit of magic around simple frontend code. Writing such code comes with a few preconditions: perhaps a firm understanding of core technologies, a lot of practice, public scrutiny, and then some. Thoughts.

Published on September 25, 2018, filed under .

Web Development and the GDPR

Who shares or presents code has a special responsibility, because for both the uninitiated and the quality-minded such code should be of a considerable standard. European privacy legislation ups the ante.

Published on August 31, 2018, filed under .

37 Theses on CSS and Web Development

CSS Optimization Basics ends with a list of key ideas. From acknowledging that we don’t always write perfectly efficient and maintainable and understandable code to leading by example.

Published on August 16, 2018, filed under .

AMP, a Strategy

There are problems with AMP. My recommendations: Avoid AMP; or use it, exclusively, on the most relevant pages; or go all-in, for AMP-only.

Published on July 5, 2018, filed under .

The Craft of CSS

When we type down CSS like we’ve done 20 years ago, and when we work with ever more abstractions, what does that mean for our craft?

Published on June 27, 2018, filed under .

The Dangers of Being a Web Developer

Video, slides, and resources for my talk at beyond tellerrand in DĂĽsseldorf.

Published on May 10, 2018, filed under .

The cover of “CSS Optimization Basics.”

CSS Optimization Basics

My latest little book, covering mindsets needed for writing effective style sheets, optimization options during operation and for production, and useful resources to aid and inform the work with CSS.

Published on April 12, 2018, filed under .

User-Centered Web Development

When we think of user focus we easily think of usability tests, following a usually strong wish to produce something that’s actually useful. For us as web developers, focus on the user has a tendency to appear distant though…

Published on March 14, 2018, filed under .

HTML, CSS, and Dependency Direction

Adam Wathan wrote one of the most interesting web development articles I’ve read in the last few months: CSS Utility Classes and “Separation of Concerns.” At least until “Phase 3” there’s much to learn about current web development…

Published on February 14, 2018, filed under .

How Declaration Repetition Developed over Time, a Statistically Insignificant Sample

We know that there’s excessive declaration repetition in the Web’s style sheets, that each declaration is on average repeated 2–3 times, often needlessly. We know that this repetition is a little less bad on tech sites…

Published on February 7, 2018, filed under .

The Compact Guide to Web Maintainability: 200 Tips and Resources

The result of reviewing, normalizing, rephrasing, sorting, and testing 134 responses to a maintainability survey that yielded more than 500 data points, to form a new guide, a new and more definite guide to web maintainability.

Published on January 24, 2018, filed under .

The Two Extremes of Writing CSS, and What We Can Learn from Them

Extremes can be useful. In practice they help get the maximum out of a given approach, and in theory they can show what we’re headed to. Compare two ways of writing CSS—like Tachyons or Atomic CSS, and 2000’s idealistic engineering.

Published on January 2, 2018, filed under .

Expert Web Development: A 3rd Key Differentiator

As web developers we have decisions to make and our decisions depend on a few variables. Two that have become much more important over the years are the one of code for research or production, and the one of web site or app…

Published on December 13, 2017, filed under .

An Ode to Smashing Magazine

Excitement about a success story.

Published on December 6, 2017, filed under .

Performance of CSS Selectors Is Still Irrelevant

From my upcoming book on CSS optimization: Selector performance is not something to optimize for as the price we pay for it is terrible: We micro-manage our work for gains that aren’t noticeable.

Published on November 29, 2017, filed under .

On Big Picture Thinking in Web Development

Thoughts on thinking outside the box, in tech, with examples ranging from selector performance to a general development vision, to illustrate how very different issues can all reach beyond their perimeter.

Published on November 22, 2017, filed under .

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