Most Popular
Loved, hated, or important weblog entries.
Contents
2021
- 5 Eleventy Tweaks That Make My Sites Better (and Maybe Yours)
- One Favicon to Rule Them All
- HTML Concepts: Constraint Validation
- CSS:
:has()and the Lost Paradigm - The 3-Second Frontend Developer Test
- Use the
iElement, and Use It Appropriately - HTML Concepts: The “Nothing” Content Model
- Reasons to Listen to Whom You Don’t Agree With
- Thoughts for the Aging Web Developer
- CS:GO on macOS, an Amateur Setup
- 98% of the Top 100 U.S. Websites Use Invalid HTML (in 2021)
- Upgrade Your HTML III
- Engineering Management Ă—12
- HTML Concepts: “Body-Ok”
- Code in Quarantine
- The Choice to F Up
- 33 Additional Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of
- 5 Tips for Your Next Promotion or Salary Raise
- HTML: The 16 Content Categories and Their Elements
- In Critical Defense of Frontend Development
2020
- Ignore AMP
- Notes on HTML 3.2
- Upgrade Your HTML II
- On HTML (and HTML in 2020)
- Custom Properties: Questioning
:root - The Anti-Reset
- 33 Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of
- The 26 Boolean Attributes of HTML
- 5 Tips to Get Your Dev Blog Running
- The 4 Pillars of Good Embed Code
- The Web Development Glossary (More Than 2,000 Key Terms for Developers)
- The Frameworks Paradox
- On the Responsibility That Comes with Good JavaScript Support
- Round Table
- How Running Your Own Website Is Much Better for You Than You Think
2019
- An HTML Optimizer’s Config for html-minifier
- When to Open Links in a New Tab
- CSS: When to Use Logical Properties
- Upgrade Your HTML (the Booklet)
- On Writing Better Markup
- The Developer’s Fallacy of Close Collaboration with Designers
- “Must Work Without JavaScript”
- Optional HTML: Everything You Need to Know
- When to use
img,img@srcset, andpictureandsource - 13 Leadership Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
- Image Compression: How to Super-Easily Set Up Automated Base Optimization
- The Problem with Web Development Checklists, or: The Frontend Checklist, Revised
- 3 Reasons Against Ad Blockers
- A Crime Called Favicon
- Counter the Happiness Assumption
- 199 Love Haiku (the Book)
- Print Styling, the 3 Basics
- Optional
@lang - HTML and Performance: Leave Out Optional Tags and Quotes
- Google Lighthouse and PWA
2018
- On Performance Visions, or: Performance Optimization Is a Process
- Should Designers Code
- Performance Rule #1: Do What You Need to Do—But Not More
- How to Configure Lighthouse for Balanced Quality Websites
- A Short Guide to Minimal Web Development
- AMP, a Strategy
- CSS Optimization Basics
- User-Centered Web Development
- HTML, CSS, and Dependency Direction
- How Declaration Repetition Developed over Time, a Statistically Insignificant Sample
- The Compact Guide to Web Maintainability: 200 Tips and Resources
- Oh WTF My Tone, or: On Germans Speaking English
- On Material Design
- The Two Extremes of Writing CSS, and What We Can Learn from Them
2017
- On Writing 1,000 Poems
- Expert Web Development: A 3rd Key Differentiator
- Performance of CSS Selectors Is Still Irrelevant
- On Big Picture Thinking in Web Development
- CSS: The Reason Why Selectors Should Be Ordered, Too
- The Scientific Irony
- DRY CSS: How to Use Declarations Just Once, Effectively
- 5 Reasons Against Resets, Normalizers, Reboots
- The 3 Levels of Code Consistency
- Understandable-Simple vs. Minimal-Simple Code
- Freedom = Ć’(Money)?
- Why It Would Be Bad If Jesus Was Here
- The Cost of Frameworks, Illustrated
- CSS @-Rules, an Overview
- In Defense of Bad Luck
- What We Should Teach Up-and-Coming Developers
- What Kills and What Will Save Content Management Systems
- Living Websites, Living Books
- Web Development: How Making Our Own Lives Difficult Is More Important Than We Think
- Frameworks, Libraries, and the Modern Web Developer: Web Development, Overdone
- What I Learned Building Google’s Web Frameworks
- Boyscout Code
- Stop Using Resets: Visual Examples of the Practical Nonsense of Resets and Normalizers
- Regarding the Fermi Paradox
- 70% Repetition in Style Sheets: Data on How We Fail at CSS Optimization
- Foreigners Are Heroes
- Principles of Web Development
- The Great Neglect
2016
- CSS Shorthand Syntax Considered Important
- Why I Don’t Use CSS Preprocessors
- Contradictions: a Problem of Logic, a Feature of Reality?
- Stop Using the Old “Clearfix”
- Why Philosophy Matters
- New Book(let): The Little Book of Website Quality Control
- Accelerated Mobile Pages, a Critical View
- WordPress Themes and Web Development
- The Anatomy of a Coding Guideline
- On Tailoring and Web Frameworks
- The Dilemma of the Kind Person
- New Book(let): How to Work on Oneself
- Conditional Boycott
- The Reminder Trick
- Humanity and “The Other Manifesto”
- Stream Theory
- The Law of Maintainability
2015
- New Book: The Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines
- What I’ve Hated and What I’ve Loved About Web Development
- The Problem of “Fire and Forget” in Web Design
- Several Lives
- New Book: Journey of J.
- The Law of User-Generated Code
- New Book: On Web Development
- Web Standards: We’re F’ing It Up
- A Vision of Web Development
- On the Problems and Limits of Science
- The Two Ground Rules of Using a Framework
- What to Carry When Traveling the World
- 180 Little Stories After Traveling the World for 18 Months
- The Truth About
!important - New Book: The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks
- On Taking Life
- Web Design and Principles
- On the Deterioration of HTML/CSS Practices
2014
- The One Assumption About Our Reality
- The Problems of Working with Web Agencies
- CSS and Specificity
- Questioning Electronic Data as Evidence
- Google and HTML/CSS Code Quality
- CSS, DRY, and Code Optimization
- How to Travel the World and Stay Healthy
- How to Travel the World and Stay Safe
- HTML and Specifying Language
- How to Prepare to Travel the World
- All Code Is Not Equal: On Research and Production Code
- The Law of Travel
- The 6 Most Useful Books I’ve Ever Read
- CSS: When to Use Generated Content
- Lessons from Writing a Dream Journal
- A Word on Contemporary Web Design
- HTML Explained in 123 Tweets: The Google #htmltuesday Archive
- How to Just Quit and Travel the World
2013
- On Writing a Book with Google Docs and Amazon KDP
- How to Become an Everyday Adventurer
- CSS, HTML, and the Problem of Spec Fragmentation
- No to DRM in HTML
- New Book! 100 Things I Learned as an Everyday Adventurer
- The Curious Case of Breadcrumbs in HTML
- About Cost in Web Development
- The Meanings of Googliness
- Goodbye Google, San Francisco, California, and United States
- How to Order CSS Selectors, a Draft
2012
2011
2010
- Testing Tricks: CSS Bookmarklets
- CSS: How to Host Right-to-Left Styling
- CSS Validation and Vendor Extensions: Throw Warnings, Not Errors
pxIs Dead, Long Livepx
2009
- HTML/CSS Frameworks: Useful, Universal, Usable, Unobtrusive
- The 3 Basic Rules for Writing HTML
- HTML, CSS, and Web Development Practices: Past, Present, and Future
- The Real Advantage of CSS
- Diagnostic Styling Reloaded
- Microformats, Key Flaws
- Maintainability Guide
- Punctuation Cheat Sheet
- CSS: The Maintenance Issue #1 and How You Can Avoid It
- Why CSS Needs No Variables
- The Stupidest Style Sheet Name Ever
- CSS: Style the Non-Obvious
- When to Split Style Sheets
- Performance and RFC 2396
- 5 Cool Ways to Support the W3C
2008
- HTML vs. XHTML: Why HTML Wins
- The Greatest Secret in Web Design
- 5 CSS Tips Every Web Developer Should Know About
- An Exercise for Emerging CSS Experts: Avoid IDs and Classes
- Accessibility Heuristics
- Web Standards at Google
- The Most Important Thing Is to Get the HTML Right
- To Be Clear (on Conditional Comments and Resets)
- Best Practices for ID and Class Names
- A Few Words on HTML/CSS Frameworks
- Yes, You Can Use HTML 5
- 10 Measures for Continuous Website Maintenance
- When Validation Becomes Unimportant
- Web Design: 10 Additional Research Findings You Should Know
- Optional Tags in HTML 4
- CSS: Simple Rules for Better Organization and More Efficiency
- The World’s Best HTML Template
- Why “Reset” Style Sheets Are Bad
- CSS: All Properties from CSS 1 to CSS 3 (Index)
- Great CSS Techniques and the Simple Truth Behind Them
- The Secret of Maintainability
- “helvetica, arial”, Not “arial, helvetica”
2007
- Choke Web Development Framework 1.0
- User Agent Style Sheets: Basics and Samples
- Microformats Would Benefit from a Pseudo-Namespace
- 20 [Alternative] + 7 Additional Ways to Focus on Users
- Are You a Web Designer or a Web Decorator?
- HTML: All Elements from HTML 1 to XHTML 2.0 (Index)
- Load Time, the UX Factor: Facts and Measures
- Requirements for Website Prototypes (and Design Systems)
- Principles of Art, Design, and Decoration
- 10 Steps to Create a High-Quality Website
- Revitalizing SUS, the System Usability Scale
- .htaccess: 7 Useful Ingredients (Plus Bonus)
- 25 Excellent Usability/UX Articles and Resources
- CSS Practice: Pseudo-Namespaces in Complex Projects
- “Valid CSS” and Similar Claims Are Unprofessional
- Hire Only Web Designers with a Website
- Print Style Sheets: The Basics (for No Excuses)
- Why “Conditional Comments” Are Bad, Repeat: Bad
- QA: On Errors, and Why Paying for Errors Pays Off
- Web Design: 15 Important Research Findings You Should Know
If you could use something more voluminous, check out my books at Goodreads or at Amazon.
Perhaps my most comprehensive book: The Web Development Glossary (2020). With explanations and definitions for literally thousands of terms from Web Development and related fields, building on Wikipedia as well as the MDN Web Docs. Available at Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and Leanpub.
Perhaps my most relevant book: CSS Optimization Basics (2018). Writing CSS is a craft. As craftspeople we strive to write high quality CSS. In CSS Optimization Basics I lay out some of the most important aspects of such CSS. Available at Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and Leanpub.
Stay up-to-date? Follow me by feed or on Twitter.