Design
An Overview of the 50 Highest-Ranking Web Design and Development Glossaries
If you want to look up terms, there are dozens if not hundreds of tech glossaries. However, a search quickly shows differences in how comprehensive and therefore useful these glossaries are—and doesn’t show whether the glossaries are being updated. A view at the glossary landscape.
#72 · · development
CSS: How to Indicate Container Overflow, When There Is Overflow
You have a block of text that you can’t shorten and yet that you don’t want to give too much space, so as not to draw attention away from other content. It’s useful metadata that you like to show. On a stopgap option using scroll-driven animations.
#71 · · development, css
Website Optimization Measures, Part XXV
On caching headers, capitalization, social graphics, download priorities, logical properties, Cloudflare, viewport metadata, obsolete markup, and calls to action.
#70 · · development, optimization
On Title Case
Casual thoughts about my experience with title case, a recent switch from AP-inspired to NYT-governed guidelines, and the respective guidelines themselves.
#69 · · misc
Website Optimization Measures, Part XXIV
On AVIF tests, book prices, AI experiments, Eleventy performance, IE scripts and styles, domain registrations, site headers, and (old) document functionality that can better be handled by native HTML elements than by handmade scripts.
#68 · · development, optimization
Website Optimization Measures, Part XXIII
Affiliate marketing and ads and Brave Rewards. HTML elements and dotenv and Git. Spellings and designs and stuff.
#67 · · development, optimization
Website Optimization Measures, Part XXII
Web design is a process, running our own websites is awesome, and together it means there’s always something to tweak and improve and optimize. Select things I’ve done over the last few months.
#66 · · development, optimization
Website Optimization Measures, Part XXI
Who hasn’t had enough of style sheet reviews, editor performance optimizations, ad removals, CTA revisions, pseudo-class refactorings, blocked AI crawlers, custom search engines, social graphics, or server log configs.
#65 · · development, optimization
WebGlossary.info
The Web Development Glossary—now also available as a website. Enjoy exploring.
#64 · · development
Website Optimization Measures, Part XIX
Dull maintenance drudgery (?), this time covering dependencies, link checks, keyboard navigation, contrast, hidden UI elements, multi-language tag handling, image compression, IndieAuth, and AI crawling.
#63 · · development, optimization
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.
#62 · · 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.
#61 · · development, html, quality, art
Website Optimization Measures, Part XIV
About link relationships, Twitterbot, dark mode, tags, addresses, social markup, color-scheme, and—FLoC.
#60 · · development, optimization
The CSS Art Paradox
The fanciest CSS, standing on the shoulders of bloated HTML.
#59 · · development, html, css, maintainability, art
33 Additional Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of
As you know, Web Development has its own, special vocabulary that easily consists of several thousand terms. Do you like to try your knowledge again, on how many of the following 33 terms you know?
#58 · · development
In Critical Defense of Frontend Development
The field of frontend development is in another crisis, largely due to an incomplete, misinterpreted definition and a bizarre mess created by “web development as a commodity” and “web development as software development.” How frontend development is more than development, and what we can (and should) do.
#57 · · development, html, css, javascript, quality
Website Optimization Measures, Part XI
Welcome to another round-up of possible website improvements, this time going from several types of link updates to table of contents CSS upgrades to CDN integration and privacy policy checks.
#56 · · development, optimization
33 Web Development Terms You May Not Have Heard Of
Web Development has its own, special vocabulary that easily consists of several thousand terms. Even if you’re an experienced developer you’re unlikely to know all of them. Still, do you like to try your knowledge? How many of the following terms do you know?
#55 · · development
The 4 Pillars of Good Embed Code
Embed code is third-party code to be integrated on websites and apps, like ads or social media widgets. There have been many problems with embed code for a very long time. This post covers the essence of what makes for good embed code.
#54 · · development, quality, html, javascript
How Running Your Own Website Is Much Better for You Than You Think
The typical reason for why professionals don’t have their own websites is that they don’t want to make the commitment, and yet that misses how the disadvantages people see are actually advantages. Renewed thoughts on how running your own website is an asset.
#53 · · development
When to Open Links in a New Tab
Always open links in the same tab unless doing so could 1) disrupt a process, 2) risk data loss, or 3) confuse users.
#52 · · usability, development
The Developer’s Fallacy of Close Collaboration With Designers
Working closely with designers makes sense and is awesome, notably for mutual understanding and efficiency. And yet there are also good reasons not to work closely with designers. For developers it’s important, for otherwise foolish, to be aware.
#51 · · development
199 Love Haiku (the Book)
In 2016, I wrote 1,000 short poems, haiku-style. I wrote those poems to challenge myself as a writer. I launched a website for the haiku and I shared the story. Today, I’ve published the 199 haiku that a few friends and I liked the most as a book.
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.
#49 · · development, css
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.
#48 · · development, html, css
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.
#47 · · development
Highlights From “Flatland” (Edwin Abbott Abbott)
“Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs, in some manner, I know not how, may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.”
#46 · · philosophy
Highlights From “The Elements of Style” (William Strunk Jr.)
“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”
#45 · · misc
On Material Design
When Google introduced Material Design back in 2014, I was happy; I was happy for the team and I was happy for Google to mark another milestone on the long way of improving the aesthetics of their products. But, I was also concerned.
#44 ·
On Writing 1,000 Poems
A story of venturing into an entirely different genre.
#43 · · misc
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.
#42 · · development, performance, maintainability, accessibility
10 Photos V
The next part of the x-monthly series.
#41 · · photography
10 Photos IV
Continuing the x-monthly series, here are yet again ten of my photographic favorites.
#40 · · photography
Apocryphal Apostrophes
Oh, typography. How have you been.
#39 · · development
10 Photos III
Establishing a three-, four-, or five-monthly series, here are ten more of my photographic favorites as of late. Of my own works, sure; if it was public what one liked on EyeEm I’d happily disclose which 4.200 photos…
#38 · · photography
10 Photos II
Some more of my EyeEm photos, published over the last few months, that have become others’ or probably my own favorites.
#37 · · photography
The Problem of “Fire and Forget” in Web Design
If I were to pick the main issue in web design… I couldn’t answer immediately. I don’t think there are so many, but there are a few, they are very different, they operate on different scales, and so they’re hard to compare. One, however, is “fire and forget.”
#36 · · development, quality
New Book: “On Web Development”
I wrote another book. On Web Development. On Web Development is an ebook that collects most of the articles about web development (and web design) that I wrote between 2005 and 2015. Most articles as in most useful, most important, and also most controversial.
#35 · · books, development, maintainability, html, css
Museums Should Always Allow Photography
The observation that there seem to be good reasons to allow most photography—to charge extra for it if necessary—, but none to offend visitors by banning it.
#34 · · art, photography
10 Photos
Some of my favorite and most popular photos lately.
#33 · · photography
Web Design and Principles
Web design has become complex. More people, more ideas, more use cases, more technical innovations, more design variations, &c. pp. More makes for more complex. However, there’s a life line helping us with this complexity, as well as trends.
#32 · · development
Jens and Photography
I love what technology has allowed all of us to do, from writing and publishing for the masses to designing and coding for the masses to photography and arts for the masses. But as a professional in an industry that is easy for people to enter…
#31 · · photography
Animated Traffic: My 10 Favorite Travel Photo Animations
Last December I launched Animated Traffic. Animated Traffic is an experiment in which I play with photo animations that feed off my eternal journey, of which I’ll share the results. The material, as of this moment, made for 302 posts covering 4 continents…
#30 · · adventure, photography
A Word on Contemporary Web Design
These days, and as juror for Design Made in Germany I see a lot of websites, many a designer knows how to make a page appear spacious, even grandiose. Alas, as many appear to have forgotten how to use space effectively…
#29 ·
Travel, Photos, Art?
I started another side project. It’s about taking a ton of photos of street scenery, working some magic that I talk about in this very post, and putting the results up on Tumblr. On the one new travel tumblr art installation that I call Animated Traffic.
#28 · · adventure, photography, art
Print Style Sheets and URLs
Print style sheets are awesome. They’re easy to write, too. Site owners and developers who care about print typically know what to do. Alas there’s one thing that’s done rather the wrong than in any right way: printing URLs…
#27 · · development, css
On Correct Punctuation
Let’s speak the unspeakable: Correct punctuation, here referring to the use of the correct characters for quotation marks, apostrophes, dashes, and ellipses, will forever remain a dream online…
#26 ·
SUS: How to Easily Grade Your Site’s Usability
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a Likert scale-based questionnaire to grade the usability of systems, which John Brooke created back in the 80s. SUS results yield a score between 0 and 100, with 100 indicating “best” usability…
#25 · · usability
Punctuation Cheat Sheet
Developing and working with international sites is an interesting challenge, not just because of right-to-left contents. Typographically, there are differences between many locales. To improve punctuation in Google translations I’m using a localization aid…
#24 · · development
Another Survey (Including Website Usability Scale Template)
I’m doing it again: Do you have another 15 seconds to answer a couple of questions? The survey is based on the System Usability Scale (SUS) John Brooke presented in the 80s. Which means nothing less than that there’s another experiment taking place with me testing SUS.
#23 · · usability