Maintainability
Why You Absolutely Need to Have Automated Dependency Management in Place
Although tooling is abundant, good, and free, many projects still have no system in place to manage software dependencies. This comes with unnecessary risk and leads to unnecessary work.
#42 · · development
Naked and Semantic
On Jared Norman’s “Dead Code” podcast, together with Fabien Basmaison, speaking about CSS Naked Day and other web development topics.
#41 · · interviews, development, css
CSS: The Pain Is Real
With presentational HTML, it’s impossible to do a CSS-only redesign. With strict separation of concerns, it’s incredibly rare to observe a CSS-only redesign. On a not-frequently-made observation around maintainability, which is to make changes more predictable.
#40 · · development, css
The Magic of the Most Minimal HTML Possible (and Why We Don’t Make Use of It)
On challenging XHTML–HTML and regular redos, by looking at HTML–HTML, full separation of concerns, and iterations.
#39 · · development, html, minimalism, conformance
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.
#38 · · development, css
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.
#37 · · development
The CSS Art Paradox
The fanciest CSS, standing on the shoulders of bloated HTML.
#36 · · development, html, css, design, art
If It Can Be Done Using an HTTP Header, Use an HTTP Header
The following is a (slightly modified) chapter from Upgrade Your HTML, which is “all about picking examples of HTML in the wild, and explaining how to make that code better.”
#35 · · development
How Can We Make Website Maintenance Work More Visible?
The maintenance and maintainability of websites is a much neglected topic. This is problematic because: We cannot not maintain. Yet primarily we may deal with a visibility problem that we could explore more options for.
#34 · · development
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.
#33 · · development
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.
#32 · · development, html, css
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.
#31 · · development, performance, accessibility, design
Web Development: How Making Our Own Lives Difficult Is More Important Than We Think
Many moons ago I wrote that web developers wouldn’t need debugging tools. I was half joking and half serious. We were just coming out of the dark ages of web development, so to speak, undernourished of useful tools, frameworks, libraries…
#30 · · development
The Great Web Maintainability Survey Results
Four weeks ago I started a survey about good and bad practices when it comes to the maintenance and maintainability of websites. Participation was amazing, and here are the first results.
#29 · · development
70% Repetition in Style Sheets: Data on How We Fail at CSS Optimization
Looking at data for some of the most popular websites, we repeat ourselves too much in CSS; using declarations just once is often one solid avenue to avoid repetition; together, we need to put more focus on style sheet optimization.
#28 · · development, css
The Great Web Maintainability Survey
The maintenance and economics of websites is a much-neglected topic in the web development community. Here are three questions for developers, to gather practices as well as resources.
#27 · · development
Principles of Web Development
Web development, at more than 20 years of age, is becoming an increasingly mature profession. Web development is yet also subject to constant change, and the field produces more of that change, out of itself. More technological standards…
#26 · · development, quality
The Law of Maintainability
One cannot not maintain. This is an important axiom, critical even when we recognize how little understanding and prioritization this topic enjoys in our industry…
#25 · · development
The Law of User-Generated Code
Whenever you allow users to edit code of your website, you’re doomed. It’s only a matter of time until you need to give up and redo the entire website—and, adding insult to injury, alienate your users.
#24 · · development, css
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.
#23 · · books, development, html, css, design
A Vision of Web Development
There is one thing every web developer should aspire to: writing the most minimal, semantically appropriate, valid HTML, and then never changing it. “Never” not in a sense of denial and refusal, but in the sense of a guiding light…
#22 · · development, html, minimalism, semantics, conformance, quality
Remember: April 9 Is CSS Naked Day
CSS Naked Day is coming up! Why the excitement? Because CSS Naked Day is a magnificent custom; the magnificent custom to, on one day of the year, strip websites of all styling. It’s awesome because—
#21 · · development, css
On the Deterioration of HTML/CSS Practices
Presentational markup for everyone.
#20 · · development, html, css
CSS, DRY, and Code Optimization
Why we should minimize repetition in style sheets—perhaps through using declarations just once—, focus more on CSS optimization, and consider that avoiding problems is also a way of solving them.
#19 · · development, css, optimization
On Declaration Sorting in CSS
I keep on seeing people advocate to sort declarations “by type.” And every time I wonder, why is this idea still going around? Type sorting is extraordinarily ineffective, for it’s extremely slow and consistently unreliable…
#18 · · development, css
HTML and Non-Script Styling
If you are to style a document differently based on whether certain technology is available, you should keep two things in mind: HTML itself is static and separation of concerns is important for maintainability…
#17 · · development, html
Maintainability: One Story and Three Concerns
To make this a little story, for a long time in my career I wasn’t very concerned about maintainability. I was maintaining projects but didn’t have an idea about whether what I maintained was actually effective to maintain. I got a sense that things weren’t quite right…
#16 · · development
HTML, “@width”, and “@height”
As the width and height attributes are to remain part of HTML, limit their use. The reason to avoid @width and @height is that they are presentational and hence constitute potential maintainability issues.
#15 · · development, html
CSS: How to Host Right-to-Left Styling
For international projects, don’t use separate style sheets for right-to-left (RTL) styling: use natural (@dir) or artificial (@id, @class) hooks instead. The only exception are unbearable performance issues due to hundreds of RTL rules…
#14 · · development, css
HTML, CSS, and Web Development Practices: Past, Present, and Future
Articles with a title consisting of more than 15,000 characters don’t need an introduction.
#13 · · development, html, css
The True Advantage of CSS
Despite CSS being around for a long, long time, there are still some myths around it. Reading Mike’s post on CSS evangelism again I couldn’t only relate to Mike’s concerns, I also felt reminded of…
#12 · · development, css
Maintainability Guide
Maintainability is important in order to deal with change. Good maintainability means making change easier and more affordable, and avoiding change that is not necessary…
#11 · · development, html, css
CSS: The Maintenance Issue #1 and How You Can Avoid It
The biggest—as most unnecessary—maintenance issue in web development is, as my recent research shows, style sheet naming and integration. Web developers use inadvisable style sheet names and inadvisable ways to integrate style sheets that force them…
#10 · · development, html, css
5 CSS Tips Every Web Developer Should Know About
Of all the tips this site shares, the following ones may be special. Let’s quickly run through what might be essential for every web developer to know about CSS. Main focus: maintainability, though differently.
#9 · · development, css
The Most Important Thing Is to Get the HTML Right
Why? Because it’s the markup that makes for most of the code of a site and is hence key to cost efficiency and maintainability; because it carries meaning and is important for accessibility; because it often has an impact on performance; and because it is the prerequisite for online success.
#8 · · development, html, quality, semantics, accessibility
Less Is Still More
Time and money spent on making things worse is something I find absolutely fascinating. Let me elaborate, beginning with HTML newsletters: Hours are spent writing supposed content, creating and decorating mockups, working around email client limitations…
#7 · · development
CSS: Simple Rules for Better Organization and More Efficiency
“Organization is not everything, but without organization, everything is nothing,” one of my teachers used to say. Almost everything benefits from organization, and so does work with CSS—especially when working with many people.
#6 · · development, css, performance
Great CSS Techniques and the Simple Truth Behind Them
There’s a simple recipe to judge CSS techniques: Does the method in question require HTML additions and modifications (beyond introducing IDs or classes)? If yes, the technique likely isn’t elegant and might be inadvisable.
#5 · · development, html, css
The Secret of Maintainability
Keep it simple.
#4 · · development
Microformats Would Benefit From a Namespace
Microformats become more and more popular, accelerated by the questionable success of the nofollow microformat. However, those of them that mandate class names cause problems that could be avoided by using a “pseudo-namespace.”
#3 · · development, html, css
CSS Practice: Namespaces in Complex Projects
Working in complex projects or in projects that don’t provide a good overview of forthcoming page types and elements may require a defensive strategy for writing CSS. Such a defensive strategy rests on certain safety measures to ensure better maintainability…
#2 · · development, css
Why “Conditional Comments” Are Bad, Repeat: Bad
“Conditional Comments” are inadvisable to use. They contradict the goal of separating structure from presentation, and because of that they will hurt you one day.
#1 · · development, html, css