Jens Oliver Meiert

Maintainability

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.

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The CSS Art Paradox

The fanciest CSS, standing on the shoulders of bloated HTML.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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—

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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The Secret of Maintainability

Keep it simple.

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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…

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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.

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