Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System . I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of
Homepage Contact RSS Feed Styles Tuesday 6 Feb 2024 Now that I’m in my 15th year of blogging it’s past time I spruced up my RSS feed . I’ve also launched a new bookmark blog . Perfect time to revisit
Hello! I posted a comic on Mastodon this week about what’s in the .git directory and someone requested a text version, so here it is. I added someextra notes too. First, here’s the image. It’s a ~15 w
CSS! CSS! CSS! posted on 11.06.2023 I just came home after three beautiful days in Amsterdam, where I gave a talk at the CSS Day conference. I’ve watched many inspirational and engaging presentations
Last updated on June 15, 2023 This is a repost of an old article on the Tenon blog. Since that’s being sunsetted, I’m reposting it below. Ensuring that your website is ADA compliant on desktop computers accounts for only one piece of the puzzle. With mobile devices garnering more than half of all…
Jun 29, 2023 What’s The Perfect Design Process? About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬ Email Newsletter Weekly tips on front-end & UX.Trusted by 182,000+…
6 August 2023 There’s a new form design trend going around: Buttons inside inputs. Anthony Hobday mentioned it by asking his audience if there was any significant difference in usability between these 3 designs: 3 different layouts for an input and button combination Button inside the input Button…
Join the 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good (it’s an 11ty Conference) January 30, 2024 Originally: https://conf.11ty.dev/ In May 2024 (this year!) we’ll gather together our ext
Our industry loves Swiss Army Knives. The tools we tend to gravitate towards are ones that do all the things . They’re packed with features. I get the appeal, but I also think this tendency is harmful
the article element and screen readers posted on 04.07.2023 I wanted to know how and if common screen readers expose the element. Here are my results: Summary tl;dr: shit's complicated. Some screen readers don't announce articles and have no default quick nav shortcuts. Some don't announce them but…
2024-02-01 #the-web #blogging The latest edition of Matthias Ott's Own Your Web (which I recommend subscribing too!) points out that there are a lot of blogs out there, but they can be hard to discove
the details element and in-page search posted on 30.06.2023 An important factor in terms of UX and accessibility for deciding whether the element is the right solution for a problem is the find-in-page behaviour. In Chromium-based browsers, the details element automatically opens when it contains a…
I turned off the Plausible analytics for this site. I used to use analytics mostly to look for links back to my site from other creators. When I had so little traffic, I could traipse through the data
It was nice to see Rach talk about stripping out analytics . I stripped out my analytics years ago and while I thought I wrote about it, I can’t find where I did so. My apologies if I’m repeating myse
Let’s take a look at the CSS text-wrap property and how we can use it to improve the way text flows on a web page. We can use text-wrap: balance to tell the browser to equalize (as much as it can) mul
I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work first, showing there is interest, then pushing to get it standardized. But Coil failed. When we started…
One of my favourite sessions at All Day Hey conference last month was Jack Franklin’s talk Abstractions, complexities and off-ramps . As web applications grow larger, they inevitably fall prey to comp
Popovers are commonly positioned relative to their invoker (if they have one). When we use the popover attribute , anchoring is tricky, as these popovers are in the top layer, away from the context of
Have you heard about #CSS @scope? It’s an upcoming way to scope the reach of your CSS selectors, allowing you to move away from methodologies such as BEM because you no longer need to name those in-be
9 July 2023 Since 2016 I’ve used, created and contributed to multiple design systems. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. By “doesn’t” I mean designers don’t trust it. And as a result they don’t use it. When I’m feeling sassy, I call these people ‘cowboy designers’. Now there are some designers…
Daily Tips In yesterday’s article on loading HTML from another page, I talked about progressively enhancing a link into a button. Let’s imagine you have a dialog modal that loads some HTML. You might keep all that HTML in a separate file, and by default display a link to it. When your JS loads, you…
Better form UX with the CSS property `field-sizing` Published on 23 Jan 2024 One of the more painful experiences I've encountered on the web is filling out a form input that is fixed width. Whatever I've typed becomes cutoff and I can't actually see what I've typed or am typing. On desktop, I…
How many times have you been in the discovery process with a client when they say something like "And of course, we'll need to be able to edit the content on our own." If you're anything like me, you
Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a metric that reflects how quickly a browser can connect and download data from your servers. By tracking TTFB timings across your site, you can detect any slowdowns or issues with your servers that negatively affect your performance. TTFB may not be a Core Web Vital,…
Whenever I do a full audit for a website, I have almost 40 individual, highly granular, form-related checks. Those checks can be boiled down to the following 6 high level goals. 1. General Structure Check that the form has a logical structure, with headings and subheadings used to group related…
Thanks to the Scroll-Driven Animations Level 1 Specification it is now possible to drive CSS/WAAPI animations by scroll . Not included in that spec are Scroll-Triggered Animations: animations that run
Sadly, I'm not too good at documenting what I'm sometimes building in the little free time that I have. At the end of last year, I implemented an interesting feature on this site, but never wrote about it. As you might have seen, this site supports Webmentions. They are displayed under each article,…
Last time I wrote "this page is a repository consisting of some thrown-together and latenight-written code". Some tests should ensure that I don't break to much when I'm, cleaning up the code. Here's
The gotchas of CSS Nesting CSS & HTML ,13 June 2023, 3 minute read Quickly deploy preview environments to the cloud! AWS, GCP & Azure support. It's OSS - try it now. Ads by EthicalAds I've written bef
19 Comments In response to John P. Green. Yeah, that is part of WordPress and I have not yet found where that lives so I can write a function to override it. Partly because I want to split each element into its own , I want to strip all instances of title, I want to strike & , and I want to strip…
I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I get it. Maybe they picked an off-the-shelf theme that doesn’t have that. Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they even don’t want to. I somehow never considered sites that have an RSS…
You might think that when you bet on the web platform and rely on native HTML features, your website will be completely accessible. Unfortunately, this assumption is wrong in many cases. If you want to learn about more inaccessible HTML features, a recent HTMHell article covered many of them. It's a…
17 December 2023 Giving context to a blogroll Garrit Franke’s recent post, titled “Roast my site”, motivated me to write about something that has always bugged me with personal sites: the grocery-styl
In typography, an orphan or widow is a single word on its own line. It can look particularly unpleasing with headings, and is hard to “plan for” on the web, where people view your site on a wide range
Rachel Andrew shared a snippet of good news for CSS layout on her blog the other day: it’ll soon be possible to vertically centre an element inside a parent without the parent needing to be a flex or
I kicked 2023 off with a pretty big change in my professional life as I transitioned roles at Squiz . Before 2023, I had been a Lead Developer , working on projects for clients in the Services team an
I have used Sass for a very long time within marketing departments, design system teams, and on many solo projects. My standout reasons as expanded upon in this post were: file organization list and m
In my new free course for beginners, Learn JavaScript, , I talk briefly about how powerful the developer console is, and why I think it’s ones of the best features of working in the front end. Today,
Implement Auth0 in any app in just 5 minutes. Sign up free and save time with Auth0. ads via Carbon Is there a good reason why we’re defining global custom properties on :root/html and not on body?” I
A friend showed me something of a design spec they were charged with pulling off: The requirements: … when I click on any of them it expands at the top to full width and the rest of the cards re-arran