5 min
The mobile site is the site
Separate "m." sites were a reasonable answer to a 2010 problem, but what finally killed them wasn't technical. It was Google changing what shows up in search.
Writing
Browse by topic →1 min
optgroup
A select with 40 options in it is nearly always a select that wanted three or four labeled groups, and the element for that has been sitting in HTML the entire time.
6 min
BEM and the long class name
A naming convention is a bet that the next person reads class names before they read CSS, and the ugly double underscores are paying for something real, which is not having to know the whole stylesheet just to change one thing.
6 min
The 400 KB hero
Every conversation about page weight goes straight to minification. Meanwhile there is a 2 MB image on the page that nobody has opened since Photoshop.
5 min
jQuery for one selector
Most of what jQuery was invented to fix has been fixed in the browsers, and a lot of us are still loading the whole library to avoid typing a slightly longer method name.
2 min
abbr and the title attribute
The abbreviation element is one of about four places in HTML where the title attribute is the actual content rather than a decoration, and it is still unreachable for anybody not holding a mouse.
5 min
IE8 is a client, not a browser
Browser support looks like a technical decision and gets argued as one, but it's a commercial decision with a number attached, and the number is usually available if you go and ask for it.
6 min
display: flex, finally
Flexbox has crossed the line where I can use it on real work, and the surprise isn't the layouts it enables. It's how much of my CSS turns out to have been compensation for not having it.
6 min
Everything is a div
Div soup is what you write before you learn what the other hundred elements are for. The argument for fixing it isn't screenreaders or SEO, it's the next person who opens the file.
5 min
Web fonts and the flash of invisible text
Every browser has picked a different answer to what should happen while a web font downloads, and all of the answers are bad so the decision quietly falls to you whether you choose to make it or not.
6 min
float: left is a layout system
We are building every grid on the web out of a property invented to wrap text around a picture, and the pile of workarounds we've grown on top of it has stopped looking like workarounds.