8 min
Alt text is writing
Every image on the site had an alt attribute, the checker reported zero errors, and not one of those attributes told anybody anything because filling in a field and writing a sentence turn out to be different jobs.
Writing
Browse by topic →6 min
Worth doing badly
Chesterton's line about doing things badly is the most useful thing I know about actually finishing anything, and it goes well past side projects.
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.
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.
6 min
The flash of nothing
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
Nobody prints anything
Except invoices, tickets, recipes, directions, order confirmations, and every page a client's accountant touches, and the stylesheet for all of that is about 40 lines nobody thinks to write.
7 min
content: "\00a0"
Why the most-used string in my stylesheets is an invisible one, how CSS escapes will silently eat the character after them, and the parts of the content property that aren't strings at all.
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
var, let, and the one I still use
ES6 is arriving all at once through a transpiler, which means that adopting it is a series of individual choices rather than one and some of those features have earned it more than others.
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.
5 min
Gulp, because Grunt
Spending all week on a tool just to save 11 seconds a run. Nobody does that math beforehand.
7 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.