This piece is incredibly disheartening, but it points out the importance of inclusive design.
Dispatches From The Internets
Netflix wants to chop down your family tree
Ten modern layouts in one line of CSS
Una did a great job in putting together this simple, but highly useful resource. If you struggle with Flexbox & Grid, this is a great place to start.
High Definition CSS Color Guide
Adam really outdid himself putting this resource together. It’s everything you’d want to know about high definition color systems… and then some.
The Market for Lemons
So much of this piece resonates with me. I’ve been there, alongside Alex, since the early days of JavaScript libraries and borne witness to the deception and misdirection from those in the “JavaScript all the things” camp.
[W]e need to move our attention back to the folks that have been right all along. The people who never gave up on semantic markup, CSS, and progressive enhancement for most sites. The people who, when slinging JS, have treated it as special occasion food. The tools and communities whose culture puts the user ahead of the developer and hold evidence of doing better for users in the highest regard.
See also:
On Dependency
Nearly three years on, this piece from Rob still resonates deeply with me.
I have no illusions about being some kind of lone wolf. All the stuff I’m making “by hand”—the way it approaches form, function, and materials—has been informed by philosophies and techniques developed by an amorphous community that spans generations. This work proliferates through byzantine open source projects, yes, but it also proliferates through books, blog posts, and videos with titles like “Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features.” When I’m making things, that’s how I prefer to depend on others and have them depend on me: by sharing strong, simple ideas as a collective, and recombining them in novel ways with rigorous specificity as individuals.
Rebuilding a PHP App using Isomorphic JavaScript with Eleventy & Netlify
Back in the early days of the iPhone, I created Tipr, a tip calculator that always produces a palindrome total. This is an overview of the minimal work I did to make it a modern web app that can run without a traditional back-end.
In 2023, Resolve to Fix Your Organization’s Meta Pixel Problem – The Markup
It’s hard to believe it’s 11 years after I wrote about dropping 3rd party share links & such to protect your users’ privacy and we’re still having to have this conversation. You need to get rid of the Facebook/Meta pixel. And if you can’t do it everywhere, at least do remove it from pages with sensitive content. Don’t sell out your users!
ChatGPT is great – you’re just using it wrong
Setting aside it’s current issues with facts, the idea of using ChatGPT as an improv partner is interesting. Could work well for brainstorming and getting your own creative juices flowing.
Digital Exclusion in Healthcare & How to Change It
Fantastic talk from Sareh on assumptions we make about our users and how those assumptions exclude people who have different lived experiences than we do. Her focus is on digital healthcare, but is applicable to everything.
I love her calls to action as well!
Related talk: Delivering Critical Information & Services
Use the dialog element (reasonably)
The dialog element is ready for prime time:
IMO, the dialog element has reached the tipping point of being the better option for web developers who need to implement dialogs in their web pages. The number of accessibility requirements a developer needs to be aware of, and the level of effort to implement custom ARIA dialogs is now largely taken care of by browsers.
Use it, don’t abuse it.