The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is more like an enormous book and it’s entirely fabulous. The data comes from making queries to the HTTP Archive and is broken down into various sections, such as Performance, Security, and the languages themselves, including how folks wrote HTML or … Read article &
Here’s a scenario. You start a banging Kendrick Lamar track in one of your many open browser tabs. You’re loving it, but someone walks into your space and you need to pause it. Which tab is it? Browsers try to help with that a little bit. You can probably mute the entire system audio. But wouldn’t it be nice to actually have control over the audio playback without necessarily needing to find your way back to that tab? The Media … Read article “Give Users Control: The Media Session A
This year I learned, or relearned maybe, that “normal” is subjective at best, and pretty misleading otherwise. If this forsaken year has taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as normal. Things change. People adapt. Everything is relative to everything else. Besides being quite metaphysical, this somewhat connects to front-end development, our industry, and the sort of expectations we have for people down there. Too often, it feels like we tend to apply our own insecurities onto &#
One thing I noticed about building websites in 2020: despite all the social networks and publishing platforms craving our content, our stories, and our attention, people are somehow still building personal websites. Over the course of the year, many of you have launched or relaunched your website. It indeed feels like the personal website is experiencing a little revival. To me, this comes as no surprise. The benefits of having your own personal site are enormous and appealing. As a … Read
An event bus is a design pattern (and while we’ll be talking about JavaScript here, it’s a design pattern in any language) that can be used to simplify communications between different components. It can also be thought of as publish/subscribe or pubsub. The idea is that components can listen to the event bus to know when to do the things they do. For example, a “tab panel” component might listen for events telling it to change the active tab. … Read article “Let’s Create a Lightwei
Connectivity has evolved beyond recognition since the beginning of the internet. We are lightyears past dial up, these days, and can watch a video in high resolution on our smartphone while being connected to a mobile network. But not all mobile connections are created equal – older generation networks (3G, 2G, etc.) are still quite dominant, accounting for almost half of all connections worldwide in 2020. Unfortunately, the phasing out process is very slow, and many people around the glob
I remember sitting in the back seat of our family’s Subaru station wagon. I was six and this was long before child carseats were a thing. My dad was at the wheel and my mom played 20 Questions with me while we drove to some vacation spot I can’t even remember. It was my mom’s turn as she and I played 20 Questions. She had an object in mind and I was asking the questions. “Is it big?” I asked.… Read article “It’s all relative.”
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This year, I learned that there is a wide world of free stock imagery available beyond Unsplash and Pexels. You see, I’ve been working on designing WordPress themes this year, and all images need to be compatible with the GPL. Unsplash and Pexels both have free and open licenses, but unfortunately, aren’t compatible. Many other free stock photos sites don’t have the highest quality photos, so I’ve had to get creative about where I get the imagery I use in … Read article “Unconventio
Black isn’t always slimming. When recently testing a dark mode option for one of my sites, I experienced first-hand the issue that Robin Rendle addresses in this article. All of my page text — headings and body copy — appeared to bulk up when I switched to dark mode. And it didn’t matter what fonts I used or which browsers I tried. The same thing happened with all of them. For example, here’s what happens with Adobe’s Source Sans … Read article “Using CSS Custom Properties to Adjust
There, I said it. What did I learn about building websites in 2020? A lot. But what I learned is not nearly as important as how I learned it. So instead, I want to share a couple of strategies I used to unblock learning in less-than-ideal times. I spent almost a decade teaching design and, let me tell you, the conditions for curiosity were all wrong this year. You are not alone if you’ve found yourself battling brain fog, deep … Read article “2020 was not a good year for learning