Sara Soueidan digs into this HTML/UX situation. “Yes” or “no” is a boolean situation. A checkbox represents this: it’s either on or off (uh, mostly). But is a checkbox always the best UX? It depends, of course:
Use radio buttons if you expect the answer to be equally distributed. If I expect the answer to be heavily biased to one answer I prefer the checkbox. That way the user either makes an explicit statement or just acknowledges the expected
… Read artic
The series is a wrap my friends! Thanks for reading and a big special thanks to all the authors this year who shared something they have learned. Many authors really swung wide with thoughts about how we can be better and do better, which of course I really love.
Adam showed us logical properties and, through their use, we’re building layouts that speak the language of the web and are far more easily adaptable to other written languages. Jennifer told
… Read article “Edge
Whether you use the eCommerce features on WordPress.com or use WooCommerce on your self-hosted WordPress site (like we do), you can use the WooCommerce mobile app. That’s right WooCommerce has native apps for iOS and Android. They’ve just released some nice upgrades to both, making them extra useful.
Perhaps you know we use WooCommerce around here. We use it to sell some physical products like posters that get mailed to you, as well as for MVP Supporter memberships that … Read
There’s a “C” word in web development that we don’t give enough attention to. No, I’m not talking about “continuous integration”, or even “CSS”. The “C” word I’m talking about is “constraints”. Understanding constraints is a vital part of building software that works the best it can in its targeted environment(s). Yet, the difficulty of that task varies based on the systems we develop for. Super Nintendo games were the flavor of the decade when I was younger, … Read article “Recogni
This article is for anyone interested in the emerging ecosystem of tools and technologies related to Jamstack and serverless. We’re going to use Fauna’s GraphQL API as a serverless back-end for a Jamstack front-end built with the Redwood framework and deployed with a one-click deploy on Vercel. In other words, lots to learn! By the end, you’ll not only get to dive into Jamstack and serverless concepts, but also hands-on experience with a really neat combination of tech … Read article R
My 2020 was colored by the considerable amount of time I spent analyzing data about CSS usage in the wild, for the CSS chapter of the Web Almanac, by the HTTP Archive. The results were eye-opening to me. A wake-up call of sorts. We spend so much time in the bubble of bleeding-edge tech that we lose touch with how the web is really built. Most of the web favors old, stable tech instead of new bling. CSS-in-JS? Only … Read article “How The Web is Really Built”
The post How The
It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time. Some of it we’ve already linked up. But let’s round up what we’ve seen so far. In no particular order:
2020 MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment HTTP Archive’s annual state
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I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel:
I want to properly reflect on the choice of going with Fela instead of any other CSS-in-JS library you might have heard of.
I’d never heard of Fela before. … Read article “Retrospective on Fela”
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Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, at least in part, by optimizing the images before they are downloaded. Researchers around the world are busy developing new image formats that possess high … Read article “Converting and Optimizing
I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say. Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before us. This list doesn’t even broach JavaScript frameworks and libraries. Much of this tech isn’t even novel in 2020—but together act as a clapperboard cueing in me a familiar fear of missing out … Rea