Yes, HTML is broken (see title ↑). Anyone who has used HTML on a big project knows it.
Just the other day, I went to code a submit button for a form. Should be pretty straightforward. Well how come this is what I wrote, then?
<table>
<td>
<a class="submi...
This is the first article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one is about online privacy and how to protect it, the second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web.
Invasion of the Data Snatchers
Gl...
As we are moving from pages to patterns when creating and documenting websites and other digital design systems, pattern libraries are becoming increasingly popular. Ethan Marcotte, who famously coined the term responsive web design, recently published a nice little piece ab...
Before Hitler set about exterminating Jewish people, he practiced on the disabled. The Aktion T4 programme was particularly fond of administering "involuntary euthanasia" to children. Parents were tricked into relinquishing their little ones with the promise that they would ...
Today, I added a basic weighted search to this site. You can find it here and in the footer below. Providing a search functionality is one of the pillars of an IndieWeb site, mainly because it offers improved access to the content you create and own on your site. But: Search...
Tantek Çelik wrote a post in 2015 called “js;dr = JavaScript required; Didn’t Read.”. It was about a fundamental problem regarding sites that depend on JavaScript for rendering content: Indexability. Although search engines got much much better at indexing JS, it still remai...
It’s that time of year when most people publish their „books I have read“ articles. Tim for example, and also Jeremy. I for myself am what you could call a book taster. There are a lot of books on my shelves that I started reading but somehow never finished. But this year th...
In May 2016, I flipped the switch for the redesign of this site. My last site was never updated once it was online, so I wanted to do things differently this time. Inspired by numerous people who use their web presence to share and promote their thoughts and ideas, I decided...
2016 has not been an exemplary year in some ways. What with the anti-intellectualism and fascism and kleptocracy and all. And you know what? I'm not completely convinced everything's going to be okay again when the clock strikes twelve on New Year's Eve.
I'm not convinced th...
Once again, beyond tellerrand, a great conference about design, development, and all things web, took place in the cold November air of Berlin. After walking over from Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to the Admiralspalast, an historical theater opened in 1910, where the spirit of th...
You spend more time contemplating and discussing code than you do writing it.
You spend more time thinking about how the end product affects users than you do about how pleasurable it is for you to write its code.
You think in terms of relationships and systems, not just th...
Do you remember when you wrote your first line of HTML? Watching my students sweat blood while I introduce them to the basics of HTML and CSS always reminds me of my teenage self, learning the ropes of HTML back in the 1990s. Although I loved to fiddle around with my compute...
Design is a wonderful thing. It's an integral part of how we work to shape the world around us.
But it is not a discrete profession or occupation.
We are not divided into designers and people who are not designers.
If someone says you don't have the right background, you hav...
We need to talk about aria-controls. It's poorly supported, does very little, and does what it does when it does badly. It is poop and we rely on it way too much. We are short-changing assistive technology users when we do.
What it is
The aria-controls attribute is a 'relati...
I'm not the most talented coder in the world. No, it's true. So I try to write as little code as possible. The less I write, the less there is to break, justify, or maintain.
I'm also lazy, so it's all gravy. (ed: maybe run with a food analogy?)
But it turns out the only sur...
Star Trek: The Next Generation was on TV in the UK when I was a little younger than Wesley Crusher, but I never watched it properly. I've started watching it on Netflix and I'm about twenty episodes into the first season. These are some notes I've made.
The set is very ster...
In September of last year, I decided I wanted to hear stories about how screen reader users access The Web. I suspected, as a sighted web user, I made a lot of incorrect assumptions. Accordingly, I composed seven questions to find out about strategies for reading and operat...
Lately, I travelled to Düsseldorf and attended the IndieWebCamp and also beyond tellerrand, a conference about design, development, and all things web. I’ll say it plain: If you never have been at a conference, you should go. If you never have been at beyond tellerrand, you ...
Far too long, we have thought of web projects like rocket launches: You plan, design, and build the thing, maybe you train people how to steer it, and most of all you sweat blood only to be prepared on that magical date: launch day. That one decisive moment when yo...
There's been a lot of talk lately in favour of progressive enhancement and 'universal' (isomorphic) applications. Apparently, server rendering increases performance, robustness, and the parsability and interoperability of content.
I welcome these arguments because I'm magna...
