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Matthias Ott

Articles and notes by Matthias Ott, User Experience Designer from Stuttgart, Germany.

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Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Detecting CSS Selector Support with JavaScript

p code { font-size: 80%; } There are many ways to adjust your CSS code to a browser’s support for a specific CSS feature. If you want to check if a certain property is supported, you can write a feature query using th...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Doing Our Part

I’m right with Dave on this one! 💚 I’m tired of environmental responsibility always falling on the consumer. I know consumer demand bubbles up into societal change, I’m willing to do my part. But as a consumer it feels ...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Patch That Package

p code { font-size: 80%; } You probably know this situation. You are working on a project and one of the npm packages you are working with contains a nasty bug or is lacking a critical feature. Of course, you first he...

Matthias Ott
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Brain Dump

You know what makes it so easy for many people to just dump their thoughts into a silo like Twitter instead of writing a post on their own site?

You don’t have to come up with a title for your post.

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Level Up Your Headings Game

Providing a proper document outline is one of the most effective things you can do to improve the accessibility of your HTML. Like the headings of the chapters and subchapters in a book, the structure of the heading elements in our HTML should have a semantic, tree-like stru...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

The CSS Cascade, a Deep Dive

The Cascade is legendary. Legendary because it is the C in CSS. Legendary in how well it works to determine which selector wins when browsers apply styles to HTML. And legendary in how little many of us really know about it. Bramus van Damme recently gave a fantastic talk a...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Eleventy Plus Vite

What’s the single best thing you can do if you want to learn a new tool or evaluate a new technology? Right, it’s getting your hands dirty. Only by building something tangible, like a realistic prototype or even a real project, you’ll get immediate answers to the questions ...

Matthias Ott
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You, a Million Times

Who should you write for? Your friends and family? Your colleagues and peers? The people you look up to? Everyone in the community? Everyone on the Internet? The answer? None of those people. You should only write for one person and one person only: you. Me? But who would...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Updates About Updates

I love reading posts in which people talk about recent updates to their personal sites. It does three things: It shows the person reading your post that you care about this little corner of the Web and that it is worth doing so. It (most often) demonstrates why you picked...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

In and Out of Style

One of the most fascinating things about the Web is how it has evolved. By that, I don’t mean so much the mind-blowing speed of growth, but rather how the foundational languages, APIs, and browsers have been able to adapt to an ever-evolving, ever-changing environment. With ...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Just Put Stuff Out There

Even if you have been posting on your own site for quite some time, blogging regularly can still be challenging. Ask almost anyone who blogs and they will probably tell you the same: They would very much like to hit that publish button more often, but, somehow, it just doesn...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

How to Delete Your Commit History in Git

Maybe you want to publish a project but don’t want everyone to see what mess you created before your initial release. Maybe you want to hand over a Git repository to a third party who should not peek into your complete git commit history. Whatever the reason, here is how you...

Matthias Ott
• matthiasott

Unblocking Your Writing Blocks, Part 3: I Can’t Write

Maybe you are afraid to start writing because you think that you can’t write. I don’t believe that’s true. Everyone can write. You have written letters or email before, right? You are constantly writing coworkers, friends, and family text messages or are chatting on your so...

Matthias Ott
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Connections

I’m sitting in the ICE 205, one of the German high-speed trains, traveling back home after two days in Düsseldorf at Beyond Tellerrand, Marc Thiele’s lovely conference about design, development, the Web, and creativity in general. It was the first time I went to an in-person...

Matthias Ott
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CSS :has( ) A Parent Selector Now

I don’t remember the exact moment anymore. But I remember that it was with a mix of disbelief and disappointment that I realized one day that there was no way to select the parent of an element in CSS. Wait, what? This can’t be. Why? Obviously, I wasn’t alone. Everyone wh...

Matthias Ott
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Don’t Play It Like the Flute

Hans Zimmer just won an Academy Award for his musical score for “Dune,” and if you have seen the movie or listened to the soundtrack, you know why. Zimmer’s soundtrack for Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel is an otherworldly masterpiece th...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Changes – 2021 ➔ 2022

Over the first couple of days of 2022, I read a lot of year-in-review posts, like Michelle’s, Dave’s, Hidde’s, and Jeremy’s, to name a few. What a pleasure to read about such a great variety of different perspectives and realities! Thank you, everyone. In my case, last year ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Turning 30

30 years ago, on August 6, 1991, a computer scientist working at CERN introduced a project to the public he had been working on for several months. The project, as he described, combined “the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful glob...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Starting Again (Again)

It was about the same time last year that I decided to change something. I hadn’t written and published as many posts on my site as I had wished to get done. And it was nagging me. If this site was meant to be a place of reflection and experimentation, if it was supposed to ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

No Wrong Notes

He played the piano like no other. Literally. When legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk sat down at the piano and started playing, he would hit the keys with his fingers held flat, almost attacking them to produce the ringing, percussive sound he was known for. His composi...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Play At Work

I love to watch my children play. How they invent things and stories. How they jump into roles and, just as quickly, change roles again. How they interact and react to each other’s ideas and the twists and turns of their play. Let’s cook something! Oh, we are knights now! Ca...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Less but Better

You know that feeling when you are leaving a movie theater after having watched a superhero movie and it almost feels as if you had superpowers yourself? I just had a similar experience, but this time with a feeling of calmness, focus, and appreciation for my surroundings. ...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

I Will, I Should, I Might

It happened again. And I bet this has happened to you before, too. I’m talking of New Year’s resolutions. Every year we make them and tell ourselves that this time, yes, this time it is going to work, for sure. But then, suddenly, it is February, and nothing has changed. (Ex...

Matthias Ott
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My Typical Day

Colin Devroe kicked off a series of “My Typical Day” posts. He tagged Dan Mall (and Chris Coyier, Jeremy Keith and others) and Dan tagged Sara Soueidan (and Dave Rupert, Rob Weychert, and others) and Sara tagged me (and Cassie Evans, Anton Sten, and others). Although I’ve n...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Doomsday

Hip-hop has lost one of its finest artists to ever touch the mic and an MPC. Daniel Dumile, better known by his stage name MF DOOM, passed away on October 31, 2020, at the age of 49. Dumile, who performed in a metal face mask, was a child of the Golden Era and a master of hi...

Matthias Ott
• Matthias Ott

Bye, 2020!

So, that was 2020. First of all, I hope that you and your loved-ones are well, that you had something to do this year that brought you fulfillment and a sense of purpose, and that you haven’t been affected too heavily by COVID-19 and the lockdowns that were both financially ...