This week, I’m doing an accessibility audit for a client. One of the first steps is to have a general look at the site. You can – and should – do that manually for sure, but another very useful way to get a good fi...
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 ab...
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 t...
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 r...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 soc...
One of the reasons you’re not blogging on your own personal website might be that you’re thinking: “Why would people listen to what I have to say? I’m not an industry expert, after all.”
I get that. You might not work for the Apples, Googles, or Microsofts out there. You mig...
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...
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 who ...
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...
Why is it that although we are now in the millions building and creating for the Web, only very few share their knowledge and experience on their own websites? Or, in other words: Why doesn’t every one of us have a blog?
Zach Leatherman asked this question on Twitter the oth...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
We all want to make the right decisions. Not only because we want to be successful, but often simply because we want to avoid the negative consequences of making the wrong decision. We are risk-averse beings. So we put a lot of emphasis on the decision itself. We collect inf...
Have you ever seen Gerhard ...
One of the most important features of a website that is built with accessibility in mind is that it can be navigated with a keyboard. Most blind users and many users with motor disabilities rely on keyboard navigation, either with a standard keyboard or with a device that mi...
Ethan Marcotte just gave a fabulous remote talk at SydCSS on the nature of design systems and the challenges of creating and maintaining them over time. Ethan managed to comprise so many of the things I’ve been hearing, noticing, and thinking about in such a concise and clea...
Over 120 years ago, an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, and philosopher named Vilfredo Pareto made an astonishing discovery. He was looking at the distribution of land in Italy, when he observed that approximately 80 % of the land was owned by only 20 % of the popul...
Una Kravets has written an excellent article about a feature that has been released with Chrome 85: The @property syntax of the Properties and Values API. The Properties and Values API is part of CSS Houdini, the next generation of additions to CSS allowing developers to ext...
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