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Matthias Ott

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

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Lazy and Prompt

Chrome 148 shipped this week, and in the release notes you’ll find one of the best things to happen to web performance in a long time: loading="lazy" for <video> and <audio> elements. Scott Jehl, tech lead of Squarespace’s Perfo...

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Buckle Up

You might know that I – with the generous help from Brandon Kelly on the Craft 5 version – wrote and maintain a Webmention plugin for Craft CMS. Today, I shipped version 1.3.0. It’s a security and abuse hardening release, and if you’re running the plugin, you should upgrade....

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At Machine Speed

Yesterday, I opened Discord to a message from my friend Bastian Allgeier that I had never quite seen in all the years I’ve been building sites with his Kirby CMS. “Today we are releasing our biggest security release in the last 14+ years,” Bastian wrote. “The last few weeks ...

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Design and Engineering, As One

In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found...

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Hello Again, World

On December 24, 1968, Christmas Eve, astronaut William Anders took what would become one of the most consequential photographs in human history. He was aboard Apollo 8, orbiting the Moon for the fourth time, when the spacecraft rotated and the Earth appeared in his window. A...

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This, Still Not for Everyone

The new WebAIM Million report is out, the eighth annual accessibility analysis of the top one million home pages on the Web. And after eight years of data, the picture is as sobering as ever. In 2019, 97.8% of home pages had detectable WCAG conformance failures. In 2026, tha...

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The Shape of Friction

Dave Rupert just wrote a piece called People are not friction and I just had to write a short reaction blog post, because Dave names something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. His main argument: the AI marketing dream of a “frictionless” workflow – where you automat...

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WeissKlang L1 – Punching Above Its Weight

In November 1928, Georg Neumann and Erich Rickmann founded Georg Neumann & Co. in a Berlin workshop and by the end of that year, Neumann had debuted the CMV 3, the first mass-produced condenser microphone. The CMV designation stood for Condensator Mikrofon Verstärker, co...

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Continvoucly Morged Value

You might have seen the diagram before. The one Vincent Driessen put up on his website a few years ago to explain the concept of a Git branching model. ...

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Webspace Invaders

A couple of weeks back, I’m sitting at my desk when a direct message from my frontend friend Kevin Powell pops up. Kevin’s a genuinely kind guy. He makes CSS videos on YouTube and he’s got this way of explaining things that never makes you feel stupid for not knowing them al...

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To Affinity and Beyond

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRA...

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The Mystery of Storytelling

Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and spea...

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Amateurs!

I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try. Reading Kai Brach’s excellent newslett...

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Echoes of Connection

In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of natural sounds, musical s...

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Linear() Is Not Linear

My gut feeling tells me that not that many people have yet heard of or used the linear() easing function, one of the most exciting newer additions to CSS. Looking at the stats in the State of CSS survey, this is somewhat confirmed: only about 30 percent of respondents have u...

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View Transitions: The Smooth Parts

Now that cross-document view transitions are gradually making their way into modern browsers, now seems like the perfect time to explore them, if you haven’t already. They are, in fact, surprisingly straightforward to implement. And just like we’ve seen with modern images, v...

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Adding AVIF and WebP Support to My Craft CMS Site

Five years ago, I wrote about AVIF: A New Image Format (back then). Since then, I’ve implemented WebP and AVIF support on numerous client sites for considerable performance improvements – but my own site was still serving JPEG, PNG, and GIF images only. So it was time to fix...

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Challenge

It’s the early nineties. Legendary comic book artist Frank Miller had just broken away from the major publishers, after creating titles like Daredevil: Born Again, Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. He was now working with the then-young Dark Horse Comics, when he decided t...

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Acoustic Room Treatment and Building Sound Panels, Part 1: Planning

Whether you are running online workshops, recording audio or video, or making music, it’s worth spending some time on acoustic treatment for your room. Shit in, shit out, as they say… In my case, I wanted to improve the sound of voice recordings and live audio in my little o...

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Play On

In the late 1960s, a young musician was recording the sounds he played on his synthesizer onto his Revox tape recorders, when he suddenly discovered: if you connect the two tape recorders together, so that the playback head is separated by several feet from the record head, ...

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Overshoot

I still remember that moment. Do You? ...

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The HTML Output Element

One of the most amazing things about working on the Web is that you can have years of experience under your belt and there are still things you don’t know. Often, people associate this with a more quickly-moving la...

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Listening Closely

My son, who is the violinist in our family, recently told me an interesting little fact about Augustin Hadelich, one of the greatest violinists alive: it’s hard for him to enjoy other people’s performances. Not because he’s critical or dismissive – to the contrary – but beca...

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Compressed Fluid Typography

When it comes to web typography, I’m a sucker for fluid type. I love that it creates a harmonious rhythm for the typography of a project. I love how it speeds up the responsive design process in the browser. And that it feels like you are working with the grain of the web, n...

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The Lifeblood of the Web

One Thursday in May, I was sitting in a slightly delayed train, heading home from Düsseldorf after three days of meeting good friends and making new ones at beyond tellerrand, my friend Marc Thiele’s wonderful conference. As usual, after visiting a conference, and beyond tel...

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What Could Go Wrong?

In 1986 – when I was four years old – three researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were working on an idea that would change the world of technology forever: they figured out an efficient way...

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That’s My Rank

Have you ever wondered why new CSS features and other web technologies very often seem to just work across browsers these days? The reason is probably: Interop. The Interop Project is a collaborative effort between major browser makers — Apple, Bocoup, Google, Igalia, Micro...

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Making Space

Gregory Scott, founder of Kush Audio, shared an interesting insight about mixing music the other day: Sometimes, to bring something forward in the mix, instead of turning it up, it can be more effective to actually turn all the other things down. Let’s say you realise that ...

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CSS :is() :where() the Magic Happens

For Blogtober, I dug up a draft about the two CSS pseudo-class functions :is() and :where() that I’d had lying around in my drafts folder for quite some time. Actually, when I originally started writing this post, :is() and :where() had just landed in CSS, and — just like wi...

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Visual Regression Testing for External URLs With Playwright

We’ve all been there: You write a bit of CSS, check whether everything looks right. You deploy. Then someone sends you a screenshot: the mobile navigation is broken. And why is the size of those headings just a bit off? And where has that button gone? Especially when you are...