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The Contrast Triangle
21.4.2020
Chip Cullen:
Let’s say you’re building a site, and you’re working with a designer. They come to you with some solid designs, and you’re ready to go. You’re also a conscientious front end developer and you like to make sure the sites you build are accessible. The designs you’re working from have...
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
18.4.2020
Interesting research from Dan Luu:
… it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is...
When debugging, your attitude matters
12.4.2020
Julia Evans:
I was debugging some CSS last week, and I think that post is missing something important: your attitude.
Now – I’m not a very good CSS developer yet. I’ve never written CSS professionally and I don’t understand a lot of basic CSS concepts (I think I finally understood for the first...
Create Diagonal Layouts Like it’s 2020
9.4.2020
Nils Binder covers the ways:
1. Use an SVG in the form of a triangle. This technique is nicely described by Erik Kennedy on CSS-Tricks.
2. Hide part of your section using clip-path. Read Diagonal Containers in CSS by Sebastiano Guerriero or Sloped edges with consistent angle...
The WebAIM Million—Updated
8.4.2020
This report made a big splash last year. It’s a large chunk of research that shows just how terribly the web does with accessibility. It’s been updated this year and (drumroll…) we got a little worse. I’ll use their blockquote:
The number of errors increased 2.1% between...
Google’s Technical Writing Guide
3.4.2020
It’s good!
I’ve written up my advice (sprinkled with great advice from others), but this is way more straightforward nuts-and-bolts training on technical writing. It’s structured like an actual course, with exercises along the way.
I’m far from an expert here. But between...
Accessibility Links
2.4.2020
Austin Gil has kicked off the first in a five-part series about “HTML Forms Right” and to starts with semantics. It’s talking to the “we build our front-ends with JavaScript” crowd. The first block of code is an example of an Ajax form submission where the data...
An Annotated Docker Config for Front-End Web Development
2.4.2020
Andrew Welch sings the praises of using Docker containers for local dev environments:
Here are the advantages of Docker for me:
• Each application has exactly the environment it needs to run, including specific versions of any of the plumbing needed to get it to work (PHP, MySQL...
Max Stoiber’s Strong Opinion About Margins
31.3.2020
Going with that title instead of the classic developer clickbait version Max used. ;)
We should ban margin from our components.
Don’t use margin?! This thing I’ve been doing my entire career and don’t have any particular problems with?!
Well, that’s not exactly Max’s...
RSS Stuff
31.3.2020
Laura Kalbag wrote How to read RSS in 2020. This would be a nice place to send someone curious about RSS: what it is, what it’s for, and how you can start using it as a reader. I like this callout, too:
Sometimes the content is just an excerpt, encouraging you to read the rest of the content...
Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG
28.3.2020
Scott Turner, who has an entire blog "Exploring procedural generation and display of fantasy maps", gets into why vector graphics seems on these surface why it would be bad for the look of a pencil stroke:
Something like this pencil stroke would require many tens of thousands of different...
Emergency Website Kit
27.3.2020
Here’s an outstanding idea from Max Böck. He’s created a boilerplate project for building websites that fit within a single HTTP request. This is extremely important for websites that contain critical information for public safety. As Max writes:
In cases of emergency, many organizations need...
Maintaining Performance
27.3.2020
Real talk from Dave:
I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals…...
Get Static
26.3.2020
In this piece, Eric Meyer argues that performance is more important than ever right now — especially for websites that contain critical information for the public:
If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to...
Performance Links
24.3.2020
I've had a number of browser tabs open to articles all related to web performance and gosh darn it if blogging them is a way for me get some closure. They are all good!
Manuel Matuzovic, Why 543 KB keep me up at night:
Yes, I know, it depends. 543 KB aren't always bad, but on that specific page...
CSS Can Influence Screenreaders
23.3.2020
Ben Myers covers some clear examples of where CSS totally changes what some screen readers announce. For example, some screenreader will see text-transform: uppercase; on a button label that says "Add" and read it like an abbreviation, "A.D.D."
These cases of CSS messing with our screenreader...
Client-Side Image Editing on Mobile
20.3.2020
Michael Scharnagl:
Ever wanted to easily convert an image to a grayscale image on your phone? I do sometimes, and that's why I build a demo using the Web Share Target API to achieve exactly that.
For this I used the Service Worker way to handle the data. Once the data is received on the client,...
15 Things to Improve Your Website Accessibility
17.3.2020
This is a really great list from Bruce. There is a lot of directly actionable stuff here. Send it around to your team and make it something that you all go through together.
Here's a little one that prodded me to finally fix...
Most screen readers allow the user to quickly see a list of links...
CSS X
17.3.2020
My name appears in an article from Bert Bos (co-author of the original CSS spec), so I'll consider that a life accomplishment. Berts makes the point that CSS has evolved and the working group versions things, but the working group hasn't been and doesn't really plan to be involved in these...
Using the HTML title attribute
15.3.2020
Steve Faulkner:
User groups not well served by use of the title attribute
• Mobile phone users.• Keyboard only users.• Screen magnifier users.• Screen reader users.• Users with fine motor skill impairments.• Users with cognitive impairments.
Sounds like in 2020, the only useful thing the title...