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It’s December! Lots of things are published this time of year, like developer advent calendars and organizations reflecting on the past year. We have even our own end-of-year series where we asked folks what they learned in 2020. But we also see lots of research come out around this time. Some of it we’ve already …

I really appreciate a real-world walkthrough of a technology. Not only in what that technology does, but why it was chosen and how it worked for a team. Anybody can read the docs, but what you know after years of real-world usage is far more valuable. Hugo “Kitty” Giraudel: I want to properly reflect on …

Images take up to 50% of the total size of an average web page. And if images are not optimized, users end up downloading extra bytes. And if they’re downloading extra bytes, the site not only takes that much more time to load, but users are using more data, both of which can be resolved, …

I’ve learned to be more comfortable not knowing. “I don’t know”, comes easier now. “I don’t know anything about that.” It’s okay. It feels good to say. Whether it’s service workers, Houdini, shadow DOM, web components, HTTP2, CSS grid, “micro-front ends”, AVIF… there are many paths before us. This list doesn’t even broach JavaScript frameworks …

Recently, I’ve become more deeply aware of the inherent tension between change and inertia, as it applies to the evolution and use of web technologies. These forces have always been present and opposed to each other, but it seems to me that the side effects of these collisions are impacting web development more noticeably.

Something I learned (or, I guess, re-learned) this year is how important it is to pay close attention to the bit depth of images. Way back in the day, we used to obsessively choose between 2-, 4-, or 8-bit color depth on our GIFs, because when lots of users were using dialup modems to surf …

Tim Severien: I feel we, the community, have to acknowledge that CSS is easy to get started with and hard to master. Let’s reflect on the language and find out what makes it hard. Tim’s reasons CSS is hard (in my own words): You can look at a matching Ruleset, and still not have the …

This year, I learned a lot about how “old” tricks can solve a lot of modern problems if you use the right tools. Following the growth of Jamstack-style development has been both a learning experience, while also a nostalgic one. It’s been amazing to see how you can power plain ol’ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript …

I spent a good chunk of my work life this year trying (in collaboration with the amazing Noam Rosenthal) to standardize a new web platform feature: a way to modify the intrinsic size and resolution of images. And hey! We did it! But boy, was it ever a learning experience. This wasn’t my first standardization …

Pluralsight is giving away 25 courses on JavaScript for free to celebrate JavaScript’s 25th birthday. It’s no cheapie, either. The courses range from getting your hands dirty with JavaScript for the first time, to full-on reactive development. Pluralsight’s been around a long time and they know how to design a great course.

In an age where so much web design is already neat, clean, and simple, I can think of three ways to distinguish your site from the norm: Stunning visuals that cannot be created in UI vector editors, like Figma and Sketch Beautifully-animated interactions that cannot be dreamt in the language of Stacks of Rectangles Typography

When I first got this writing prompt, my mind immediately started thinking stuff like, “What tech have I learned this year?” But this post isn’t really about tech, because I think what I’ve learned the most about building websites this past year is simplification. This year, I’ve learned that keeping it simple is almost always …

There was a time when I felt overwhelmed by how fast the web developed. It seemed like not a single day passed without a new plugin, framework, technique, or language feature being released. I believed that in order to survive as a freelancer and to compete with others I had to learn everything everyone else …

I was recently looking for a way to perform scrolling effects on a project and I stumbled on the Locomotive Scroll library. It lets you perform a variety of scrolling effects, like parallax and triggering/controlling animations at scroll points. You might also call it a “smooth scrolling” library, but it doesn’t leverage native smooth scrolling …

I enjoyed this blog post from Shawn. Lampshading is apparently the idea of a TV show calling attention to some weakness (like an implausible plot point) so that the show can move on. By calling it out, it avoids criticism by demonstrating the self-awareness. For developers, Shawn notes, it’s like admitting to your teammates/boss that …

In the short term, opinions about technology often follow a compressed form of Laver’s Law: Everything just before me was completely broken. Everything that comes after me is completely unnecessary. Everything I use right now is perfectly fine; stop changing things. We tend to judge things based on where we started, our personal “Year Zeros.” …

When Chris asked me to write about “one thing I learned about building websites this year” I admit my brain immediately went through a list of techniques and CSS properties I started using this year. But then I paused. Other people can write about that much better than I can. What’s something that I specifically …

WCAG 2.1 Recommendations rolled out in 2018. It’s been a couple years now and there are some new Success Criterion. In this article, I will discuss Label in Name, which is how we visually label components. We’ll take a look at what some failure states look like, how to fix them, and examples of how …

Speaking of cool CSS stuff you can buy, Julia Evans’ zine Hell Yes! CSS! is hot off the presses. A “zine” being 28 pages of “short, informative, and fun comics which will quickly teach you something useful.” Some parts of it are like cheat sheets. Some parts of it are like concepts made digestible through …

This year I had the pleasure of re-launching The Accessibility Project. I spend a lot of time researching and writing about accessibility and inclusive design, so this felt like the cumulation of a lot of that effort. The site now uses all sorts of cool web features like CSS Grid, @supports, and media features, aria-current, …

Cassidy Williams has been doing a Blogvent (blogging every day for a month) over on the Netlify Blog. A lot of the blog posts are about Next.js. There is a lot to like about Next.js. I just pulled one of Cassidy’s starters for fun. It’s very nice that it has React Fast-Refresh built-in. I like …

What’s one thing I learned about building websites this year? Not all that much. This year, unlike most previous years, I didn’t explore a lot of new technologies. For obvious reasons, it’s been a difficult year to be as engaged in the hot new topics and to spend time playing around with new things. So, …

High five to Ahmad Shadeed for releasing his new book, Debugging CSS. I think that’s a neat angle for a book on CSS. There are a ton of books on the general subject of CSS already, so not that they can’t be fresh takes on that, but this feels equally important and less trodden territory. …

Looks like all the content of MDN is on GitHub now. That’s pretty rad. That’s been the public plan for a while. Chris Mills: We will be using GitHub’s contribution tools and features, essentially moving MDN from a Wiki model to a pull request (PR) model. This is so much better for contribution, allowing for …

Here’s a scenario. You start a banging Kendrick Lamar track in one of your many open browser tabs. You’re loving it, but someone walks into your space and you need to pause it. Which tab is it? Browsers try to help with that a little bit. You can probably mute the entire system audio. But …

The HTTP Archive looked at more than 7 million websites and compiled their annual report detailing how the sites were built. And there’s an enormous wealth of information about how the web changed in 2020. In fact, this report is more like an enormous book and it’s entirely fabulous. The data comes from making queries …

One thing I noticed about building websites in 2020: despite all the social networks and publishing platforms craving our content, our stories, and our attention, people are somehow still building personal websites. Over the course of the year, many of you have launched or relaunched your website. It indeed feels like the personal website is …

This year I learned, or relearned maybe, that “normal” is subjective at best, and pretty misleading otherwise. If this forsaken year has taught us anything, it’s that there is no such thing as normal. Things change. People adapt. Everything is relative to everything else.

An event bus is a design pattern (and while we’ll be talking about JavaScript here, it’s a design pattern in any language) that can be used to simplify communications between different components. It can also be thought of as publish/subscribe or pubsub. The idea is that components can listen to the event bus to know …

Max Stoiber wrote some interesting notes about why he loves Tailwind. (Max created styled-components, so he has some skin in the styling methodology game.) There’s a lot of great history in this post about how Tailwind emerged and became a valuable tool for designers and engineers alike, but he also talks about what beats at …