Links

Initially, I thought this was just an article on how to fix the janky hover state of a card component. But it also goes over the HTML markup for a typical card component in the context of semantics and accessibility.

Ah! Good old Jeremy Keith, insightful and funny.

If I really want to change someone’s mind, then I need to make the effort to first understand their mind. That’s going to be far more productive than declaring that my own mind is made up. After all, if I show no willingness to consider alternative viewpoints, why should they?

There’s an old saying that before criticising someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. I’m going to try to put that into practice, and not for the two obvious reasons:

1. If we still disagree, now we’re a mile away from each other, and
2. I’ve got their shoes.

John Oliver on drawing the line:

Giving the bully your lunch money doesn’t make him go away. It just makes him come back hungrier each time.

I really like this explanation of what happens in between the user entering a web address into the browser and the browser displaying the result.

1. The web browser requests the resource you want to access from the web server it is stored on.
2. If the request is successful, the web server sends a response back to the web browser containing the requested resource.
3. In some cases, the requested resource will then fire off more requests, which will result in more responses.
4. When all of the resources have been requested, the web browser parses and renders them as required, before displaying the result to the user.

Jim Nielsen on the personal connections formed on the internet.

You could search the world and find someone who saw what you see, felt what you feel, went through what you’re going through.

And how these connections are increasingly being lost when we prompt an impersonal LLM instead.

I love this bit from the video where Jason quotes Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia:

A developed country is not where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.

But why is it important that wealthy people take public transportation? Because, as Jason mentions,

[…] for better or for worse, these people are likely to have the power and political influence to demand efficient service.

Karthik Srinivasan discusses how to use curation to build a personal brand and shares some steps to get started.

Karthik Srinivasan uses his experience with running as an analogy to emphasize the importance of consistently showing up in the context of personal branding.

I found the analogy effective and relatable, as I had a similar experience when I started running.

Jim Nielsen uses his experience with golf as a metaphor to explain that the key to success in web development comes from actual practice — building websites — rather than obsessing over what tools, frameworks and technologies others are using.

Personal branding is about bringing focus to your touchpoints with the world (of strangers) so that the right kinds of people can find you and remember you. You make use of the attention when you really need it. But it is good to be in the consideration set.

As a freelancer, I’m always eager to learn how other folks work. Piccalilli’s behind-the-scenes look at their redesign is extremely useful.

Dr. Steve Bagley explains in layman’s terms what an operating system is:

[…] Imagine the difference between a house and a hotel. If you own a house, you can decide how to use the rooms, what color to paint the walls. But if that house becomes a hotel, you might give people the option to change the air conditioning temperature, but you wouldn’t let them fit air conditioning into their room without permission from the building owner. And it’s a bit the same with a computer. The operating system is a bit like the people who run the hotel in that it’s controlling all the resources for the system. So if Microsoft Word crashes, these days it’s not going to take down your computer because the operating system is set up in such a way that it can access resources that have been assigned to it and clean that up, and everything else continues hunky-dory.

And what happens if the operating system crashes and you get the blue screen of death (BSoD):

At that point, the thing that’s in charge of controlling everything has gone wrong, is corrupted, and can no longer run. So there’s pretty much no option at that point other than to halt the machine, say something’s gone wrong, and let the user reboot and restart.

Wow! Who knew you could use modern CSS to test HTML? Well, Heydon certainly did!

This article by Michelle Barker for Piccalilli is a great read. I learned about a bunch of new CSS properties that I didn’t know existed.

Eric Meyer describes his journey of learning about and implementing fully-Light-DOM web components.

You just take some normal HTML markup, wrap it with a custom element, and then write some JS to add capabilities which you can then style with regular CSS! Everything’s of the Light Side of the Web. No need to pierce the Vale of Shadows or whatever.

Jeremy Keith discusses what makes a custom element an HTML web component.

If your custom element is empty, it’s not an HTML web component. But if you’re using a custom element to extend existing markup, that’s an HTML web component.

React encouraged a mindset of replacement: “forgot [sic] what browsers can do; do everything in a React component instead, even if you’re reinventing the wheel.”

HTML web components encourage a mindset of augmentation instead.

In this piece, Karan Thapar emphasizes that:

• Interviewers must remember they are asking questions on behalf of the public.
• Questions must be relevant, significant, and timely to demand accountability.
• The interviewer must persistently push for answers instead of allowing monologues or tangents.
• The interview should not serve as a platform to attack critics, but rather an occasion to make the PM respond to valid criticisms.
• The interviewer and PM must interact as equals, with the former feeling empowered to challenge evasions or dubious claims.

In this article, Dave Rupert explains how testing in forced colors mode improves accessibility for users and reveals design flaws, such as excessive reliance on color cues.

In Level 3 of the Display specification, the value of display is defined as two keywords. These keywords define the outer value of display, which will be inline or block and therefore define how the element behaves in the layout alongside other elements. They also define the inner value of the element — or how the direct children of that element behave.

This means that when you say display: grid, what you are really saying is display: block grid. You are asking for a block level grid container. An element that will have all of the block attributes — you can give it height and width, margin and padding, and it will stretch to fill the container. The children of that container, however, have been given the inner value of grid so they become grid items. How those grid items behave is defined in the CSS Grid Specification: the display spec gives us a way to tell the browser that this is the layout method we want to use.

As simply put by Rachel:

When you define layout on a box in CSS, you are defining what happens to this box in terms of how it behaves in relation to all of the other boxes in the layout. You are also defining how the children of that box behave.

If there’s one thing you can do to make your websites better, it is to embrace what the web platform gives you: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind. You’ll be a happier developer. Your visitors will be happier, too, as things work as expected.