This post is in response to Tim Baxter's A List Apart article "Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It".
It's an excellent article well worth a read and offers some pointed criticism against the current CSS practices that developers, such as myself, use when building and styling websites. If you haven't read it yet, none of this post will make sense, so go read it now and I'll be here when you're done.
@adambsilver recently published MaintainableCSS which aims to be a best-practices guide for writing CSS. It's a good read and gives generally sound advice.
I made a rather terse remark about it's similarity to BEM on twitter, and I'm hoping to clarify my thoughts in long form because I tend to be verbose and twitter isn't an appropriate medium for conveying nuanced thoughts. As this post is in response to MaintainableCSS, please be sure to go read it thoroughly before continuing otherwise much of this may not make sense.
This could alternatively be titled ”W3C standards writers are human and sometimes make foolish mistakes“.
You might think that writing JavaScript for the browser to listen for keyboard events is something that we'd have solved after 20 years. Unfortunately, like many things in JavaScript land, it's a mess caused by naïve implementations of multiple inconsistent standards.
Sometimes it's useful to provide text or code to users so that they can copy and paste it elsewhere. This might be an embeddable code snippet, a generated license key, or maybe a recipe. What's being copied doesn't matter so much, but how you allow users to copy it does.
HTML is a powerful language that has a lot of features. In the current JavaScript- and framework-heavy front-end culture, it's easy to lose sight of the native features of HTML in favor of more JavaScript bloat. There are many instances where JavaScript is used to poorly replicate what HTML can do for free.
In this post I'll cover how to make a simple embedded youtube playlist with only HTML.
This post is in response to Heydon's articles "Things to Avoid When Writing CSS" and "Things to Avoid When Writing CSS (Part 2)".
They're both well written articles that make some excellent points. If you haven't read them yet none of this post will make sense, so go read them now. I'll wait.
No matter how much you try,
you can't stop people
from sticking beans up their nose.
William Howard Taft is America’s Greatest President by volume
‘Premium’ is the least useful adjective when describing a product as it imparts exactly zero knowledge. Given that it means fuckall, you can safely replace the word with ‘fuckall’ in almost every instance of its use.
I read an excellent article on medium on how [contenteditable] is terrible with a detailed mathematical explanation of why. More importantly it explained at a high level how Medium designed their editor and what was involved to make it not suck. It's a fascinating article, and absolutely worth a read.