Our mission is to combine the raw stats and trends of the HTTP Archive with the expertise of the web community. The Web Almanac is a comprehensive report on the state of the web, backed by real data and trusted web experts. It is comprised of 20 chapters spanning aspects of page content, user experience, publishing, and distribution. There’s so much to digest here. 85 contributors! Quite an achievement and one that I’m excited to dig in to.

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I am dumbfounded by the level of skill involved in pulling this off.

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Just like caniuse.com, but for email! (The only thing worse than browser incompatibilities is email client incompatibilities)

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Nintendo has been slowly bringing their iconic games and characters to mobile platforms. Maybe it’s time they consider the web platform? 😉

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Conventional template languages like EEx use a form of interpolation to embed a programming language into a markup language, which can result in some ugly code that can be difficult to write and debug. Temple is written using pure elixir. There are some good ideas here, for sure. (Click through for code samples.) My concern with this (and with pretty much all non-HTML style template languages) is cognitive overhead for folks who’d rather be writing HTML. That being said, if I were creating a web app from scratch all by my lonesome, I’d 💯% give Temple a go.

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This looks like a nice way to help make web components easier to use. If you want to see it in action, Chris Coyier has a solid write-up over on CSS-Tricks.

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10 cool things you can achieve with nothing but HTML. They don’t all work well (and they don’t all work in all browsers), but the big takeaway here is that you should know the capabilities of the tools you’re using before you layer another tool on top.

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My big concern is at the bottom of that technology pyramid. The lowest common denominator of the Web. The foundation. The rhythm section. The ladyfingers in the Web trifle. It’s the HTML. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that there’s a whole swathe of Frontend Engineers who don’t know or understand the frontend-est of frontend technologies. Solid rant with a nice list of resources at the end. 👌

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A great example of how good accessibility practices are often actually good usability practices for all. While the problems highlighted are most impactful on those who have challenges, I found every single alternative suggested improved usability for me as well. Author Raghavendra Peri states: According to the research conducted by Nielsen, it is not best practice to have a placeholder in the form field from a user experience perspective. This is because many users are confused by placeholders. In particular, people with cognitive disabilities tend to have issues understanding placeholder text because they think it is pre-populated text and will try to submit the form without entering their specific information. TL;DR Don’t use placeholders! But for examples of what else to do, read this article.

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Fascinating read through covering historical context for accessibility and assistive technologies as well as diving into the way we do accessibility in the web today. According to author Be Birchall this article aims to shift your perspective by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design. We’ll see how designing for different sets of abilities leads to insight and innovation. I’ll also shed some light on how the history of browsers and HTML is intertwined with the history of assistive technology.

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This is the coolest webpage I’ve seen in awhile. The way the quine is accomplished is so brilliantly simple, it almost feels like cheating. It’s brilliant, by the way, because of the esoteric knowledge required to pull it off. It’s simple, because it’s literally a single CSS rule.

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The prefers-reduced-motion media query is a great tool for improving accessibility and helping users with visual impairments that make animations and such hard to follow, but did you know you can use it inside a picture element with a srcset? Brad writes: This technique would definitely be helpful for posts with embedded animated GIFs in it. Authors would have to grab a static frame of a GIF as a fallback, so there’s a bit of extra work involved, but the technical execution is pretty dang straightforward. What would be even cooler is if blogging and social media services did this automatically…

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The year long feud between the WHATWG and the W3C is officially over as the W3C hands over the HTML and DOM standards to WHATWG. This leaves the browser vendors including Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Apple in charge of web standards. JS Party #39 discusses the feud and just what each of these groups are.

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This is notable/different because it uses descriptive HTML rather than semantic CSS classes: <grid columns=8> <c></c> <c span=3>3</c> <c></c> <c span=7-8>7-8</c> <c span=2+2>2+2</c> <c span=5-8>5-8</c> <c span=1-4>1-4</c> <c span=6..>6..</c> <c span=2..>2..</c> <c span=4..>4..</c> <c span=1-2>1-2</c> <c span=4-5>4-5</c> </grid>

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I’ve been using Semantic UI for years. Still do to this day. Unfortunately, the project hasn’t been sustainable with a BDFL despite Jack Lukic’s efforts (you can read a lot more on that history right here). These things happen. And when they do, it’s awesome to see the community rally around the project and keep it alive and thriving. That’s exactly the case with Fomantic UI. Let’s be clear: this is no hostile takeover. From the README: NOTE: Fomantic was created to continue active development of Semantic-UI and has the intent to be merged back into the master repository once active development can restart. Let’s hope the two can become one flesh at some point in the future. In the meantime, Fomantic is where the action’s at.

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Eric Bailey writing for CSS-Tricks: Good design isn’t about forcing someone to walk a tightrope across your carefully manicured lawn. Nor is it a puzzle box casually tossed to the user, hoping they’ll unlock it to reveal a hidden treasure. Good design is about doing the hard work to accommodate the different ways people access a solution to an identified problem. For reading articles, the core problem is turning my ignorance about an issue into understanding (the funding model for this is a whole other complicated concern). The more obstructions you throw in my way to achieve this goal, the more I am inclined to leave and get my understanding elsewhere—all I’ll remember is how poor a time I had while trying to access your content. What is the value of an ad impression if it ultimately leads to that user never returning? Fantastic article full of amazing resources. As web developers, we want people to experience our site the way it was intended. But that means we have to put in the work to make that experience easy, accessible, and clutter-free.

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Robin Rendle writing on CSS-Tricks: We should see front-end development as a unique skillset that is critical to the success of any project. I believe that’s why frameworks and tools like Bootstrap are so popular; not necessarily because they’re a collection of helpful components, but a global solution that corrects an inherent issue. … Bootstrap isn’t a skill though — front-end development is. It’s supremely ironic that front-end development is incredibly undervalued by many, yet those same people use frameworks because moving a box around in CSS is “hard.”

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Tomasz Jakut takes us through a proof-of-concept where he rebuilds Vue’s single file components from the ground up with nothing but browser-native technologies. It takes a few ‘dirty’ hacks to get the job done, but the journey is quite enjoyable and you learn a lot along the way. A great read! 💯

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Copy/paste the code in this repo’s README into your browser’s address bar and you end up with a super minimal CodePen-style editor. Pretty cool, and a bit crazy that you can get so much functionality with just 400 bytes of code…

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It allows complex layouts to be defined with CSS and JavaScript, while writing the content in a friendly, minimal syntax close to Markdown or LaTeX. Lots of nice output examples in the README.

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This is a spectacular project by Diana Smith: Rules I have for myself: All elements must be typed out by hand Only Atom text editor and Chrome Developer Tools allowed. SVG use is limited, and all shapes can only use hand-plotted coordinates and bezier curves - without the aid of any graphics editor. The results are stunning, to say the least. I won’t embed the image here, because it won’t do it justice. You have to click through and see it for yourself.

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Keith J. Grant: For the next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some aspects of HTML5 that maybe haven’t received as much attention as they deserve. As a warm up, I’ll look at some elements from HTML5 that most web developers probably are somewhat familiar with: <main>,<nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, and other structural, semantic elements. Even if you already use these elements, you might just learn a few new things along the way (I know I did as I researched this). I really enjoyed this article. I try to be as semantic as possible in my markup, but Keith’s post shed light on things I didn’t know—especially the impact certain elements can have on accessibility.

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This library has a tiny (4 KB) footprint, no dependencies, and most (all?) of the features you’d need in a file dropping library.

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What are Flame Graphs good for? According to Netflix, they’re using them for: quick analysis of performance issues such as perturbations, variance, single-threaded execution, and more.

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