Frameworks, AI, and the modern web developer
I first started playing with web content in 1994 while in college. Over the years I've see most major changes in web development. From the early days of HTML, to CGI, to Javascript, Ajax, and many...
Comparing compression methods
Compression has been around for a long time, and it's a key part of web performance. In this post, we'll compare three popular compression methods: GZip, Brotli, and Zstd. We will first look at each...
Balancing text in CSS
The different values for text-wrap provide reading experience enhancements for headings and long-form text. This post will look at two values for the text-wrap property: balance and pretty. text-wrap:...
Design for bad performance
A somewhat contrarian view on designing websites is to design for bad performance. This post will explore the idea of how designing for bad performance can lead to better user experiences. Credit...
Using int.relativeTimeFormat for localized relative dates
One of the things that has always bugged me is how to display relative dates on a web page in the Eleventy template that I chose to use for this blog. This post will explore the issue, how the...
Evaluating browser support
Talking about web browser support for a given CSS or Javascript is deceptively simple. This post will explore a definition of browser support, different strategies to support a feature accross...
Custom Media Queries
When working with media queries is that we can't reuse media queries. A naive approach is to define the value as a CSS variable in the :root pseudo-class. :root { --width: 20em; } And then use the...
text-trim in CSS
This post will discuss leading, how to control it in CSS and the new text-box-trim property. Leading is the space between blocks of text; the term comes from the strips of lead that were used to...
Basic Performance Analysis (4) - User perception
Most of the time we measure the time it takes for a page to load, the number of requests, the size of the assets, etc. But we often forget that the user's perception of performance is not always...
Basic Performance Analysis (3) - Lighthouse
This post will explore what is Lighthouse, how to use Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools and Pagespeed Insights and some of its drawbacks and benefits. What is Lighthouse? # Lighthouse is an open-source,...