The comeback of The Cascade · 4 min read
A lot of smart people have been involved in writing the specs for CSS, and evolving it to meet the needs of today's applications. And if you listen to them, you may start to get an appreciation for everything the cascade gives us.
This blog runs on Ghost · 6 min read
I have been shopping around for a home for my blog for quite a long time, and I have finally landed on Ghost as my platform of choice. How I ended up here...
The UX of clean code · 11 min read
There is no universally-agreed definition of clean code. What makes for clean and readable code is context-dependent. We can apply UX research techniques to understand which specific tactics will optimize the reading experience for our context.
TDD your meetings so they suck less · 7 min read
Many technical folks are generally unequipped to design meetings with intention. Using the lens of TDD, here’s how you can make your technical meetings more effective and action-oriented.
Adventures in Vertical Rhythm · 14 min read
The goal of having good vertical rhythm is to provide a comfortable and engaging reading experience for our users. The challenge is, how do we know when we’ve achieved it, besides our design instincts? And how do we maintain the rhythm when the content changes?
Engineering CSS: applying method to the madness · 17 min read
Many folks underestimate and undervalue CSS, believing it’s not much more than a collection of magical incantations to make web pages look pretty. In reality, it takes real engineering discipline to write systematic, modifiable, and proactive code.
Designing for Accessibility · 6 min read
Accessibility is, and should be, a non-negotiable requirement of software delivery. To be successful, teams must design for accessibility, which requires collaboration between everyone on the team: product strategists, designers, developers, and quality analysts.
Demystifying Accessibility · 9 min read
Two persistent misconceptions about accessibility are that it’s about building niche features for niche audiences, and that it’s costly to implement. In fact, it’s costly to continue thinking this way.
The difference between margin and padding · 5 min read
From a purely visual point of view, while it may sometimes seem that setting margin: 10px is equivalent to setting padding: 10px, there is a key conceptual difference between them.
The cost of custom controls · 6 min read
Just because you can customize something, doesn’t mean you always should. You’re almost certainly breaking accessibility.
Values for writing maintainable and scalable CSS · 4 min read
There is a veritable alphabet soup of methodologies out there which have some worthwhile ideas about how to write saner and more structured CSS. This post is not about any of those methodologies, or about why CSS sucks. This post is about getting back to basics: things we value in our CSS.
Using rems for saner typography · 7 min read
Using relative units is essential to responsive design, and considering the infinite scenarios in which web content can be viewed, it is almost always necessary to be responsive by default. Let’s demystify when to use rems, ems, and pixels.