A blog about CSS, front-end development, the web, and beyond.
Find out moreFor many projects I work on it’s useful to define all of our brand colours in a JavaScript file, particularly as I work on a lot of data visualisations that use them. Here’s an abridged example of how I define brand colours, as well as those used for data visualisations, and their variants:
Read more
Earlier this year the BBC published a report on digital sustainability, Does what you scroll burn coal? Mythbusting energy consumption on the web. The report seeks to address some of the ways our online activities consume energy but interestingly, is quite critical of some of the web sustainability guidelines that have been developed and published by the community.
Read more
A recently published post by the science fiction writer Robin Sloan (Is It Okay?, published 11th February 2025) ignited some examination and debate among my little corner of the web. The post asks the question of whether it’s ethical, from an individual moral standpoint to use an LLM (Large Language Model, such as Claude or GPT-4). Robin raises some important points about the trade-offs that come with LLMs, depending on their application.
Read more
Recently I had the experience of migrating a Vue web app to a new state management library, Pinia, which was interesting from both a technical and non-technical point of view. In this article for Piccalilli I’ll share my thoughts and findings on when, why and how you might consider carrying out such a major technical migration, applicable to any large web project, and some tips and advice on migrating from Vuex to Pinia specifically.
Read it on Piccalilli
Recently I’ve been working with map data to create interactive visualisations. When working with maps it’s common to receive data as GeoJSON, a JSON format for encoding geographic features, which specifies the type of geometry and co-ordinates for the features we want to display on a map. Javascript mapping libraries such as Mapbox GL are designed to consume GeoJSON to render features on a canvas. I’m fairly accustomed to using GeoJSON in this way — for example, rendering geographic areas as different coloured polygons overlaid on a map to show varying values for different areas.
Read more
I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep my iPhone 8 going for over five years (with one battery replacement in that time). But recently it’s been increasingly unreliable, switching itself off at random times, and spontaneously draining the battery after doing anything remotely taxing. This combined with the fact that software updates are no longer available for this model led me to the conclusion that buying a new phone was probably a good idea at this point.
Read more
Baldur Bjarnason shared an article in a recent edition of his newsletter about AI in education. As a parent of an 8-year-old, this is something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. Like most other parents I’ve encountered, I find the idea that teachers can be “replaced” by AI so preposterous that I’d imagine no one who’s ever had a child, met a child, or even been a child would take it seriously. Apparently though, there are some for whom the idea of taking an immeasurably complex, still-forming, constantly changing human brain, understanding, caring for and nurturing it, and imbuing it with the wisdom of the universe in a way that inspires excitement, passion and curiosity are the kind of tasks that should be done by a computer. Go figure.
Read more
Ahmad Shadeed has published a great article digging into the proposed CSS masonry layout syntax. In case you’re unaware, the term “masonry” for layout is used to describe the kind of grid layout where instead of items of various heights being aligned in neat horizontal rows, they are shifted to fill the leftover space, effectively creating a brickwork effect. It was popularised by the website Pinterest some years ago, and became a widespread UI design trend for a while.
Read more
The Green Web Foundation have published a thorough and insightful report into the sustainability of AI, and the results are pretty damning. Over the couple of years I’ve been talking about web sustainability I haven’t really touched upon AI a whole lot, partly as there wasn’t a lot of publicly available hard data about its environmental impact. Now, however, it’s become an issue that’s too big to ignore. We can’t not talk about it.
Read more
When writing blog posts in Markdown files I often find myself needing to add HTML elements that aren’t accounted for in Markdown. Some common ones are <aside> elements, where I include content tangentially related to the post itself, or external references.
Read more
True to form, Heydon Pickering has written another blistering account of one of the most ubiquitous HTML elements, the <blockquote>. You’ve probably used a <blockquote> when writing HTML. I know I’ve used literally hundreds of them. What I didn’t know is that I’ve been using them wrong all these years.
Read more
Last week I attended Green IO, a conference in London all about sustainability in digital technology, organised by Gaël Duez (who also hosts the Green IO podcast). It was a fantastic conference, and amazing to see so many people who are passionate about this stuff all in one room!
Read more