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.
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If anybody needs some free advice on how to build websites, Sara Joy has got it absolutely nailed. (With supporting voiceover from Keenan, and an accompanying video from Robb Knight.)
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This week I climbed a mountain. There are some things that make me care not one tiny bit about web development, and being on top of a mountain is one of them. The web helped me with this adventure, though.
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I’m sure I’m not alone in noticing the recent proliferation of articles lamenting the impending (or, indeed, already happening) destruction of the web as we know it, due in large part to the influx of AI-generated content. For the most part, I share their pessimism. It’s hard not to see the devaluation of human content as anything but a negative.
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When you get an invite from Chris and Dave to appear on ShopTalk Show it’s hard to say no! Despite my longstanding fear of sounding like an idiot on the airwaves, I swallowed my nerves and joined them for an episode on web sustaibaility — althought we managed to delve into a few other topics too. Naturally, right afterwards I thought of a whole bunch of things I forgot to mention (hopefully I’ll get around to writing one or two follow-up blog posts!), but I was pleased to get the chance to talk about this important subject on such an esteemed podcast. I hope listeners will take away one or two things, and be inspired to do their own research.
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The Green Web Foundation has recently redesigned their green web hosting directory. Previously the directory was a useful resource for finding hosting platforms that at least claim some sustainable credentials but, as I’ve noted before the information provided by each web host was somewhat limited. From the directory alone it was impossible to discern which providers could claim to be running on renewable energy rather than buying carbon offsets, for instance, or which providers were doing the bare minimum of box-ticking, as opposed to making sustainability a key part of their offering. Finding a truly green web host is hard!
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Melinda Seckington has just launched a brand new blog series, Beyond the Spotlight, where she’ll be talking to conference speakers about their talk process, preparation and delivery. Melinda is an accomplished speaker , writer and engineering manager, so I was honoured to be the first speaker interviewed.
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I’ve been speaking about web sustainability a bit recently, and a question that comes up fairly frequently is about the impact of audio and video streaming. Catherine Van Loo from Carnerstone consultancy is part of the team working on DIMPACT — a collaborative initiative between researchers and digital media companies with the aim of quantifying and reducing carbon emissions from digital content. She recently gave an illuminating talk at Green Tech South West on the subject.
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Yesterday I spoke at Smashing Meets Goes Green, an online meetup themed around building a more sustainable web. In my talk I spoke a little about tools for measuring your website’s carbon emissions, and how it would be great if these metrics could be integrated with commonly-used developer tools for monitoring performance. As I also mentioned, it’s really hard to land on 100% accurate figures for this stuff, as there are so many variables.
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A recent post by Melinda Seckington, The Myth of not Having Anything To Talk About really resonated with me. I’ve been doing talks about CSS for a few years now, and for a while before that I was an organiser of web conferences, so I’ve seen a fair few talks. I can definitely say that some of the best talks I’ve seen are not necessarily by the people with the most expertise in a given subject, but by people who share their story, their perspective — whether it’s on a particular technology, design problem, workflow, project case study, or something else entirely. Making it personal makes it relateable. As Melinda says:
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Reality Check is a new article series from Set Studio that focuses on CSS layout with real-world case studies. Each issue takes a design from Dribbble (or a similar platform) and demonstrates how to code it in CSS in a way that plays to the strengths of the medium, rather than aiming for pixel-perfect recreations. As Andy says in the first article:
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This post on the role of a UX Engineer by Donnie D’Amato was published almost a year ago, but has cropped up in my feed today. UX engineering is something I identify strongly with, as I suspect do many of my friends on the front-of-the-front end. Like Donnie, I’m from a design background, but cared a lot about how things were built, as well as how they looked and the function they performed for the user. I gradually made the transition to a more technical role over time, by dappling in front end development in my spare time. I’ve since gained a fair bit of experience in “back-of-the-front end” development, but “front-of-the-front end” is where my heart lies, and so the title of “UI and UX Engineer” is one that I can identify with.
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I’m a big fan of lists. I like to think of myself as a fairly organised person. I make lists for a lot of stuff, at work and home, and get a little kick out of crossing things off. Yes, I’m one of those people who add tasks to a list post-completion, just for the pleasure of seeing it crossed off. This sounds completely pointless, but it’s actually a good motivator! I’m more motivated to tackle the rest of the list if I already have the sense of achievement that comes from already-completed tasks.
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Last week I had the pleasure of attending FF Conf in Brighton. I was partly inspired to go to the conference after watching a talk from last year’s event: Programming With Yarn by Lily Madar.
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It’s been a year since Twitter (X) went down the pan, and I finally got around to removing the Twitter link from this site. I haven’t visited the platform in months, except periodically, guiltily checking that I haven’t missed an important DM. I never post there, and the occasional fleeting glimpse of my feed is enough to convince me I’m not missing much.
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This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, trying to square my own work as a web developer with my personal values and the impact I want to have on the world.
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The Sustainable Web Design Community Group has just launched a draft set of guidelines for designing and developing sustainable web applications. Covering design, UX, front and back end development, and business strategies, these guidelines have been months in the making, with contributions from experts and breakout groups from across the industry.
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When we talk about the concept of reactivity in Javascript, we generally mean a variable in our code responding to an event or change in state somewhere else in our code. Perhaps we need a button to respond to a 'click' event, or maybe we need to update the DOM in response to new data. The Vue docs have a great explanation of reactivity.
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WebPageTest is a great tool for measuring your website’s performance, providing detailed metrics and actionable advice. They’ve just released a brand new add-on, Carbon Capture, which measures the CO2 emissions generated by a website. It includes detailed breakdowns on which resources have the greatest carbon impact, as well as quantifying the total emissions. Read all about it in this blog post by Scott Jehl at WebPageTest.
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There are lots of areas where better web performance and reducing carbon emissions overlap: faster websites are often less carbon-intensive ones. They transfer less data, cache efficiently, and make fewer requests, all of which reduce energy consumption.
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If you’ve been writing CSS for any length of time, the chances are you’ll have come across situations where you need to hide some text visually, but still have that text available to assistive technologies (such as screenreaders). Icon buttons and skip links are just two examples. (There are plenty more.) Simply using display: none hides text from assistive technologies, which is not useful to us in this scenario. So developers over the years have come up with clever ways to hide text visually, which usually manifest as a utility class that gets copied and pasted into every project, often called .visually-hidden or .sr-only — something like:
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Last year, Interop 2022, a collaborative cross-browser initiative, was hugely successful in getting 15 key features implemented interoperably. As developers, we can enjoy the fruits of this collaboration, with features like container queries, cascade layers and dynamic viewport units going from little or no browser support to almost full support in the space of a year.
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Do you find yourself needing to switch between development environments frequently? That's often the case for me. I work on a web app for wind turbine operators, and I regularly need to test my front end code with different databases.
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Recently I’ve been thinking quite a bit about third-party scripts and how much bloat they so often add to the average webpage — and, consequently, their impact on climate change via the additional carbon emissions generated, often for something the end user doesn’t really want or need. Third-party scripts can include ads, trackers, analytics, social media embeds, and probably some other stuff too. An analysis by Marmelab found that up to 70% of the carbon footprint of media websites could be attributed to ads and stats (source).
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