Articles by

Chris Coyier

In which I argue that the only browser usage statistics that make sense use for decision making are the ones gathered from the website being worked on itself.

The reason you can’t use global statistics as a stand-in for your own is because they could be wildly wrong ... Sites like StatCounter that track the worldwide browser market are fascinating, but I’d argue largely exist as dinner party talk.

We get a decent amount of comments on blog posts right here on CSS-Tricks (thanks!), but I'd also say the hay day for that is over. These days, if someone writes some sort of reaction to a blog post, it could be on their own blog, or more likely, on some social media site. It makes sense. That's their home base and it's more useful to them to keep their words there.

It's a shame, though. This fragmented conversation is slightly more useful for each individual person, it's less useful as a whole. There is no canonical conversation thread. That's what Webmentions are all about, an official spec! In a sense, they allow the conversation to be dispursed but brought all together in a canonical conversation thread on the main post.

Webmentions don't need to be an alternative to comments, although when you pop over to real Drew McLellan's post you'll see he's using them that way. They can be in addition to "regular" comments. Surely the idea of turning off regular comments is appealing from a community perspective (less asshats likely when you need to link to your published words) and a technical debt perspective.

Rachel Andrew also recently implemented them, and this is classic Jeremy Keith stuff.

Hidde de Vries gathers some of the early thinking about CSS:

There is quite a bit of information on the web about how CSS was designed. Keeping it simple was a core principle. It continued to be — from the early days and the first implementations in the late nineties until current developments now.

The four main design principles listed are fascinating:

• Authors can specify as much or little as they want
• It is not a programming language by design
• They are agnostic as to which medium they are used for
• It is stream-based

So... did it?

I think lots has changed since the early nineties, but not really things that touch on how we apply CSS to structured markup.

A community-driven list of stats and news related to Progressive Web Apps

Things like:

Twitter Lite saw a 65% increase in pages per session, 75% in Tweets, and a 20% decrease in bounce rate. Twitter Lite loads in under 3 seconds for repeat visits even on slow networks.

It's in the same veins as WPO Stats, which is focused solely on web performance and positive effects of doing a good job.

Activities to help you develop empathy for the variety of people that use your thing. Eric Bailey:

This project is geared towards anyone involved with making digital products. It is my hope that this reaches both:

• People who are not necessarily involved in the day-to-day part of the process, but who help shape things like budget, timeline, and scope, and
• People who work every day to help to give these products shape and form

These prompts are intended to help build empathy, not describe any one person's experience. These prompts are not intended to tokenize the experience of the individuals experiencing these conditions.

I love the "share" link on the page. It's basically window.prompt("go ahead");