It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
A very fun jaunt through the early days of front-end web development. They are open to pull requests, so submit one if you’re into this kind of fun chronicling of our weird history!
That CSS3 Button generator really hits home. 😬… Read article “Dark Ages of the Web”
On March 6, 2018, a new bug was added to the official Mozilla Firefox browser bug tracker. A developer had noticed an issue with Mozilla’s nightly build. The report noted that a 14-day weather forecast widget typically featured on a German website had all of a sudden broken and disappeared. Nothing on the site had changed, so the problem had to be with Firefox.
A screenshot of the bug report filed with Mozilla.The problem, the developer noted in his … Read article “Yet Another JavaScript Framework”
Browsers, thank heavens, take backward compatibility seriously.
Ancient websites generally work just fine on modern browsers. There is a way higher chance that a website is broken because of problems with hosting, missing or altered assets, or server changes than there is with changes in how browsers deal with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, another other native web technologies.
In recent memory, #SmooshGate was all about a new JavaScript feature that conflicted with a once-popular JavaScript library. Short story, JavaScript has a … Read article “A historical look at lowercase defaultstatus”
For the 30th anniversary of the web, CERN brought nine web nerds together to recreate the very first web browser — Or a working replication of it anyway, as you use it from your web browser, inception style.
Well done, Mark Boulton, John Allsopp, Kimberly Blessing, Jeremy Keith, Remy Sharp, Craig Mod, Martin Akolo Chiteri, Angela Ricci, and Brian Suda! I love that it was written in React and the font is an actual replication of what was used … Read article “WorldWideWeb”
Early in my career when I worked at agencies and later at Microsoft on Edge, I heard the same lament over and over: “Argh, why doesn’t Edge just run on Blink? Then I would have access to ALL THE APIs I want to use and would only have to test in one browser!”
Let me be clear: an Internet that runs only on Chrome’s engine, Blink, and its offspring, is not the paradise we like to imagine it to be.… Read article “The Ecological Impact of Browser Diversity”
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this creative exchange all the way through. To take a look at a popular CSS trick, the clearfix, and find out exactly how a web design technique comes to … Read article “Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution”
In August of 2013, Aaron Gustafson posted to the WaSP blog. He had a bittersweet message for a community that he had helped lead:
… Read article “A Short History of WaSP and Why Web Standards Matter”Thanks to the hard work of countless WaSP members and supporters (like you), Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the web as an open, accessible, and universal community is largely the reality. While there is still work to be done, the sting of the WaSP is no longer necessary. And so it is time for us to
When you think of HTML and CSS, you probably imagine them as a package deal. But for years after Tim Berners-Lee first created the World Wide Web in 1989, there was no such thing as CSS. The original plan for the web offered no way to style a website at all.… Read article “A Look Back at the History of CSS”
Bert Bos, noting today as quite a notable day:
On December 17, 1996, W3C published the first standard for CSS.
Very interesting to see what historic points made the cut for the timeline. The Zen Garden, acid tests, preprocessors… good times!… Read article “20 Years of CSS”
Jeremy Keith released a new book, for free, on the web only:
… Read article “Resilient Web Design”This is not a handbook. It’s more like a history book.
