Hi
This week (after a few weeks where my motivation left a lot to be desired) felt like we got a lot of things back on track again. Also, one of the client projects which was super-urgent before got pushed out by the client for a few weeks, and gave us a little more room for everything else, which was nice!
Here’s a few things I’ve read this week:
Frontend Development
✨ Build Excellent Websites
Loved this bold and beautiful microsite by Andy Bell, highlighting the key principles of good web design. With modern CSS, we don’t have to define everything down to the last pixel, but rather give the browser enough information to work with and then let it decide on its own. Or, as he summarized it much more eloquently:
Be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager.
Andy Bell
🔥 All that’s left of a website is the markup
Robin Rendle with a great piece about why you should use less dependencies and why the most important part of your website is, well, the websites’ markup and not your fancy build processes and what not.
This is the second law of thermodynamics made clear on the web: the entropy of any isolated system always increases and, at some point or another, all that’s left of a website is the markup.
Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle – Blogging and the heat death of the universe
😳 CSS Toggle States, anyone?
This proposal to include toggle states right into CSS sounds really interesting. This will definitely give so much more power to CSS and reduce the need for JS solutions once more.
CSS Toggles Explainer & Proposal
WordPress
📦 Tame that block editor
In this first post, Thomas Kräftner lays out some of the history of publishing on the web, and how we came from writing HTML in a text editors, to WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver etc. and then finally to editors like the WP Block editor we have today.
The second post gives some practical examples of how you can fit the editor to your needs, from removing blocks you don’t need to filtering the output of blocks and more. The article’s from July 2020 already, so possibly not everything’s up to date, but I still got a few ideas out of it.
Thomas Kräftner – The Taming of the Block – Part I: Publishing on the web
Thomas Kräftner – The Taming of the Block – Part II: The practical part
Other / Random
🐥 Musk & Twitter
You might have read about the news of Musk making an offer to buy Twitter and take it private again. While the whole offer is ridiculous in and off itself, it’s interesting to see everyone realizing how fragile it is to “outsource” your whole content to a platform that you don’t own and control.
It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen now. But the truth will probably be somewhere in the middle and not turn out as dramatic as everyone thinks right now. Here’s an article that I found worth reading by Kara Swisher, who knows a thing or two about Musk and tech:
👨🦳 103 Bits of Advice
Loved this list of advice by Kevin Kelly on his 70th birthday.
Kevin Kelly – 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
☀️ Have a happy weekend!