The other day I had a friend come to my place with the request to “learn HTML and how web sites work”. We spent a few hours playing with the topic and she got excited and quite far into it. The whole thing reminded me about a real problem when it comes to teaching people HTML. We keep fast-tracking the learning to the fun part of building visual things with it.
People who started early with the web had platforms that allowed them to quickly publish things. Geocities, Neopets and many others. For many these were the only accessible ways…
Often you find things in web sites that annoy you. And — as a web developer — you’re even asked to fix some problems in web sites without getting access to the source.
Using developer tools in browsers you can change a lot of things and you can even fix some issues. You get visual tools to tweak colours, dimensions and more without having to know CSS.
The problem is that the changes aren’t persistent — once you reload the page, they are gone. …
About eight years ago Bret Victor tried to change the way developer tools work by providing a faster and simpler way from creation to consumption. He also followed it up with a Learnable Programming Course asking for simpler development teaching courses.
The presentation “Inventing on Principle” was a smash hit, despite its deplorable video quality. Many people in the field set out to create more visual development tools. Tools that invite users to play with values and see the immediate effects. Tools that disrupt the “code, deploy, test and debug” cycle. …
It was around 2005 when I sat at my job and didn’t like it. I was head of web development at an agency in London that covered huge web sites and government portals. The pay was great, my team was top-notch and the products interesting.
What I didn’t like was that my computer was a mess. I dealt with various products each with their own stack. Early .NET (with state stored in a hidden form field) here, Java Spring there, PHP on another. Flash generated from Apache Turbine from XML to use XSLT to build the HTML fallback. …
- Thou shalt not forget about the agenda or deviate from it — It’s a lot of work to stay up late (or early) and dial into a meeting. An agenda published at least a day before makes it worth while. If people can’t attend, they can add the info you need from them to the agenda.
- Thou shalt not cancel meetings shortly before they start — This isn’t “giving people back the time”, this is “annoying people who stayed up late to have this meeting”.
- Thou shalt not all speak at the same time — Nothing is more grating when…
This is a write-up of my talk at DotJS Paris this year.
We obsess about coding, creating automated workflows and optimising. And yet our final products aren’t making it easy for people to use them. Somewhere, we lost empathy for our end users and other developers. Maybe it is time to change that. Here are some ideas.
I’ve been doing web development for a long time. Over 20 years. When I started it was literally all fields. Interaction in web sites meant that we needed to send forms and deal with the logic on the backend. When JavaScript came around…
The other day someone asked me to help them with a project and take a look at a single web document. Nothing fancy, one document with a bit of text and some design. No interaction, no special ”app” needs. I looked at the page and I found a typo.
Normally I’d write a report of what could be done better. But I thought I’d be a good web citizen and go to GitHub, fork the project and do the changes myself adding comments why I did so. …
There is a strange fascination in developers to keep things as small as possible. There are several reasons for it. In the past, computers had limited resources, so every byte had to count. On the web, we never know what people use to consume our code. Erring on the side of caution is also a good plan there. One virtue of every good developer is also laziness. This translates to fewer words and keystrokes.
Another reason for short code is that we drum up excitement in blog posts and presentations. Screen space isn’t plentiful when you want people at the…
This is the article version of a talk I gave at Web Unleashed in Toronto and Halfstack in Vienna. You can also check the slides here .
I love the web, and it has been only good to me from a career point of view. I am also worried about where it is going. I am worried about how we keep advocating for it in the same manner we did when I discovered it. And maybe it is time to re-evaluate our approach to “saving the web”.
Over the last 20 years I’ve worked on the web on various products…
Update: there was a simplification about Custom Attributes not supporting concatenation, thanks to Sime Vidas, Brian Kardell and Greg Whitworth to set this straight.
Over the last few iterations of CSS the boundaries between CSS and JavaScript started to blur. CSS was a static language, meant to define colours, look and feel, but not interactivity. You could use percentages in dimensions as sort of interactivity to the environment, but reacting to things changing was the job of JavaScript.
In the days of old HTML was there to give structure, CSS look and feel and JavaScript interactivity. Or, as I put…
Christian Heilmann
Maker of web things. Ponderer of new technology. Lover of simplicity. Portfolio: http://christianheilmann.com — http://developer-evangelism.com
