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.) The indie web community is awesome ? Everybody’s Free (to Write Websites ..read more

Hearing you’re doing a good job matters. Like anyone, there have been plenty of times when I’ve felt disinvested from a job, when I’ve lacked motivation or felt disconnected. There are lots of reasons why those feelings can arise in anyone, but one that triggers them often is a lack of feedback. If someone (your manager, for example) seems uninterested in your work or doesn’t appreciate the effort you put in, then it’s likely to make you feel demoralised. In web development, personally I feel that junior team members are less frequently singled out for praise, as often they are working on less ..read more

I recently gave a CSS layout talk at Pixel Pioneers conference in my (sort of) home city of Bristol. I’ve spoken about CSS layout quite a bit over the years, but I feel like there’s always a lot to talk about, as things are changing all the time! Although the talk shares a title with others I’ve given in the past year or two, I’ve updated it and added a couple of new sections covering anchor positioning and the forthcoming masonry layout proposal. If you attended the talk, you might find the slides useful, which include links to some of the demos I showed. View Modern CSS Layout is Awesome! (2 ..read more

Here’s a new demo where we’re positioning article references for a body of text relative to two different anchors for the block and inline axes. Each reference is positioned so that it aligns vertically with the position it’s referred to in the text, but appears adjacent to the main content wrapper on the horizontal axis. The content area has its own anchor name: .content { anchor-name: --content; } We reference this anchor to alternately position our references to the left or right of the text using the anchor() function: .ref { position: absolute; inset-inline-start: anchor(--conten ..read more

View from the top of Mount Snowdon (Y Wyddfa) in Eryri National Park 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. I planned the trip on the web. I researched the hiking route on the web. I booked the hotel on the web. I bought equipment on the web. I navigated the journey on the web (well, Google Maps). At the top of the mountain, none of it mattered. All that mattered was the moment. On top of the mountain, the people below were nothi ..read more

Anchor positioning in CSS enables us to position an element relative to an anchor element anywhere on the page. Prior to this we could only position an element relative to its closest positioned ancestor, which sometimes meant doing some HTML and CSS gymnastics or, more often than not, resorting to Javascript for positioning elements like tooltips or nested submenus. Anchor positioning is currently only supported in Chrome with experimental platform features enabled, You’ll need to view this article in a supporting browser in order to see the demos. Popovers Anchor positioning becomes even mor ..read more

My son gets a weekly magazine delivered to our home. It’s full of his favourite comic strips by fantastic authors and artists, he gets the pleasure of receiving something in the post just for him, and (even better) it doesn’t come with a load of plastic tat like you get with magazines in the supermarket. It’s not packed full of ads either, apart from a few for the comic book company’s workshops and merchandise, which I consider a small trade-off. Wouldn’t it be awesome to get a magazine full of articles by your favourite bloggers every week? Anyway, that’s kind of what RSS is like. RSS stands ..read more

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. But in the face of all this gloom, I think it’s important to define not just what we don’t want from the web, but what we do. I put some of these thoughts into words and created a manifesto for what I think is a better vision for the web. It’s a lot o ..read more

Greys. Who doesn’t love ’em? When it comes to building websites, it can be handy having a few shades of grey at your disposal, no matter your colour palette. We use them for borders and subtle dividers, shadows, and to indicate state changes without overwhelming the user with colour. Some designers feel that a website needs quite a few shades of grey in order to convey subtleties. I once worked on a project that literally had 50 shades of grey. If your native language is American English, you might be a little vexed by my spelling of “grey” here. Sorry, not sorry. Happily, CSS named colours ar ..read more

There’s something special about starting a new web or software project. Like a blank canvas, it has so much potential. Surely this is where we’re about to do our best work... In this piece for Branch magazine, I explore the theme of “Perfection is the enemy of progress” by considering how those of us concerned with building a humane web can weave incremental change into our work — without allowing perfectionism to stall our progress. Read the article via Branch ..read more