“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” : users perceive beautiful interfaces as easier to use and cut them more slack when it comes to minor usabiity issues. A common incarnation of form-over-function, is when designers start identifying signifiers and affordances as noise to be eliminated, sacrificing a great deal of learnability for an — often marginal — improvement in aesthetics. is one of the Nielsen/Norman core usability heuristics (and all other heuristics taxonomies have something similar). More poetically, Antoine de ..read more

So, I set out to create a proper web component for star ratings. The first conundrum was, how does this relate to a element to look like a star rating is . Not to mention that this approach won’t even work in Shadow trees (unless you include the CSS in every single shadow tree ..read more

to publish a subset of the design principles that apply to web developers, to help them in creating Web Platform compatible APIs. After all, with web components, web developers are now HTML designers, with Houdini APIs, they are now CSS designers, and with JS, they’ve been JS API designers since forever. The project is currently in its infancy, and If elected, it will be one of my tasks to get it published within my next term. , I ran for the TAG election for the first time and had the great honor of being elected by the W3C membership. This year, I’m running for re-election. The W3C Technical ..read more

However, CSS features are not the only — or even the most important questions being asked. added questions about 15 new CSS features based on proposals in that repo, and decided against adding 9 . Overall, there are 30 new CSS features the 2022 survey asks about. To make space for all of that, we also . But that also meant we had to make some tough decisions about what gets in the survey and what doesn’t, otherwise we’d end up with a survey so long nobody would want to finish it! that were not really shining much light into what developers do anymore, and also a couple others that were not act ..read more

I will let that sink in for a bit. Color objects. For context, Vue 3 uses proxies to implement its reactivity system, just like did back in 2016 (the first one to do so as far as I’m aware). I was getting several errors and upon tracking them down I had a very sad realization: instances of classes that use private fields cannot be proxied Private fields, proxies, pick one, you can’t have both ..read more

Please join me in welcoming them to the project and help them get settled in as new stewards! , an app to calculate the WCAG 2.1 contrast ratio between any two CSS colors. At the time, all similar tools suffered from several flaws when being used for CSS editing: I have started and maintain, , talks, and workshops. It basically became the standard URL developers would visit for this purpose. approached me with a generous offer to buy the domain, and a commitment to take over maintainship of the , I was cautiously optimistic. But now, after having seen some of their plans for it, I could not be ..read more

ported my 14 year old blog from WordPress to Eleventy but it’s aimed at importing Disqus comments as static copies, but I wanted to have the option to continue using Disqus. Looking at the WP generated HTML source, I noticed that Disqus was using the WP post id (a number that is not displayed in the UI) to link its threads to the posts. However, the importer I used did not preserve the post ids as metadata (filed issue ..read more

What does this mean in practice? It means it’s not enough if migration saga of this blog from WordPress to 11ty shows all posts tagged “foo”, should also show all tags. Similarly, it’s not enough if ..read more

So this summer, Google trusted me with a much bigger project, a brand new survey: project, where browsers collaborate to implement the most important features for developers interoperably. research, but because this studies what is actually used on the web, it takes a lot longer for changes in developer practices to propagate). Google sponsored me to be Survey Design Lead . It went really well: we got 60% higher response rate than the year before, which gave browsers a lot of actionable data to prioritize their work. The feedback from these surveys is a prime input into the ..read more

State of HTML 2023 Survey You still haven’t started the State of HTML 2023 survey?! made the survey possible in the first place, by proposing it and securing funding from Google. , I’ve been hard at work leading a small product team spread across three continents (2am to 8am became my second work shift ?). We embarked on this mission with some uncertainty about whether there were features for a State of HTML survey, but quickly found ourselves with the opposite problem: there were too many, all with good reasons for inclusion! To help weigh the tradeoffs and decide what makes the cut we consul ..read more