This is a guide to how to be a web developer.
Really good advice from Laurie.
What this site is not is a tutorial. Tutorials are very specific to a time and a technology. This is intended to be a guide to tell you all the things you can learn, so you can then go off and learn them.
This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
Some good—if overlong—writing advice.
- Focus on what matters to readers
- Be welcoming to everyone
- Swap formal words for normal ones
- When we have to say sorry, say it sincerely
- Watch out for jargon
- Avoid ambiguity: write in the active voice
- Use vivid words & delightful wordplay
- Make references most people would understand
- Avoid empty adjectives & marketing cliches
- Make people feel they’re in on the joke – don’t punch down
- Add a pinch of humour, not a dollop
- Smart asides, not cheap puns and cliches
- Be self-assured, but never arrogant
This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).
Good advice for documentation—always document steps in the order that they’ll be taken. Seems obvious, but it really matters at the sentence level.
Another terrific interactive tutorial from Ahmad, this time on container queries.
This isn’t just a great explanation of :has(), it’s an excellent way of understanding selectors in general. I love how the examples are interactive!
This is a wonderfully in-depth interactive explainer on touch target sizes, with plenty of examples.
This is a terrific interactive explainer!
Michelle has written a detailed practical guide to container queries here.
When you think of heraldry what comes to mind is probably knights in shining armor, damsels in distress, jousting, that sort of thing. Medieval stuff. But I prefer to think of it as one of the earliest design systems.
This totally checks out.
I like Jason’s guidelines—very in keeping with The Session’s house rules.
And I really like his motivation for trying out comments:
The timing feels right. Twitter has imploded and social sites/services like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon are jockeying to replace it (for various definitions of “replace”). People are re-thinking what they want out of social media on the internet and I believe there’s an opportunity for sites like kottke.org to provide a different and perhaps even better experience for sharing and discussing information. Shit, maybe I’m wrong but it’s definitely worth a try.
Yes! More experiments like this please! Experiments that aren’t just “let’s clone Twitter”.
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.
This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!
Vitaly has rounded up a whole load of accessibility posts. I think I’ve linked to most of them at some point, but it’s great to have them all gathered together in one place.
It all started at Patterns Day…
(Note: you’ll probably need to use Reader mode to avoid taxing your eyes reading this—the colour contrast …doesn’t.)