UI Brainstorms & Design

The View Transitions API is routinely described as having gone cross-browser, and that description is half right in a way that matters.

clip-path: path() has always carried a tax.

Theme systems have always had the same weak joint.

Baseline coverage skews heavily toward one half of the model.

Large stylesheets eventually fight the cascade.

For years, positioning a tooltip next to its trigger required JavaScript.

Large CSS codebases develop a particular kind of technical debt: specificity inflation.

In June 2005, Steve Jobs stood at a Stanford graduation podium and told a story about dropping out of college.

CSS is a large specification written across dozens of modules.

Flexbox is the dominant tool for component-level responsive layout — the layer between a macro grid system and individual element styling.

The three flex sizing properties — flex-grow, flex-shrink, and flex-basis — are almost always written together as the flex shorthand.

WCAG 2.1 is the current stable version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that most legal and regulatory frameworks reference.

grid-template-areas is one of the most readable things in CSS.

Heading elements are among the oldest navigational affordances on the web.

Caching is one of those subjects where a little knowledge is genuinely dangerous.

DevTools shipped with the browser.

Forms are where users do the work that matters — signing up, checking out, submitting a report, booking an appointment.

Typography on the web is not a design problem — it is a rendering problem.

Motion in an interface is a claim on attention.

The double-dash prefix is easy to recognize, but the mechanics behind it are frequently misunderstood.

Google’s Core Web Vitals program emerged from a straightforward problem: lab benchmarks and synthetic audits measure what engineers care about, not what users experience.

WCAG 2.2 was published by the W3C as an official recommendation in October 2023.

The WAI-ARIA specification opens with what it calls the “first rule of ARIA use”: if you can use a native HTML element or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, do that instead.

Serving a single image file to every device — a 2400px wide JPEG compressed for desktop monitors — has a measurable cost.

Date and time are among the most information-dense elements in any UI.

Progressive enhancement in web development is one of those ideas that gets filed away as historical best practice — useful once, superseded now.

The shift from XHTML to HTML5 was not simply a version bump.

CSS Grid is a two-dimensional layout system — it handles rows and columns simultaneously, in a single coordinated model.

The <abbr> element occupies a small but specific corner of HTML semantics.

The contrast ratio between a foreground and background color is one of the most concrete, testable accessibility requirements in WCAG 2.1.

Flexbox has been production-ready since around 2015, yet it remains a frequent source of confusion — not because the spec is poorly designed, but because most introductions lead with property lists rather than the underlying model.

Apache’s .htaccess file sits at the intersection of web server configuration and everyday development work.

Every time a browser renders a page, it resolves thousands of potential conflicts: multiple rules targeting the same element, declarations scattered across author stylesheets and browser defaults, inline styles competing with external files.

A URL is a contract.

What Lynx Is — and Why It’s Still Worth Your Time Lynx is a fully featured text-based web browser that has been in continuous development since 1992.

Typography is infrastructure.

The Case for Meaning Over Appearance Every HTML element you write is a decision about what a piece of content is — not just what it looks like.

A sighted visitor scans a page visually and jumps straight to the content they want — skipping past the header, ignoring the sidebar, landing on the main article.

“It works on my machine” has a specific, unglamorous fix: testing on machines that aren’t yours.

Long before a form submission reaches a server, the browser itself can catch a meaningful share of invalid input — a missing required field, a malformed email address, a number outside an allowed range — using nothing but native HTML attributes.

CSS offers more than a dozen length units, but in practice most projects rely on four: px, em, rem, and the viewport units (vw/vh and their relatives).

A media query is a conditional block of CSS that applies only when a stated condition about the viewport, device, or user preference is true.

CSS was never designed with large-scale application development in mind.

For most of the 2000s, embedding video or audio in a web page meant embedding a plugin.

Every element rendered in a browser is a rectangular box, and the CSS box model is the set of rules that determines how big that box actually is.