HTML, CSS, JavaScript and web development
The most important online tool I use is a bookmarking service. I’ve been collecting more than 41,000 bookmarks over the course of 17 years. And these are only the ones that survived numerous relocations, exports and imports. My bookmarks are an archive of what I read, watched and listened to. They document topics that preoccupied me and that were discussed in the spaces I frequented. So these…
This post describes my personal approach to software development. It highlights different aspects that are not strongly connected but all affected by generative AI – a topic I’m not particularly keen on writing about, but here we are. The Power of Understanding Shortly after I got internet access, I came across a free documentation: “ SELFHTML – create your own HTML files”. Established in 1995,…
Recently, two articles were published and widely shared: How much energy does ChatGPT use? Why using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment What these articles show is that the average personal usage of LLM-based chatbots like ChatGPT likely contributes a negligible share to the carbon footprint of a person living in a Western industrialized society. Compared to other mundane online activities…
Table of contents Smashing things against each other Next: Next.js The JavaScript crisis The community crisis Camp mentality Poor analysis and conspiracy theories The Big Rewrite Simplicity and complexity The dichotomy between User Experience (UX) and Developer Experience (DX) The obsession with developer experience React and derailed frontends Common goals Primitives and APIs Closing words…
Around 1996 or 1997, I started writing HTML. My family did not have internet access yet. But we owned a computer with a CD-ROM drive. On a CD-ROM that came with a video gaming magazine, I found some .HTM files. The magazine had shipped its website as HTML files on this CD-ROM because few people had internet access. I opened the files in Internet Explorer, then in Notepad. I changed the code and…
Content note: Mention of fictional death in a video game Almost three years ago, I wrote about Factorio , a factory simulation game. I lamented on the distorted relationship between human and nature and how the game negates the principles of human and non-human life. On Twitter, Dr Annie Burman followed up with a thread I recommend reading as a whole. Burman notes that the player character, simply…
Preface on asynchrony One of the defining features of the web is technical asynchrony. Web standards, web clients – like browsers – and web pages are never fully aligned in time. They meet sometimes but most of the time one is ahead or lags behind. Web standards are usually ahead of browsers and websites. They are designed, then browsers start implementing them. Once a web standard is stable, the…
One of the biggest changes in JavaScript in the last decade was the switch from loosely-connected scripts to ECMAScript modules (ESM). This affected both client-side and server-side JavaScript code. JavaScript programmers today take it for granted that they can pull a library dependency into client-side or server-side JavaScript code with npm install or other package managers that build on the npm…
A continuation of An update on Robust Client-Side JavaScript – Where is client-side JavaScript heading? The Great Divide is now a Great War JavaScript critics are effing mad right now. For well-documented reasons. And they do not mince matters any longer. The web development community has never been so divided. The Great Divide is now a Great War. Critics mostly talk to their kind on Mastodon…
In 2017, I published the online book Robust Client-Side JavaScript – A Developer’s Guide . More than five years later, I think my advice is still valuable. JavaScript as a language has not changed much when it come to techniques for writing robust code. At the moment I do not have the time for a substantial book update. In this post, I would like to describe how I regard the whole issue today and…