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This is a post I’ve been putting off for a long time, but it really is time to make a clean break and share with y’all what my plans are and where you can go to keep the dream alive of an HTML-first, indie-friendly, “vanilla” open web. When I first launched The Spicy Web Discord in February 2021, the goal was to create a destination where people could go and talk specifically about how to build…
January 30, 2025 Addendum: I was further inspired to attempt squirclization (is that a word?!) of images in a grid of thumbnails, which you can take a look at here . What fun! ☺️ Before we get into the nitty-gritty, just what is a squircle? And how it related to a superellipse? Here’s a definition I found from this article by Olga Nikolskaya : The Superellipse is the name given to a family of…
I am very sorry to inform you, but if you are a React / TypeScript frontend engineer a few years into your career, you are ground zero for getting replaced by “AI engineers”. Mark Zuckerberg hath decreed it to be so! Big Tech is literally salivating at the idea of taking your job away and replacing it with automation at an industrial scale. Their plan seems to be to hire a bunch of low-wage prompt…
Use the Platform™ has become an amusing rallying cry which is essentially more of a philosophical argument than a technical one. Which is why I’m going to avoid virtually all technical jargon in this article, because I’m not here to refute Ryan Carniato . I’m here to tell you how much I resent we’re even having this conversation in the first place. Ready for some real talk? Good. Let’s goooooo ……
( Note: this content was originally intended for a new course in JavaScript programming, but with my course development on hold for the time being, it’s being released to the public for free. Enjoy! ) I want to preface this article with a little reminder of something which often gets overlooked in discussions like these: There’s only one web API for executing JavaScript code when a particular tag…
I’ll breeze through the marketing-speak quickly so as to get to the heart of the matter. I have a new course out, the first one for THE SPICY WEB , called CSS Nouveau . This is my very latest, up-to-date, pedal-to-the-metal thinking on how to build up a 100% vanilla CSS architecture from scratch, from design tokens to global stylesheets to encapsulated components . When people tell me “vanilla CSS…
I’ve been a part of “cults” before, whether that’s being a total Apple fanboy or a total Ruby fanboy or—perhaps more recently—a total web components fanboy. So as the seemingly never-ending debate over Tailwind CSS continues to rage on, some haters of Tailwind hurl accusations that Tailwind is a “cult” and überfans are responsible for perpetuating it. Even pro-Tailwind promoters are getting in on…
One thing I’d like to get off my chest right away. It was always possible to render custom elements on the server. Any server. Setting any “web component-y JavaScript-y” bits aside, you could always output something like this directly in your HTML : <my-custom-element> <my-custom-header><h1> Wee! </he></my-custom-header> <my-custom-button variant= "primary" ><button> A button!…
Before I give you my side of the story, I’d like to point you to Brian Rinaldi’s comprehensive take on the demise of Jamstack (or as I still prefer to call it, JAMstack) for some much-needed context on what’s been going down. He asks “is Jamstack officially finished?” and this article is essentially my reply. TL;DR: the answer is yes . As for the reason why, we must point our finger straight at…
Hello everybody! It’s been a minute since posting here, so I wanted to get you all caught up on the thrilling projects which I’ve recently launched alongside The Spicy Web . First, I’ve started a new aggregator-style link blog called That HTML Blog where I’ll be posting daily to share links to wonderful resources around the web about the world of standards-adjacent web development. Please be sure…
