A collection of thoughts, experiences, ideas that I like, and ideas that I have been experimenting with over the last year. It covers HTML semantics, components and approaches to front-end architecture, class naming patterns, and HTTP compression.

General CSS notes, advice and guidelines

Yeah, yeah. You’re agile. You always test first, you work in tight iterations, you have YAGNI tattooed on your forehead. Good for you. Guess what? You’re building on sand. Do this stuff first:

When writing code that will be used by others (and we do that 100% of the time, even if the other user is ourselves in a few weeks time), there’s a tricky balance to strike between being generous to the users of our code, and ensuring that they get the information they want to ensure they’re calling our code correctly. There are two coding maxims: “Be generous on input, and strict on output”, and “fail fast”, which we need to hold in tension. This post explores the trade-offs between the two.

This little book is to aid a shared understanding of front-end development best practice at PUP.

It's to help us deliver high quality content that works better, reaches more people - not only in today's browsers & devices, but in tomorrows.

The recent hubbub about Delicious got me thinking about bookmarking in general, and brought to mind a long-standing irritation: poorly designed web page titles.

I've worked on several large Rails apps and seen at least a dozen javascript systems. In this post I'll describe a few techniques that I've seen that consistently make javascript easier to test and maintain. To those of you who write javascript more than I do, these might be old news, but it's taken me 4 years to learn them!

jQuery’s $(document).ready() event is something that you probably learned about in your earliest exposure to jQuery and then rarely thought about again. The way it abstracts away DOM timing issues is like a warm security blanket for code running in a variety of cold, harsh browser windows.