The Messy Pile

After skirting around the topic for a year, I’m ready to write about web components. Before I do that though, I want to show you what I believe is the ideal user experience for web components. Fortunately, it’s a user experience that exists today, and you can already use it. script src="/footnotes.js" defer>script> h2>Contenth2> p> This is a...

iframe { display: block; margin: 10px auto; } My UtahJS talk, "Building the Hundred-Year Web Service", was put online this week! It's about how to build software infrastructure that lasts a very long time. If you're not a software engineer (very unlikely that you're reading this blog if so, but it's possible) the first 11 minutes of the talk...

It's been two years since I wrote my first production webservice with htmx. Two years is not a very long time, but early indicators suggest that the software projects I've written with htmx are a much better experience for users, and orders of magnitude easier to maintain, than the software projects they replaced. They are likely to remain useful...

While I'm not going to settle the Single-Page Web Application (SPA) debate in a blog post, there is one claim about SPAs that routinely goes unchallenged, and it drives me nuts: that users prefer them because of the "modern," responsive feel. SPAs achieve their signature feel using partial page replacement: adding or removing DOM elements instead...

iframe { display: block; margin: 10px auto; } This past weekend, I gave a talk entitled "The Life & Death of htmx" at Big Sky Dev Con. Summary The thesis of the talk is that, with 30 years of real-world usage evidence, we have a clear understanding of HTML's limitations as hypertext, and with just three small additions to HTML, we can address...