Blown Away By the Unexpected

Jeremy Keith, Chris Coyier, and others (see Jeremy’s post) have written about the idea of “pace layers” and now I’m going to take a stab at applying it to user interface primitives. First, let’s start with a line of reasoning: Common user interface controls — such as checkboxes or radios — should be visually and functionally consistent. This...

John Gruber has a post about how Google’s search results now require JavaScript[1]. Why? Here’s Google: the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam Lol, the irony. Let’s turn to JavaScript for protection, as if the entire ad-based tracking/analytics world born out of JavaScript’s...

Let me tell you about one of the best feelings. You have a problem. You bang your head on it for a while. Through the banging, you formulate a string of keywords describing the problem. You put those words into a search engine. You land on a forum or a blog post and read someone else’s words containing those keywords and more. Their words...

This is a note to my future self, as I’ve setup HTML minification on a few different projects and each time I ask myself, “How did I do that again?” So here’s your guide, future Jim (and anyone else on the internet who finds this). I use html-minifier to minifiy HTML files created by my static site generator. Personally, I use the CLI tool...

A note before we start: I don’t know how much of this I believe. I’m sketching out some feelings in this post and thinking through whether it actually makes any sense. I’d be curious where other folks land on this. I’m not sure I totally understand this impulse we have on the web to override the default style and appearance of fundamental...