The Best "Hello World" in Web Development

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...

A couple months ago I was sitting next to Ivy Wong and I saw them working on a dropdown menu so cute that I immediately asked how they did it. It looked something like this: ul.base { list-style-type: none; margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; width: fit-content; } .base li { background-color: bisque; border: 2px black solid; margin: 5px...

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...