Posts Tagged ‘html’

How I refactored CSS when redesigning a website iteratively

28th April 2019

Nowadays it’s thankfully common that any backend redesign of a system, website or service is done iteratively, bit by bit. I often hear that that cannot be done with the frontend, that redesigning the look of a website always means you have to do a so-called “Big Bang release“, the very risky practice of releasing all relevant changes in one go after months of working on it.
I can prove that this is not true, because I’ve done two iterative redesigns of a website twice in my last job.

When I was rewriting and redesigning most of Zopa’s website iteratively in 2013, I used a specific method to refactor the CSS. When trying to explain how I did that, I found it’s easiest to explain its principles by showing what I did in a simplified version.
Here is that simplified version.

(Note: This blog post was hiding in my drafts folder for a couple of years. Nowadays it is best practice to use encapsulated components to achieve something similar.)

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Pure CSS image lightboxes

13th May 2016

I don’t like using JavaScript unnecessarily. That’s why I love pure CSS solutions. As browsers are getting better and better at implementing CSS3 features, pure CSS solutions are getting slicker and more production-ready.

One of the few pure CSS solutions I built recently was a pure CSS lightbox. I built my solution first and then looked at the tens of other solutions out there to compare and check if I missed anything important.

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The trouble with HTML and CSS skills

15th November 2012

When talking to recruitment agents, I very often hear that having “just” HTML and CSS skills is no big deal as everyone is good at those. That’s probably because they hear and read so many times from web developers that they are really good at them. So, they think those skills are not very valuable.

But the truth is, while many developers say they have good HTML and CSS skills, most of them really haven’t. The problem is that the languages themselves are very easy (so, they might not be really lying as such). But applying them to real world projects isn’t easy at all. You could also say it’s the distinction between “CSS, the language” and “CSS, the skill”.
If it was easy, why is the quality of at least 90% of the web so crap? While working with other developers I have found that the vast majority (at least about 90%) of them are overestimating their HTML and CSS skills by far.

During the over 10 years of working in this business, I have worked with roughly 100 other web developers. And out of those only five were good enough in HTML and CSS so that I would rate them 4 or 5 (out of 5).

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Error reporting for HTML

5th August 2012

Never heard of error reporting for HTML? Well, me neither, but I plan to use it soon…
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CSS Playing Cards

23rd August 2010

Some days ago a friend of mine told me that he would be interested in using pure CSS playing cards for a personal project. A few people have tried CSS playing cards before. But I wasn’t satisfied with any of our findings, as ideally they should be semantic, accessible and scalable, they shouldn’t use more markup than necessary and should be pleasing to the eye. So, I was up for the challenge and created them myself …
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