Notes

Especially in my self employment, I always struggled to find a title like description for what I'm doing. And even now, as an employee I avoid to just say my official title (Product Design & UX Expert), as I feel like it's leaving out something.
Brad Frost has some really resonating thoughts on that and I totally love the mortar metaphor.

"It is a statement of intent and a call to arms, inviting you, the reader, to go forth and build humane websites, and to resist the erosion of the web we know and love."
I would sign it if I could. At least go read it!

The 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good can be viewed in full on YouTube. Definitely worth to watch.

The ingenuity of Heydon Pickering strikes again. He describes his strategy to test (mainly for accessibility) by using CSS. This brings the advantage of seeing the warnings quite prominent on your page, and also provides an easy way to check for details in the browser dev tools.
I will definitely give that approach a try.

Jakob Nielsen woke up one morning last week and chose violence. Is the beginning of this article. And it's kind of true. On February 29, Jakob Nielsen declared "Accessibility has failed" and seeks help in generative AI.
I think, if you have that much of an audience as Jakob Nielsen has, this is a quite dangerous claim. And therefor you probably shouldn't read Jakob's article, but this well thought through piece:

A great interactive tutorial for beginners or those interested in web design. But also for the more seasoned web worker it’s worth to go through that 4 minutes, as it‘s a great demonstration of a procedural enhancement mindset and that it might be a good idea to style your semantically correct HTML elements, instead of throwing classes all around.

Manuel Matuzović presents an overview of the cascade and how it's prioritization works. Probably useful for all knowledge levels.

Ana Rodrigues wrote this little post, that totally speaks from my heart. Why not just have a personal website as a profile, to be reachable. On a place you own and not some stupid social network silo. Go read it.

Federico Viticci: How I Created the Hybrid Mac-iPad Laptop and Tablet That Apple Won’t Make

It‘s a quite costly and probably dangerous endeavor to remove the screen of your MacBook and use the base as the perfect control unit in combination with your iPad and/or Vision Pro. But according to Federico it’s worth the effort, as you gain a versatile device, that lets you easily switch between iOS and macOS. I don‘t think I will try it myself, but it‘s still an interesting read.

I'm not really a fan of Tailwind. In fact, sometimes I dislike it passionately. At the end of the day, it's just inline styles and that was always a bad idea. Our framework-centric way of doing web development has led to too many people thinking that global styles are a bad thing. I kind of get it. It really does take convention and discipline to know where your style declarations end up, but the (messy) alternative is to repeat yourself over and over again, or to have utility classes that are essentially inline styling, and by mixing markup and styling make it impossible to effectively restyle anything later.
So now I also ended up in a rant when I just wanted to send you over to read that much more elaborate article.

Via: https://mastodon.social/@bastianallgeier, who wrote a much less complaining article to counterbalance the rant he shared.
The article also inspired Heydon Pickering to write a great satirical Peace on Utility Classes.

To understand where my scepticism towards Tailwind and often frameworks in general comes from, it might help to read Ste Grainer's article for A List Apart. Ste, who has a similarly long history with the web as I do, summarises the history of web design. Because only when you know what it was like and have a broad view of what it is like today can you plan where it might go.

You might have realized, I'm a big fan of 11ty, but also of markdown and it's simplicity for generating content. I also switched my note taking to Obsidian a while ago, as my notes are not locked into a proprietary cloud, but are just markdown files that are on my computer (and via iCloud files they are also on my phone, my iPad and my other computers). Actually I used this approach for a long time with first Notational Velocity, later nvALT. So after some trial phase with Apple-Notes and Notion, I happily came back to a file based note management. Jim Nielsen therefor sent me into the right direction, when he mentioned Scott Jenson's article.

I have to share bad news. Unfortunately A Book Apart will not publish new books anymore.

Anil Dash beautifully describes how podcasts, by successfully resisting large-scale monetisation, have never been completely taken over by large platforms. That's why Roman Mars can end every episode of 99% invisible with "... wherever you find podcasts". According to Anil, this is also a motivating example of how an open web can work and he draws parallels to Mastodon and others. In my eyes he has a point there.

I already told you in January about the article by Correctiv.org that revealed the evil plans of AFD and other right wing extremists and how good it felt to see thousands and thousands of people bringing their anger about that to the streets.
February started with another wave of demonstrations and also in Nuremberg there was a huge one again. This time on another place and I managed to get some astonishing pictures of the crowd.

Brad Frost argues for a Global Design System, a collection of aesthetics- and technology-agnostic common UI components. In his opinion, this could be a great resource that saves the design and development communities millions of hours of wasted time.
On reflection, at least in my eyes, this is a great idea, especially when you consider the accessibility and usability benefits.
However, given the sheer size of this task, it is unlikely to be implemented in the near future.

Stephanie Eckles teaches us some astonishing simple enhancements, you could happily use, as they are broadly supported.
It allways surprises how fast CSS progresses in the last few years, and Stephanies amazing series Modern CSS Solutions is a great resource to stay on top of these developments.

Germany finally wakes up, and makes a stand against fascism

The beginning of the year brought an investigative report by Correctiv.org about a conference of high-ranking AFD members, people from the CDU Werteunion, some Identitarians and other far-right participants.
One of the main topics was the deportation of virtually all people with a migration background, as soon as they would gain power.
This finally brought the outcry that I had hoped for so long in view of the increasing autocratic, often even fascist tendencies in Germany and ultimately the whole world.
The most satisfying result of this were demonstrations in virtually all German cities with a total of several hundred thousand participants. At least for the protests in Nuremberg I attended, I can say with satisfaction that the entire cross-section of society was represented and everyone made it clear how much we reject fascism and racism and how we will not allow our democratic freedoms to be taken away.

A kind of euphemistic title for the Verge's detailed description of how Google, with the decade long game of catch between their algorithm and SEO "experts" ruined the web for everybody.

Open Culture describes the hilarious end of The Who's performance of My Generation in The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 blew up the stage, affecting Pete Townend's hearing permanently, throwing a totaly befuddled Keith Moon off his drumstand and leaving the host stunned and overwhelmed.

I have already written a separate article about this. The whole HTMHell advent calendar is worth investing some time in, but Vasili's article deserves a special mention.

Another detailed and very interesting process is the way to the app Orion, from Lux, the people behind the great iPhone camera app Halide.

Until now I had used Pocket as a read-later service. These days, thanks to Matthias Ott, I came across Omnivore and have been using it quite enthusiastically ever since. It's simple, works great and is less cluttered than Pocket.

The temporarily discontinued open source Mastodon app Mammoth has been revived and not only does it look fantastic, it also has what I think is a very well done logo. The designer describes their process in the following article.

In the late 19th century, the then teenager Marcel Proust filled out a questionnaire for a friend. In the 1970s, the French TV presenter Bernard Pivot used it to interview a number of celebrities, including David Bowie.

Just as valuable, if not more so, than the HTMHell Advent Calendar is the collection of articles 12 days of web initiated by Stephanie Eckles.

With CSS variables, there is not too much reason for preprocessors like LESS, SCSS etc. besides it's ability to write you CSS in a nested way. I totally missed, that it's possible natively now. But it is, and obviously it's supported in all major browsers now.

I could assume you already know this site. But I didn't (or forgot) and maybe you don't, too.

It's a fun project of Max Böck that is best described by himself:

So this site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.

Browsing the whimsical web felt a lot like StumbleUpon back in the day, for me.

Set Studio set out to rebuild Dribble (and other) layouts using proper modern web techniques.

And they don't just show you the result, they show you the process.

This is not really something I bookmarked, but a topic Jeremy Keith mentioned on border:none last month.

It's an event he is hosting next March in Brighton and it's a day focused on design systems, pattern libraries, style guides and components.

I would really love to join. Brighton is not really around the corner from my place. But perhaps I still manage to attend.

In this list you'll probably find a lot of performances that are clearly not your cup of tea (is that a correct British phrase? It's the BBC, after all). But I'm absolutely confident that you'll also find many of your favorite performers.

However, there is a really high chance that this list is a dangerous opportunity to waste an incredible amount of time.

Signal's executives explain in detail why they estimate Signal's operating costs for 2025 at $50 million per year.

Why some ideas survive and others die

Made to stick is one of the better (text)books I've read last year.

The authors lay open the common things behind sticky ideas, be it in teachings, or especially marketing of any kind. They manage to stripp it down to six concepts.

What sounds a bit like a dry topic, is really well written and fun to read. So I can recommend the book to anyone in marketing, user research, journalism or similar.