A blog about web development, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web accessibility.

Day 2: logical properties

Logical properties are a new way of working with directions and dimensions, one that allows you to control layout through logical, rather than physical mappings. This is especially useful, if you’re dealing with websites that are presented in different languages and writing modes, like right-to-left.

100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS

It’s time to get me up to speed with modern CSS. There’s so much new in CSS that I know too little about. To change that I’ve started #100DaysOfMoreOrLessModernCSS. Why more or less modern CSS? Because some topics will be about cutting-edge features, while other stuff has been around for quite a while already, but I just have little to no experience with it.

Day 1: custom properties and fallbacks

You can pass a second value to the var() CSS function which acts as a fallback for when the property has not been set.

Buttons and the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon

Shortly after we got our new car, a Volkswagen T5, I noticed many people seemed to have the same car. Actually, it was everywhere.

Parents counting children in CSS

The other day I was driving home when suddenly it hit me: We can use :has() to determine how many children a parent element has.

outline is your friend

If you open a plain HTML document with no CSS and you focus an interactive element like a button, link, or textarea, you’ll see that by default browsers use the outline property to highlight these elements.

Analyzing pages in a particular state with Lighthouse

Historically, Lighthouse has analyzed the cold pageload of a page only. Clicking the “Generate report” button reloads the page before Lighthouse runs its tests. This can be problematic when you want to run tests on parts of the UI that are only visible when the user interacts with it. For example, a fly-out navigation, a modal window, or the content in a disclosure widget.

Divs are bad!

Yes, clickbait, I’m so sorry! Of course, divs are not bad. For example, they can be really useful,…

  • …when you need additional elements for styling.
  • …for structuring content, when there’s no other suitable element.
  • …when you need custom landmarks.

Even though there’s nothing wrong with the div per se, some people, including me, still like to complain when they’re not used consciously.

Please, stop disabling zoom

I know that you’re not supposed to tell people what to do, but in this particular case I’m really tempted because recently I’ve noticed that a lot of websites are preventing users on mobile to zoom.

Bonn Meetup 7: Introduction to web accessibility and deceitful Lighthouse scores

This week I’ll be speaking at the Bonn Code Meetup about accessibility testing. I’m joining Konstantin Tieber who’ll talk about the What, Why, Who and How of building accessible web applications. I’ll show you how I built “The Most Inaccessible Site Possible With A Perfect Lighthouse Score”.