Category: Geek

  • Scope donuts

    Note: This article is esoteric-could-be-should-be wishing for future browsers. If you only like to hear about what you can use right now, you won’t like this. You’ve been warned. 😉 At first, when the HTML5 working group added the scope attribute I was skeptical. I thought, “oh dear, this is going to be another way…

  • Don’t Style Headings Using HTML5 Sections

    Styling headings is either a deceptively complex problem, or maybe the design of CSS made it appear complex when it need not have done. When styling headings (or really anything) we want three big goals to be met: DRY – Do not repeat yourself. We want to set headings once and never (ok, rarely!) repeat…

  • CSS Lint open sourced

    Nicholas Zakas and I spoke at Velocity a few minutes ago. First we talked about CSS 3 and it’s impact on performance, then we demoed and open sourced CSS Lint! I really couldn’t be more excited (or relieved, I was super duper nervous before this presentation). CSS Lint is a tool to help point out…

  • Welcoming Nicholas Zakas to the Team

    I am so very pleased to announce that Nicholas Zakas and I are joining forces to form a consulting duo. Nicholas has spent the last five years defining what it meant to to be a client-side engineer at Yahoo!. He consistently raised the client-side glass ceiling with his commitment to good code and practical solutions.…

  • Our (CSS) Best Practices Are Killing US

    Our (CSS) Best Practices Are Killing US

    I was prepping to speak at Webstock this year when I realized I didn’t want to give the talk I had proposed. I didn’t want to talk about the Mistakes of Massive CSS, because I realized it went deeper than that. In fact, in most cases, the things we considered best practices were leading to…

  • Automating CSS 3 Gradients

    CSS 3 is full of ways to reduce our dependence on background images, one of which is pure CSS gradients. They have several features, which I’m sure designers are salivating over, like multiple color stops, and angled, radial, and linear gradients. Many people had built cool designer-focused tools to make interacting with a somewhat confusing…

  • Performance Double Whammy Hits New Zealand at Webstock

    Interested in Performance and scaling sites to a large number of visitors or pages? I just realized both Steve Souders and I will be giving talks at Webstock next week! This is a pretty amazing opportunity to massively increase your Performance mojo in one go. 🙂 I’m going to be hosting a workshop in which…

  • Grids improve site performance

    CSS grids can improve performance? How so? The Importance of Page Weight The weightier your page the slower the user experience. There are a few notable ways you can ease this correlation, but for the most part keeping your pages snappy is about being absolutely relentless when reducing and optimizing code. CSS is no exception.…

  • The hacktastic zoom fix

    Everyone keeps asking me what is with all the “x” in the OOCSS grids… so I finally wrote an article. The short answer is that it isn’t just a clearfix (it does that too), but it also causes the element to stretch wide, even when it has very little content. It is a bit of…

  • Woman in technology

    Usually I avoid topics like women in technology because (1) it is a can of worms, and (2) I can really only speak for myself. For the most part, I’d rather be seen as a person in technology than a woman, but this weekend the twitterverse erupted with opinions about Google sponsoring female students to…