19½ things you didn’t know about accessibility in HTML and CSS by @matuzo
"If you’ve been to a conference before, I assume you’ve also watched a talk about accessibility, and I imagine you learned how to describe images properly or structure your pages using headings. That’s important to know, but I feel like I’m in front of an educated, informed crowd, and I don’t want to repeat the basics."
It's a really bad pattern to have a rollover on something that has no interaction, right? In this case, it's a value prop (heading + description) that moves up a few pixels and outlines, but there's no actual link/button/interactivity.
Gonna push back on it, because this can't be good usability...right??
Recent Improvements in #WebDevelopment
Everyone is feeling how dire our industry is right now with AI decimating our jobs and an influx of bloated libraries and frameworks – making us wonder if we’ll all still be here in five years. But it’s not all bad news, and I’d love to bring some of the good stuff back into the light.
https://amberweinberg.com/recent-improvements-in-web-development/
#frontend #webdev #html #accessibility #a11y #css #js #javascript
I love that everyone who’s replied to this so far, has replied with technologies or tools that I’ve either never used or heard of before, even though I’ve been a dev since the 90’s. Our industry is so vast and varied, I love that there’s something for everyone.
With all the bad stuff going on, I decided to write a post about the good bits in web development right now, what are some of the things you think has gotten better in the past couple of years?
RE: https://sfba.social/@drahardja/117136649933380203
Same - if I notice an AI image in your social post, I'll keep scrolling.
Biggest pet peeve in the world is when someone comes to me and tells me they know that I’m more well-versed or educated in a topic and proceeds to ask me to explain said topic but then when I do, all they want is to argue with me about it because it doesn’t match their personal view.
Why did you ask me if you weren’t ready to learn? I don’t know what else you want from me. 🤷🏼♀️
OOOooo this one get extra points for the unique article design:
what happened to the #frontend
"Two decades, forty-four meters of build tools, and one very confused <button> later, here's the whole story. Spare twenty minutes; I'll get you up to speed...In 2008 you saved a file called index.html, dragged it onto an FTP client, and watched a little progress bar crawl to the right. When it finished, your website existed..."
https://davidpoblador.com/deep-dives/what-happened-to-the-frontend/
First project in 20 years where the designer gave me :active and :visited states - and I'm ashamed to say this is also the first time in 20 years I've added them.
Best new client feedback *ever*:
"We're very pleased with both the front end and back end of the build. We especially appreciate your attention to detail, communication, and the thoughtful implementation of design/functional elements throughout, which did a great job bridging the gap between our original design files and the live website. The back end also feels very clean, modular, and aligned with the scalable, sustainable development practices we've come to value from our partners."
Ya’ll have proven to me today that I need to share more of my handicrafts lol.
In addition to knitting, also do embroidery, cross-stitch, and crochet. But any craft is fun to me.
Here are some of the latest things I’ve made!
This one took me three whole months to knit, so ya'll get to hear about it now :awesome:
"This is a simple background animation as the map itself has no interactive elements. The client wanted the map to load in first, then the pins, then have the lines draw the animation from pin to pin."
"CSS is also more fault-tolerant than JavaScript. This means the entire experience won’t be ruined if something conspires to affect your website or web app loading properly.
Content will be shown if CSS experiences an issue being applied. While it won’t look the way you want it to, it will still be readable by the people requesting it. And that’s the important bit."
Making content-aware components using #CSS :has(), grid, and quantity queries by @eric https://piccalil.li/blog/making-content-aware-components-using-css-has-grid-and-quantity-queries/
"The <select> dropdown field has been the bane of many a designer and developer...we’ve never been able to really style the dropdown itself. Many people turn to third party #JS replacement solutions, like the Select2 library. Unfortunately, these are not very #accessible and introduce a ton of issues and bugs, as well as yet another heavy JS library dependency..."
Why am I still seeing so many job ads for #Elementor sites?? #Gutenberg is bad enough, but at least it's native to #WordPress now and does the same thing.
Better yet though, stop using all of these heavy buggy drag-n-drop solutions that output junk code.
#ACF Flexible Layouts a good middle ground. Flexible enough to allow the client customization w/o breaking design guidelines, no junk code output or buggy admin, a bit of customization makes it even easier to use.
I hate to say I’m desperate, but I haven’t had work in *months*. If anyone’s looking for a #freelance senior #wordpress #developer, please keep me in mind. I do full, custom theme builds, specialize in #accessibility and #semantic code, and am a great communicator about time estimates and budgets! My full portfolio is www.amberweinberg.com
If you don’t have any work, I would appreciate a boost 😊
#frontend #frontendDeveloper #development #WPJobs #needwork #hireme #hire #getfedihired
Great post by @anildash
Endgame for the Open Web
"Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system."
AI Prototyping: Harder. Worser. Faster. Wronger. by @annaecook
"But what you get is often a lot of output with very little attention to detail or quality. The details are often inaccurate or misleading and not in minor ways. They’re distracting in studies and with stakeholders, and worse, they can steer a concept in the wrong direction all the way into production."
https://annaecook.com/writing/2026/ai-prototyping-harder-worser-faster-wronger
I try to keep themes lightweight - only use a few plugins, use plain CSS and vanilla JS for animations, and use PHP for functionality. Having turned Gutenberg off also makes the admin so much faster.
I left the call wondering if web development has left me behind and do I need to retire after 28 years of loving the front end.
My brain doesn't seem wired to grok functional JS programming.