So many JavaScript examples I see in articles are the opposite of how I go about solving problems. They all seem to carbon-copy bloated, slow, and inefficient techniques that are rooted in a “brute force” mentality.

I caught myself doing that about a decade ago. What really turned the corner for me was I stopped following tutorials and started reading actual references and specifications. So many things people are actually doing “the hard way” and don’t even realize it as it’s the only way they know.

Things such as:

1. If you’re doing stuff during the page load it’s often easier—…

I’ve seen a lot of articles and posts on this the past couple years, and it is indeed a very handy thing to have. Still, too many implementations have gaping flaws, crippling implementations, etc, etc.

The overall concept is sound: Use HTML 5 properties to restrict what can be sent to the server, and then enhance it with Javascript to restrict what the user can even type into it in the first place.

So let’s go through the issues, and implement this better.

Issue #1, Bad Scripting

The most common flaw is a lack of graceful degradation “scripting off”. Whilst that’s fine if you’re…

I am oft disturbed at how people can claim to know accessibility, and then claim that somehow, magically, these systems of client-side scripting based rendering meets accessibility minimums.

I’ve been programming for four decades, and working as an accessibility and efficiency consultant for ten years, and let me tell you something. If your page does not have scripting off graceful degradation — a big fancy way of saying “if JavaScript is blocked/unavailable your page still works” — then it does NOT meet accessibility minimums. …

For some time we’ve heard anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters, Libertarians, and others complaining about how their “rights” are being violated. The loudest of which seems be those incapable of social virtues; much less describe what rights are, why they are important, and more importantly where they end.

Rights are not carte-blanche to run around like a greedy narcissistic sociopath, no matter how hot and trendy that behavior is in society at the moment.

The simple fact is that most of those screaming loudest about their “rights” in American society have no clue what they’re talking about.

What Actually Are “Rights”?

The dictionary definition always left…

CODEX

The majority of people are “visually oriented”. They like to think about how things look before most other concerns. When it comes to web development this is a hard “habit” to break oneself of, but it’s an essential one given that HTML is for more than just perfectly sighted users. It’s why bass-ackward nonsense like artists under the DELUSION they’re “designers” pushing pixels around in Photoshop are able to sucker nubes and rubes alike, flipping the bird at UX and accessibility in their ignorance of anything other than art. …

Over the past decade the improvements to CSS have transformed how websites are built, mostly for the better. One of the most powerful of these has been the CSS transition, allowing us to make animations without the slew of JavaScript we threw at sites in the past.

Yet frustratingly the one transition that’s hard to do is between “0” and “Auto” values. The automatic size calculation — sizing to the content — simply isn’t something browser makers seem to be willing to even consider implementing.

This makes show/hide animations of all sorts a lot harder than need be. I’ve seen…

In my voyages from company to company as a freelance accessibility and efficiency consultant, I am constantly butting heads with web developers who have some genuinely queer notions of what semantic markup is and isn’t. From those saying “Isn’t that just for SEO?” to “It really doesn’t matter”, to “Well that’s just for coders to look at”, there’s a lot of disinformation, misunderstandings, and just plain lies out there.

To put it as plainly and succinctly as possible:

Semantic markup is nothing more than a sick euphemism for “Using HTML properly!”

Semantic markup is the reason HTML existed from the…

I want to like BEM — Block, Element, Modifier — I really do! Any time someone comes up with a uniform consistent naming scheme, I’m usually all-in… BUT… when it comes right down to it how it works and what it does defeats most if not all of why HTML exists and why CSS is separate from it.

It reeks of people too stupid to understand the simplicity of selectors, combinators, and proper semantics trying to just slop classes everywhere to fix their own ineptitude; when really if using combinators and the proper markup is “so hard” you need this…