Links are what connect online content – they’re everywhere. Since they’re so common, their design and functionality often go unnoticed, especially when it comes to external links. But, as you’ll learn, it’s actually an important design decision. External links go to pages on different websites. For…

10 Comments In response to Crystal Scott. Crystal, that indeed sounds like a challenge. My only experience with Webflow and Big Commerce is that they are de facto accessibility barriers as platforms. However, I have no idea if the scenario you pose is genuinely intrusive, is configurable, is itself…

The Green Web Foundation has recently redesigned their green web hosting directory. Previously the directory was a useful resource for finding hosting platforms that at least claim some sustainable credentials but, as I’ve noted before the information provided by each web host was somewhat limited.…

Because I love Web Components so much, today, I thought we’d build an HTML Web Component from scratch. Let’s build a component that shows and hides text when a button is toggled. Let’s dig in! If you’

This blog uses static site generator Eleventy (or 11ty. I have no idea which one is the “official” spelling, and the docs appear to delight in switching gratuitously between the two! Let’s go with “El

I want to see more developers experiment with how they build their websites! Don’t just npm install a blackhole. Roll your own personal solution. It’s fun and rewarding! Where it Started My website is

Hi All! 🤗 In the last issue, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of persona

When to use CSS text-wrap: balance; vs text-wrap: pretty; At the start of the year I had written about how I wanted to spend this year writing about new CSS features landing in browsers. Life happened

I used to leave pull request descriptions empty. "Let the code speak for itself" or "let the commits speak for themselves" are the perfect getaway from the extra work of documenting your thought process. Recently, I've experienced that spending time on a good description is a worthwhile investment.…

GoMakeThings.com has been my home on the web for over 12 years. When I first started publishing here, I had an HR blog (I was an HR professional at the time), and wanted a place to just share cool, fu

Updated September 29, 2025, originally posted July 25, 2023; TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns. Test Details The first four examples are lifted from WHATWG HTML’s entry. The next three…

Dave and I just had Brad on ShopTalk Show to talk about his idea for a Global Design System . I love Brad’s optimism on all this. From Brad’s perspective, he’s seen, and helped build, the same set of

Homepage Contact RSS Feed Styles Tuesday 6 Feb 2024 Now that I’m in my 15th year of blogging it’s past time I spruced up my RSS feed . I’ve also launched a new bookmark blog . Perfect time to revisit

CSS! CSS! CSS! posted on 11.06.2023 I just came home after three beautiful days in Amsterdam, where I gave a talk at the CSS Day conference. I’ve watched many inspirational and engaging presentations

Jun 29, 2023 What’s The Perfect Design Process? About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬ Email Newsletter Weekly tips on front-end & UX.Trusted by 182,000+…

6 August 2023 There’s a new form design trend going around: Buttons inside inputs. Anthony Hobday mentioned it by asking his audience if there was any significant difference in usability between these 3 designs: 3 different layouts for an input and button combination Button inside the input Button…

Join the 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good (it’s an 11ty Conference) January 30, 2024 Originally: https://conf.11ty.dev/ In May 2024 (this year!) we’ll gather together our ext

Our industry loves Swiss Army Knives. The tools we tend to gravitate towards are ones that do all the things . They’re packed with features. I get the appeal, but I also think this tendency is harmful

the article element and screen readers posted on 04.07.2023 I wanted to know how and if common screen readers expose the element. Here are my results: Summary tl;dr: shit's complicated. Some screen readers don't announce articles and have no default quick nav shortcuts. Some don't announce them but…

the details element and in-page search posted on 30.06.2023 An important factor in terms of UX and accessibility for deciding whether the element is the right solution for a problem is the find-in-page behaviour. In Chromium-based browsers, the details element automatically opens when it contains a…

I turned off the Plausible analytics for this site. I used to use analytics mostly to look for links back to my site from other creators. When I had so little traffic, I could traipse through the data

It was nice to see Rach talk about stripping out analytics . I stripped out my analytics years ago and while I thought I wrote about it, I can’t find where I did so. My apologies if I’m repeating myse

Let’s take a look at the CSS text-wrap property and how we can use it to improve the way text flows on a web page. We can use text-wrap: balance to tell the browser to equalize (as much as it can) mul

I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work first, showing there is interest, then pushing to get it standardized. But Coil failed. When we started…

One of my favourite sessions at All Day Hey conference last month was Jack Franklin’s talk Abstractions, complexities and off-ramps . As web applications grow larger, they inevitably fall prey to comp

Popovers are commonly positioned relative to their invoker (if they have one). When we use the popover attribute , anchoring is tricky, as these popovers are in the top layer, away from the context of

Have you heard about #CSS @scope? It’s an upcoming way to scope the reach of your CSS selectors, allowing you to move away from methodologies such as BEM because you no longer need to name those in-be

9 July 2023 Since 2016 I’ve used, created and contributed to multiple design systems. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. By “doesn’t” I mean designers don’t trust it. And as a result they don’t use it. When I’m feeling sassy, I call these people ‘cowboy designers’. Now there are some designers…

Daily Tips In yesterday’s article on loading HTML from another page, I talked about progressively enhancing a link into a button. Let’s imagine you have a dialog modal that loads some HTML. You might keep all that HTML in a separate file, and by default display a link to it. When your JS loads, you…

Better form UX with the CSS property `field-sizing` Published on 23 Jan 2024 One of the more painful experiences I've encountered on the web is filling out a form input that is fixed width. Whatever I've typed becomes cutoff and I can't actually see what I've typed or am typing. On desktop, I…

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a metric that reflects how quickly a browser can connect and download data from your servers. By tracking TTFB timings across your site, you can detect any slowdowns or issues with your servers that negatively affect your performance. TTFB may not be a Core Web Vital,…

Thanks to the Scroll-Driven Animations Level 1 Specification it is now possible to drive CSS/WAAPI animations by scroll . Not included in that spec are Scroll-Triggered Animations: animations that run