Highlighting in CSS has been beneficial for applying a highlight on specific text or text fragments during user selection, emphasizing a piece of information on a website, or visually emphasizing a text for the sake of branding. Particularly, this is pretty helpful when users wan … | Continue reading

We're getting close to the last part of iteration one — the skeletal build of the site. Good! I'm getting eager to get on with the design work now. For some reason, doing this series (along with being busy in general) has stifled my ability to think creatively about my site. I g … | Continue reading

Communication can be difficult. Not only when we humans try to communicate with one another, but also in web development. While it is easy for sighted people with full mental and motor abilities to click a button with a mouse to display more information, users of Assistive Techno … | Continue reading

FYI I'm Mat, author of Piccalilli's very own [JavaScript for Everyone](https://piccalil.li/javascript-for-everyone), a course designed to help you make the jump from junior- to senior developer. As ever, I'm here to teach you JavaScript — not just the _what_, but the _how_ and th … | Continue reading

Fixing full-bleed CSS A rather deep dive into how some of the newer CSS can make this age old pattern even better. Where’s the holistic AI productivity data? It’s hard to find anything other than anecdata from individuals telling us how AI has made them individually more product … | Continue reading

We're picking up some good momentum, so let's keep the flow going. After integrating WordPress to power the blog section, it's now time to integrate a new feature of this website: AT Protocol posts. I could go all in at this point and integrate posts, comments, interactions and c … | Continue reading

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky. If you are wondering what 'lexicons' and 'the Atmosphere' are, don't fret. This article will explain what they mean, why you should ca … | Continue reading

It doesn’t matter if it works An extremely good and important read. LLMs and performative productivity A rather detailed post that links out to some really interesting studies too. When to use (and not use) CSS shorthand properties As I see it, margin, padding and border are safe … | Continue reading

Just as with every aspect of my life, I find it hard to identify my software development skills. At my heart, I am a developer, though I spent way too much time as a high school senior fretting about whether or not I’d become an engineer. On paper, my job title has been product o … | Continue reading

The ::checkmark pseudo-element was introduced in CSS Form Control Styling Module Level 1 and it’s a powerful CSS feature to say the least. I even wrote about it as an almanac entry for CSS-Tricks in 2025 to share what this pseudo-element can do. The CSS ::checkmark pseudo-element … | Continue reading

A quick note before we get into things: this is a practical guide that covers managing, building and packaging design system components. It’s impossible to go into thorough detail at every step of the way without this becoming a full course. Some basic knowledge is assumed: A ba … | Continue reading

Before we get into this issue, I thought I'd just let you know that Scott has launched a free Mindful Design Toolkit, packed with good stuff for you. Polypane snippets store Polypane is already the best development browser in the business and these new snippets make it even bette … | Continue reading

Fraude Design Why slop it when you can Fraude it? heerich.js A really nice tool for generating 3D voxel scenes with fantastic documentation and examples. Searching for birds So much good stuff in this piece. It's so refreshing to see this sort of thing without scroll-jacking too. … | Continue reading

Delivering a dynamic hexagonal world map in just 10kb The is really impressive stuff from the speed experts at Calibre. The importance of people who care Tech is full of people who care deeply about their area of chosen specialism, and we’re all struggling in a world where doing … | Continue reading

I’ve been waiting for fourteen years to write this article. Fourteen years to tell you about one relatively new addition to the way images work on the web. For you, just a handful of characters will mean improvements to the fundamental ergonomics of working with images. For users … | Continue reading

Let's work out what I need to account for here by referring back to our existing page audit. I need to account for the following: Post listings, limited by a defined items per page Pagination to render each page of post listings The actual blog items themselves With those, I'd … | Continue reading

Planning is now done, so now it's time to get stuck into a basic version of my website. It's important to do this part well because even though the UI is incredibly temporary, the system behind it is not, so we want to make sure our foundations are solid. I say a HTML-only build … | Continue reading

News of RSS' death following the demise of Google Reader has been greatly exaggerated. RSS is alive, well, and as omnipresent as ever. You aren't properly publishing content on the web if you aren't also publishing in syndication formats. This is a general guide designed to help … | Continue reading

Accessibility had never really played a significant role since I started working as a front-end developer in 2019. It didn’t have a significant role in my boot camp, or in YouTube tutorials I watched, and certainly not in my job. At some point I got very invested in accessibility … | Continue reading

SVG favicons that respect theme preference A handy approach here! It'd be useful if browsers had a queryable value for the colour of the UI too so developers could serve an appropriate favicon. Designing for people with anxiety This is absolutely packed with great knowledge. Try … | Continue reading

To add to the container query options that we already have (size queries, style queries, scroll-state queries), as well as the container query range syntax and many upgrades to all of the above, we can now use anchored container queries from Chrome 143. Chrome’s announcement post … | Continue reading

Puzzmo Web puzzles without the corporate media slime. It looks like they're integrating nicely with the AT protocol too. How to make your first contribution to an open source project A thoroughly good explainer of how to get involved in open source. A brief history of domains Ver … | Continue reading

Back in January, I found myself longing for an accessibility-first culture and for a while, I’ve also been looking for ways to learn senior-level accessibility skills. I expected to find one of those needs, but not both, when I joined npmx on a whim. Today is the alpha release of … | Continue reading

As promised in the last one, we'll wrap up planning today. This stuff is the more fun to do though! The tools I know it's what you want to see, so let's get into what I'm using for this project. My uses is here too. Planning and organising Obsidian for tracking what needs to be … | Continue reading