Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”.
This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.
The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!
All twelve are out, and all twelve are excellent deep dives into exciting web technologies landing in browsers now.
This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!
New from Mr. Vanilla JS himself, Chris Ferdinandi:
A learning space for people who hate the complexity of modern web development.
It’ll be $29 a month or $299 a year (giving you two months worth for free).
I’d recommend going in the order HTML, CSS, JS. That way, you can build something in HTML, add CSS to it as you learn it, and finally soup it up with your new-found JS knowledge.
Excellent advice for anyone new to web develoment.
Once you start getting into interactive website territory, with API calls and fancy stuff, that’s where you need JavaScript (JS) knowledge. More specifically, vanilla JS: plain JS with no additional frameworks or plugins. The JS that your browser understands without having to do any pre-processing. It makes working with frameworks a whole lot easier, and it’ll help you to know when not to use a framework (and avoid making users download massive JS bundles when all you need is a tiny bit of code).
I like the split-screen animated format for explaining this topic.
This is a great tutorial—I just love the interactive parts that really help make things click.
A very handy collection of organised notes on all things JavaScript.
In a break with Betteridge’s law, I think the answer here is “yes.”
This is a great (free!) course on learning CSS from the basics up. Nicely-pitched explanations with plenty of examples.
I don’t think I agree with Don Knuth’s argument here from a 2014 lecture, but I do like how he sets out his table:
Why do I, as a scientist, get so much out of reading the history of science? Let me count the ways:
- To understand the process of discovery—not so much what was discovered, but how it was discovered.
- To understand the process of failure.
- To celebrate the contributions of many cultures.
- Telling historical stories is the best way to teach.
- To learn how to cope with life.
- To become more familiar with the world, and to know how science fits into the overall history of mankind.
This is a truly wonderful web page! It’s an explanation from first principles of how cameras and lenses work.
At its most basic, it uses words which you can read in any browser. It also uses images so if your browser supports images, you get that enhancement. And it uses interactive JavaScript widgets so that you get that layer of richness if your browser supports the technology.
Then you realise that every post ever published on this personal site is equally in-depth and uses the same content-first progressive enhancement approach.
This is a nifty visual interactive explainer for the language of CSS—could be very handy for Codebar students.
Having your independent blog is an excellent way to share what you think in a decentralized way, independent of any major company that may add a paywall to it (Medium, I am looking at you).
An excellent and clear explanation of specificity in CSS.
A really great one-page guide to HTML from Bruce. I like his performance-focused intro:
If your site is based on good HTML, it will load fast. Browsers incrementally render HTML—that is, they will display a partially downloaded web page to the user while the browser awaits the remaining files from the server.
Modern fashionable development techniques, such as React, require a lot of JavaScript to be sent to the user. When it’s all downloaded, the user’s device must parse and execute the JavaScript before it can even start to construct the page. On a slow network, or on a cheaper, low-powered device, this can result in an excruciatingly slow load and is a heavy drain on the battery.
When I challenge the idea of topics—especially when I suggest writing about a design topic—the “I don’t know what to write about” excuse goes to level two: Someone has already written about [design topic]. And that might be true, but by Great Gutenberg’s Ghost, if that was a hard requirement for publishing, we’d have one newspaper, a few magazines, and maybe a thousand books. Hollywood would be a ghost town because we got to the end of all of the movie tropes by 1989. We’d have seventy-five songs with lyrics, but re-recorded in every music style and everyone would still hate Yanni. The point is you can’t let the people who have come before you be the excuse to stop you from writing or, frankly, creating.
A great explanation of the curse of knowledge …with science!
(This, by the way, is the first of 100 blog posts that Matthias is writing in 100 days.)