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When creating software, ensure there are working harnesses for testing, installation, and upgrade first.

Routing HTTP requests is now fairly straightforward in JavaScript thanks to the URL Pattern API. That’s useful both in a browser context (e.g. for service workers) and on the server side with WinterCG-compatible runtimes.

If you’re forced to use Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange infrastructure or erroneously employed IMAP, you might need an exit strategy.

If you want to be remote, learn to be literate. If you want your team to support remote workers, make time for literature.

In order to avoid memory leaks and prevent subtle bugs, we typically need to remove event listeners when the respective DOM element disappears. Except the browser already takes care of this for descendants.

CSS allows for arbitrary shapes these days. Getting the details right turns out to be a little challenging.

Turns out the HTML parser and DOM APIs don’t always agree on semantic constraints.

The cascade is what makes CSS powerful and special. And yet, sometimes we want to limit that power for containment purposes.

Every so often I create another local web application, for myself or others – mostly because not relying on a server seems more sustainable and eternally trustworthy, especially for personal, single-purpose projects. Sometimes all you want to rely on is a web browser.

Purveyors of software must exercise reasonable care to guard against decontextualization of architectural choices.

JavaScript bundles don’t need to be monolithic, even without surrendering control to inscrutable algorithms. Here’s an approach for explicitly sharing code between multiple bundles.

Constructable Style Sheets are useful to inject and control styles via JavaScript.

As we’ve learned from the brouhaha around Svelte’s use of TypeScript, JSDoc makes it possible to write plain JavaScript while getting the benefits of static typing.

There are many options these days for securely sharing sensitive data, but they typically require some kind of shared infrastructure. Sometimes all you can rely on is the web.

Every once in a while, I need to turn HTML strings into DOM nodes. The mechanisms for doing so are less than obvious and nuanced.

Reading about Excalidraw’s end-to-end encryption a while back piqued my interest: Given my TiddlyWiki background, the idea of using a server to exchange sensitive data without exposing details to anyone else seemed compelling.

View transitions are excellent, but might block concurrent animations as well as interactions while transitioning.

Having been roped into dealing with the excesses of RxJS lately, I’d been wondering about Angular folks’ excitement about signals. So I finally sat down in an effort to understand the furor.

npm is slow, unwieldy and unsafe. Deno can now serve as a drop-in replacement for front-end development environments.

being sent to the dictionary is a gift

Allowing users to tinker in private is essential to enabling creativity.

Browsers begin rendering HTML even before the document has been fully downloaded, which can greatly improve perceived performance. Servers can support such progressive rendering by emitting partial HTML chunks as soon as possible.

At face value, An Approach to Lazy Loading Custom Elements appears to propose a solution for on-demand loading of web components. It’s actually subtle propaganda for custom elements.

Sometimes I need to generate HTML without relying on external dependencies.

After years of advocating transclusion as a simple and effective integration mechanism, we’ve identified patterns and pitfalls worth considering.

In ruminations on how async-first communication could and should work within a rapdily growing team, I had concluded that unidirectional broadcasting of significant developments can provide tremendous value, if done well.

The data: URI scheme is an underappreciated trick for virtual files.

After repeatedly teaching the basics of HTTP caching in an ad-hoc fashion, I decided it was worth briefly summarizing the fundamental mechanisms.

happy to help – it’s simple math: I spend 5 min. to save you 60

in the grand scheme of things, we just cheated god

This is a write-up of the “Progressive Web Components” presentation at GOTO Berlin.

Bugs are an opportunity for the community to reveal itself.

Discussing isomorphic JavaScript at dotJS, I questioned the value of client-side templating – and was confronted once again with the “but … JSON is faster!?” assertion.