The HTML specification is old and, while there is beauty in longevity, there's an inevitable build-up of boondoggles and baggage. Some elements like <marquee> have sadly been consigned to the dustbin of history - but there are still vestigial attributes just waiting to trip up the unwary. If you're young, you may never have heard of Image Maps. Back in the bad-old-days, there weren't many good…
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If you're reading this, you've probably been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to parse and decipher the new HTTP Signatures sent by Mastodon and other Fediverse servers. This is a basic and somewhat incomplete guide to accepting these signatures. I'm sure there are various gotchas, but it works with the signatures I've seen in the wild. Shut Up And Show Me The Code! OK, wow, no…
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D'yer remember the eighties? The eighties, eh? Remember 'em? With the Acorn Archimedes an' that? What were we like? Remember them mags what y'got? The computer mags? Wirral the source code? Remember typin' it all in be hand? If yer semicolon were outta place y'd gerra syntax error! And you try telling that to the young people of today, will they believe yer? For those of you born this century,…
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There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a website to another. Just like an app!!!! A decade-and-a-half later, and CSS has caught up (mostly). No more JavaScript, just spec-compliant CSS. Well, …
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A decade ago, I was writing about how you should test your user interface on drunk people. It was a semi-serious idea. Some of your users will be drunk when using your app or website. If it is easy for them to use, then it should be easy for sober people to use. Of course, necking a few shots every time you update your website isn't great for your health - so is there another way? Click the "🥴 …
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Let's say that you've visited a website and want to share it with your friends. At the bottom of the article is a list of popular sharing destinations - Facebook, BlueSky, LinkedIn, Telegram, Reddit, HackerNews etc. You click the relevant icon and get taken to the site with the sharing details pre-filled. The problem is, every different site has a different intent for sharing links and…
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Originally posted as part of HTML Hell's advent calendar. While browsing Mastodon late one night, I came across this excellent blog post called HTML is all you need to make a website. It describes a few websites which are pure HTML. No CSS and no JS. And I thought… do you even need HTML to make a website? A few hours later, I launched the NO-HT.ML website. Proving, once and for all, that you d…
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