If you make websites — as a developer, designer, product owner or more — what’s your favorite way to learn about what’s new on the web?

What type of content do you find most helpful?

Where are some of your favorite resources?

What’s hard? What doesn’t work? Why?

What do you need that you don’t have now?

What do you want to learn? What could unblock you?

If you could wave a magic wand, what would you want someone to make for you???

@jensimmons

Thanks so much for all your work!

For me, clear, concise docs that assume nothing and tutorials that are focused going step-by-step including all setup commands.

There’s nothing worse than following examples in the docs that don’t work.

Start with the basics but have really complete detailed docs when I’m ready to dive in further.

WebKit Blog Category: <span>CSS</span>

A collection of WebKit blog posts.

WebKit

@jensimmons Good and tough questions for me to answer, as a 100% self-taught in the aughts coder who wears most of the hats at my company and rarely has time to do more than, e.g., search Stack Overflow for answers to problems I face when maintaining and improving our PHP+MySQL-based products.

I try to keep up with RSS feeds on sites where I see interesting and helpful topics (and that don’t make me feel inferior for not having a complicated build process with ten different plugins for the JavaScript-first/only approach du jour). I like *reading* articles with plenty of concise content. Tips & tricks that work broadly on modern browsers are the best; articles that require in-depth knowledge of the JS-library-du-jour are intensely frustrating. Developers dismissive of others lacking Wizard-level abilities make me curse, and their pervasiveness never seems to abate :(

Wave a magic wand and make documentation accessible and my life would be brightened immeasurably.

@jensimmons I would love up-to-date, baseline examples of what a great webpage contains.

I wanted to make my personal site as simple as possible while still being “correct” - up to standards, accessible, and complete.

With so many new features and different ways of doing things, it was hard to tell which are highly recommended and which are optional.

Semantic HTML mostly makes sense, but ARIAs were confusing.
How many favicons do I actually need?
What information should I have in my <head>?

And so on. Answers feel scattered and opinionated currently.

@jensimmons A compact introduction to CSS for people who specialize in non-CSS programming:
* How to organize CSS
* Everything that’s needed for writing solid user interfaces
* Much of the advanced stuff (e.g. animations) can be omitted

I find much of the CSS content too high-level and too low-level at the same time.

CSS Inheritance, The Cascade And Global Scope: Your New Old Worst Best Friends — Smashing Magazine

If you don’t want your design to look like it’s made out of unrelated things, this article is for you. There is already a technology, called CSS, which is designed specifically to solve this problem. Using CSS, you can propagate styles that cross the borders of your HTML components, ensuring a consistent design with minimal effort. Today, Heydon Pickering is going to revisit inheritance, the cascade and scope here with respect to modular interface design. He aims to show you how to leverage these features so that your CSS code becomes more concise and self-regulating, and your interface more easily extensible.

Smashing Magazine
@jensimmons Written or video explainers with interactive examples!

@jensimmons First, I could use a podcast about what's ahead in the web.

Other stuff includes
1. I dig videos, I have a kid, and 40+ hours of work, stuff I can watch while doing dishes, would be rad.
2. I super dig @astro's blog, I also https://bradfrost.com/, and @shoptalkshow .
3. It's hard to build things offline first. Workbox is great, but there's not a great integration for Astro or Wordpress that I know of.
4. A Safari youtube/podcast channel that I hear what your devs are working on.

Brad Frost Web

Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, consultant, musician and artist living in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA.

Brad Frost

@ericmikkelsen @jensimmons @astro @shoptalkshow

Building offline is much easier with a tool like CodeKit. That's been a constant companion for years now - windows users near me consider it black magic.

Updoots for a Safari/Webkit YT channel!

@HollandJim @jensimmons @astro @shoptalkshow Oh wow, I didn't know codekit had service worker tools, that's so cool!
@jensimmons
First of all I would like to see consistent cross browser support for CSS features. I didn't bother to go deeper into view transitions or scroll animations since Firefox does not support it.
@sebastianlaube @jensimmons Progressive enhancement works fine on those though.
@mb21
So we want to do noting about it because the browser of that advertisement company supports shiny new things?
Technically you are right, but to me it's like saying the user is dumb when I fucked up an interface as a designer.
@jensimmons
@jensimmons I read about new stuff on mastadon/blusky/rss, won’t use it because it’s not in all browsers yet, and then forget about it. I’d like to get a reminder when a certain feature hits baseline availability.
@jensimmons My only source is from developers on social media. But I would like to switch to news letters. What is hard is learn about new features that are not yet supported on some project browser support. Usually support is locked to specific functions or versions for some time.
@jensimmons For some reason, it's pretty hard to find articles that remember have read some time ago on the WebKit website. I will just give a recent example: I remember having read fantastic news about the <details> element. But I haven't been able to find them again. In the webkit search feature, "details" doesn't bring anything useful. Maybe it was just a dream?
@jensimmons My preference is for blog posts about new features and changes. And for somewhat in-depth article-esque posts that provide practical examples of how to do things (and ideally pointing out the old vs new way). If you need to show sometime, sure, an embedded video is great, but don’t do a 30 minutes vlog when a few 100 words and a 5 second video would suffice.
@jensimmons For me, the clear leader is docs. MDN and caniuse are the gold standards and they’re both just meh. They’re both written as one layer of abstraction from the spec. I’d like docs that speak to problems and offer solutions. E.g. instead of a WebSocket doc, a doc on realtime data transfer that includes polling and SSE. Of all the docs I’ve used next.js gets closest to this balance.
@joeybaker @jensimmons great feedback! Good docs are certainly more than "a layer of abstraction from the spec". Just providing reference pages is indeed not always helpful. Seems like some How-tos are needed here.

@jensimmons I mostly hear about new stuff because @Meyerweb boosted something (like this post).

For the very latest I like to read the readme/explainer in the spec suggestion repo, and the resulting PR/issue(s). The real spec feels like it's more for browser vendors, but nice to have as a reference.

For existing stuff I go to MDN.

@jensimmons excellent questions! We just launched a W3C Documentation Community Group as a regular place to discuss. We would love to hear your thoughts! https://github.com/w3c-cg/webdocs
GitHub - w3c-cg/webdocs: Repository for the W3C Docs Community Group. This group is an open community with the mission to ensure web developers and designers worldwide have the best information available so they can build things on the web platform.

Repository for the W3C Docs Community Group. This group is an open community with the mission to ensure web developers and designers worldwide have the best information available so they can build ...

GitHub
@jensimmons I always liked learning from blog posts by all the web design gurus such as yourself. But I have to admit that lately, based on the limitations of time, I'm more likely to go to YouTube and search for a specific thing. I save blog posts and never have time to read them. Still, I feel a learned more and learned better back in the day from the blogs.
@jensimmons MDN. Precise, correct and comprehensive documentation.
@jensimmons 1. Better iOS PWA support (maintain the data from the web version to provide a seamless transition to PWA).
2. https://w3c.github.io/web-share-target/
3. Fully support install prompts from pages that support PWA.
Web Share Target API