AddyOsmani.com - Preload late-discovered Hero images faster
Did you know there’s an imagesrcset attribute you can put on link rel="preload" as="image" (along with an imagesizes attribute)?
I didn’t. (Until Amber pointed this out.)
Don’t Use The Placeholder Attribute — Smashing Magazine
A lot of the issues here are with abuses of the placeholder attribute—using it as a label, using it for additional information, etc.—whereas using it quite literally as a placeholder can be thought of as an enhancement (I almost always preface mine with “e.g.”).
Still, there’s no getting around that terrible colour contrast issue: if the contrast were greater, it would look too much like an actual pre-filled value, and that’s potentially worse.
Related links
Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API :: Aaron Gustafson
Great minds think alike! I have a very similar HTML web component on the front page of The Session called input-autosuggest.
Reimagine the Date Picker – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)
This is a superb way to deprecate a little JavaScript library. Now that you can just use HTML instead, the website for Pikaday has been turned into a guide to choosing the right design pattern for your needs. Bravo!
Pikaday is no longer a JavaScript date picker. Pikaday is now a friendly guide for front-end developers. I want to push developers away from the classic date picker entirely. Especially fat JavaScript libraries.
I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since | by Mike Hall | Jul, 2025 | Medium
I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.
And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:
At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.
The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.
This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.
Matthias Ott – Painting With the Web – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 20025 - YouTube
A great talk by Matthias on what you can do with web standards today!
Related posts
My approach to HTML web components
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
Netlify redirects and downloads
How to use HTML’s `download` attribute even if you’re storing your files on S3.
Displaying HTML web components
You might want to use `display: contents` …maybe.
button invoketarget=”share”
An alternate route to a declarative version of the Web Share API.
Lost in calculation
A lazy option for responsive images is at hand.