Introduction

This is the second collection of articles from my website, meiert.com. The first, On Web Development, covered 134 articles from 2005 to 2015. This one continues from there.

If you know my work, you know what to expect. If you don’t: I’ve been a web developer for over 25 years, working across projects and companies of all sizes. I code every single day and run several well-trafficked websites. This book reflects that experience—the last 10 years of it, distilled into the articles I believe are most useful. My perspective is both pragmatic and idealistic: I care about things that work and things that could work better.

You’ll find practical insights on web development in general, on principles and quality, on HTML and CSS and how we write and could write it, as well as on maintenance, processes, and engineering management. While I included some thought experiments, many articles are lessons from building and optimizing sites and apps at scale and over long periods, dealing with real constraints and consequences.

The articles are ordered and clustered by topic, with a light structure designed to read as a thread, perhaps even a vague narrative, while respecting that this material comes from a blog—a more spontaneous medium.

What you hold is a document of authenticity. I focused on curation, not further editing, which means the articles appear exactly as they did online, mistakes and all. (I run a quality program on meiert.com for errors, and I’m happy to double the donation amount for anything you find here.)

To avoid repetition, I omitted material that seemed redundant (like some of my annual HTML conformance studies) or better suited elsewhere (like the website optimization series). What remains should be useful without boring you.

You’ll get to know me a little better through these articles, too. Because the book is predominantly about web development and engineering management, there’s one thing I like to share about the person publishing it: I firmly believe we need to do more for everyone’s well-being (even if we don’t like them, especially if we don’t know them). While this isn’t something I’m promoting in what follows, it’s something we influence with our work.

Enjoy reading On Web Development II.

—Jens Oliver Meiert