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Welcome to September’s toolbox.

I sure do love little reminders about HTML semantics, particularly semantics that are tougher to commit to memory. Scott has a great one, beginning with this markup:

<p>I am a paragraph.</p>
<span>I am also a paragraph.</span>
<div>You might hate it, but I'm a paragraph too.</div>
<ul>
  <li>Even I am a paragraph.</li>
  <li>Though I'm a list item as well.</li>
</ul>
<p>I might trick you</p>
<address>Guess who? A paragraph!</address>

You may look at that markup and say “Hey! You can’t fool me, only the 

 elements are “real” paragraphs!

You might even call out such elements as divs or spans being used as “paragraphs” a WCAG failure.

But, if you’re thinking those sorts of things, then maybe you’re not aware that those are actually all “paragraphs”.

It’s easy to forget this since many of those non-paragraph elements are not allowed in between paragraph tags and it usually gets all sorted out anyway when HTML is parsed.

The accessibility bits are what I always come to Scott’s writing for:

Those examples I provided at the start of this post? macOS VoiceOver, NVDA and JAWS treat them all as paragraphs ([asterisks] for NVDA, read on…). […] The point being that screen readers are in step with HTML, and understand that “paragraphs” are more than just the p element.

Paragraphs originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Didya see that Tumblr is getting a WordPress makeover? And it’s not a trivial move:

This won’t be easy. Tumblr hosts over half a billion blogs. We’re talking about one of the largest technical migrations in internet history. Some people think it’s impossible. But we say, “challenge accepted.”

Half a billion blogs. Considering that WordPress already powers somewhere around 40% of all websites (which is much, much higher than 500m) this’ll certainly push that figure even further.

I’m sure there’s at least one suspicious nose out there catching whiffs of marketing smoke though I’m amicable to the possibility that this is a genuine move to enhance a beloved platform that’s largely seen as a past relic of the Flickr era. I loved Tumblr back then. It really embraced the whole idea that a blog can help facilitate better writing with a variety of post formats. (Post formats, fwiw, are something I always wished would be a WordPress first-class citizen but they never made it out of being an opt-in theme feature). Tumblr was the first time I was able to see blogging as more than a linear chain of content organized in reverse chronological order. Blog posts are more about what you write and how you write it than they are when they’re written.

Anyway, I know jobs are a scarce commodity in tech these days and Auttomatic is looking for folks to help with the migration.

I was about to say this “could” be a neat opportunity, but nay, it’s a super interesting and exciting opportunity, one where your work is touching two of the most influential blogging platforms on the planet. I remember interviewing Alex Hollender and Jon Robson after they shipped a design update to Wikipedia and thinking how much fun and learning would come out of a project like that. This has that same vibe to me. Buuuut, make no illusions about it: it’ll be tough.

Shipping Tumblr and WordPress originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Developers suffer in the great multitudes whom their sacred block-based websites cannot reach.

Johannes Gutenberg (probably)

Long time WordPresser, first time Gutenberger here. I’m a fan even though I’m still anchored to a classic/block hybrid setup. I believe Johanes himself would be, too, trading feather pens for blocks. He was a forward-thinking 15th-century inventor, after all.

My enthusiasm for Gutenberg-ness is curbed at the theming level. I’ll sling blocks all day long in the Block Editor, but please, oh please, let me keep my classic PHP templates and the Template Hierarchy that comes with it. The separation between theming and editing is one I cherish. It’s not that the Site Editor and its full-site editing capabilities scare me. It’s more that I fail to see the architectural connection between the Site and Block Editors. There’s a connection for sure, so the failure of not understanding it is more on me than WordPress.

The WP Minute published a guide that clearly — and succinctly — describes the relationships between WordPress blocks, patterns, and templates. There are plenty of other places that do the same, but this guide is organized nicely in that it starts with the blocks as the lowest-level common denominator, then builds on top of it to show how patterns are comprised of blocks used for content layout, synced patterns are the same but are one of many that are edited together, and templates are full page layouts cobbled from different patterns and a sprinkle of other “theme blocks” that are the equivalent of global components in a design system, say a main nav or a post loop.

The guide outlines it much better, of course:

1. Gutenberg Blocks: The smallest unit of content
2. Patterns: Collections of blocks for reuse across your site
3. Synced Patterns: Creating “master patterns” for site-wide updates
4. Synced Pattern Overrides: Locking patterns while allowing specific edits
5. Templates: The structural framework of your WordPress site

That “synced pattern overrides” is new to me. I’m familiar with synced patterns (with a giant nod to Ganesh Dahal) but must’ve missed that in the WordPress 6.6 release earlier this summer.

I’m not sure when or if I’ll ever go with a truly modern WordPress full-site editing setup wholesale, out-of-the-box. I don’t feel pressured to, and I believe WordPress doesn’t care one way or another. WordPress’s ultimate selling point has always been its flexibility (driven, of course, by the massive and supportive open-source community behind it). It’s still the “right” tool for many types of projects and likely will remain so as long as it maintains its support for classic, block, and hybrid architectures.

Understanding Gutenberg Blocks, Patterns, and Templates originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Happy birthday, Chris Coyier — and thank you for CSS-Tricks as well as everything you do at CodePen, ShopTalk, Boost, and even your personal blog!

Quick Hit #13 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

September’s web design trends have a fun, fall feeling … and we love it. See what’s trending in website design this month.

Giant kudos to Scott Jehl on releasing his new Web Components De-Mystified online course! Eight full hours of training from one of the best in the business.

Quick Hit #12 originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Eric gifting us with his research on all the various things that anchors (not links) do when they are in :focus.

Turns out, there’s a lot!

That’s an understatement! This is an incredible amount of work, even if Eric calls it “dry as a toast sandwich.” Boring ain’t always a bad thing. Let me simply drop in a pen that Dave put together pulling all of Eric’s findings into a table organized to compare the different behaviors between operating systems — and additional tables for each specific platform — because I think it helps frame Eric’s points.

That really is a lot! But why on Earth go through the trouble of documenting all of this?

All of the previously documented behavior needs to be built in JavaScript, since we need to go the synthetic link route. It also means that it is code we need to set aside time and resources to maintain.

That also assumes that is even possible to recreate every expected feature in JavaScript, which is not true. It also leaves out the mental gymnastics required to make a business case for prioritizing engineering efforts to re-make each feature.

There’s the rub! These are the behaviors you’re gonna need to mimic and maintain if veering away from semantic, native web elements. So what Eric is generously providing is perhaps an ultimate argument against adopting frameworks — or rolling some custom system — that purposely abstract the accessible parts of the web, often in favor of DX.

As with anything, there’s more than meets the eye to all this. Eric’s got an exhaustive list at the end there that calls out all the various limitations of his research. Most of those notes sound to me like there are many, many other platforms, edge cases, user agent variations, assistive technologies, and considerations that could also be taken into account, meaning we could be responsible for a much longer list of behaviors than what’s already there.

And yes, this sweatshirt is incredible. Indeed.

Basic keyboard shortcut support for focused links originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

A gem from Chris Ferdinandi that details how to use custom events to hook into Web Components. More importantly, Chris dutifully explains why custom events are a better fit than, say, callback functions.

With a typical JavaScript library, you pass callbacks in as part of the instantiate process. […] Because Web Components self-instantiate, though, there’s no easy way to do that.

There’s a way to use callback functions, just not an “easy” way to go about it.

JavaScript provides developers with a way to emit custom events that developers can listen for with the Element.addEventListener() method.

We can use custom events to let developers hook into the code that we write and run more code in response to when things happen. They provide a really flexible way to extend the functionality of a library or code base.

Don’t miss the nugget about canceling custom events!

Callbacks on Web Components? originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family. You should get the newsletter.

Picture this: You open Netflix, and it’s like the platform just knows what you’re in the mood for. Or maybe you’re browsing Amazon, and the products displayed feel like they were picked just for you. This isn’t just a happy coincidence — it’s machine learning-powered AI working behind the scenes to create a personalized experience just for you. In today’s digital world, where user experience (UX) can make or break a product, AI-driven personalization is changing the game.