Why XPath still beats CSS selectors in messy scrapers
A legacy vendor portal with no IDs, no classes and no API broke every CSS selector we threw at it. One XPath expression replaced fifty lines of them, and it has not broken since.
Category: Development
What AI-driven server management actually changed for me
A mid-day flash sale took down a 30k-product WooCommerce shop and cost me three hours in Nginx logs. Here is what AI-driven server management does to that hunt, and where the automation stops.
Why a $50k design system culture still lost to one-off CSS
A SaaS team had Storybook, Figma tokens and a dedicated Slack channel, and still shipped one-off CSS for every feature. Strict linting made it worse. A contribution bridge is what finally moved them.
Twelve fade-in keyframes in one stylesheet, and the fix
One WooCommerce stylesheet had twelve @keyframes definitions for a single fade-in, spelled three different ways. Here is the tokens file that replaced them, and how reduced-motion support fits in at the token level.
The 6 UX strategy components I check before writing code
A client once brought me Dribbble-ready mockups and no answer for the 45% drop-off at his shipping step. He had a goal, not a strategy. Here are the six UX strategy components I look for before anyone writes code.
What accessible UX research fixed that my ARIA patches couldn’t
Our WooCommerce configurator passed the automated audits and still stopped a screen reader user at step one. Accessible UX research, and Michele A. Williams’ new book on it, is what got us out of the patch-and-move-on habit.
Modern CSS features that let me delete a client’s JavaScript
A client’s WooCommerce site shipped a JavaScript bundle whose main job was resizing a textarea. field-sizing does it in one line. Here are the modern CSS features that are baseline now, and the code they let you delete.
Debugging the Gamepad API with CSS cascade layers
Console logging the Gamepad API at 60 frames per second tells you nothing useful. Here is the visual debugger I built instead, with its styles isolated in a CSS cascade layer so they stop fighting the theme.
How to split text into letters without breaking screen readers
CSS still has no :nth-letter selector, so letter-by-letter text effects mean splitting a header into spans, which screen readers then read out one letter at a time. Here is the ARIA markup and the PHP helper that avoid that.
Fixing link underline alignment with text-decoration-inset
A client kept flagging link underlines that ran a couple of pixels past the letters. The CSS property text-decoration-inset clips them without pseudo-element hacks, and it animates on hover. Firefox only for now.