CSS has long been the “language” of terror for more sophisticated developers. CSS can be messy, ugly, illogical, and utterly wonderful to work with sometimes. Recently, tools like SCSS and LESS have emerged which let us write more structured CSS in a DRY way (I’ve written about it before).

But we still have the problem with the actual “content” of the CSS. All the classes, IDs, and tag names. Hell is other people’s CSS it’s said, and it’s true. Really bloody true. Trying to comprehend a semi-large CSS code base is like putting your feet into wet socks. If it’s one person writing the CSS, it’s he who’s got the structure in his head. He models it according to his views and sense of organization).

Hence, Knyle Style Sheets, is an interesting idea. It’s basically like a style guide – documentation – for a site or app’s CSS. Go ahead and read about it, and check out the project on GitHub. I really like the thinking behind this, and would consider it a necessity for larger projects.

Dmitry Fadeyev:

His [Ive's] latest designs are a tribute to Dieter Rams, who sought to produce the timeless through ruthless, methodical elimination. Rams approach produced work that was clean, simple and could stand the test of time because it was not a work of style but his best solution to the given problem.

Call me a boring northern European, but I like the clean, simple, functional industrial designs of Braun, Apple, IKEA, et al.

Great article on why PHP must go, and what the alternatives are – if there are any at all. PHP is a pretty neat language. It’s available on almost every web host around the world. It’s really easy for beginners to setup, write code, and publish it. Still, PHP is starting to become dreaded, unwanted and hated among serious new-era web developers. The familiar C style syntax is becoming old, there’s a lot of noise in the code, and a lot more pet peeves which are forcing developers to other languages, such as Ruby, Python, and in recent days Javascript.

I can knock out a good website in an hour in PHP, and an excellent one in a day or two. Its performance characteristics are well-known and understood, so I can make it scale pretty much indefinitely. Every developer we’d want to hire knows it, and every system we’d integrate with has a wrapper library written in it. I am trapped by the convenience of PHP in a language that is losing its suitability for the task.

What’s happened with PHP is that we’ve become too convenient and lazy. Everybody uses it – why change? It’s an evil spiral I don’t want to go down with.

“PHP needs to die” is perhaps a bit harsh, but I definitely think it shouldn’t be the first choice of web server language when beginners grow out of HTML and CSS (it is actually very much a de facto language). In a perfect world, web hosts (even shared hosting providers) would offer Ruby and Python out-of-the-box without any addon fees.

I want a language that assumes everything I will be building is an MVC web app, and builds that right into the core language, not just a library.

To become the Number One Web Language, it has to look on what made PHP big: drop in functionality, straight forward documentation, simple hosting, and a not too steep learning curve.

Peter Michaux on Javascript:

One of the most obvious deficiencies in JavaScript is with its user interface: its syntax. The inability to quickly improve its syntax has lead to the language’s downfall.

If you have to read a single article on Javascript this month; make it this one. Insightful, nitty-gritty computer science-y stuff is promised (don’t worry about the overly dramatic title). Lots of great musings, code samples, history, and suggestions on improvements of Javascript, and also about the state of compilers such as CoffeeScript.

Since CoffeeScript compilers are in the hands of developers rather than the visitors to sites, you control which version of CoffeeScript you are using. You can upgrade at will. This also means CoffeeScript does not need to be standardized and go through the subsequent painfully slow growth of a standardized language. CoffeeScript can grow at the rate of its community’s imagination and desire. JavaScript standardization was essential to the success of the web but the same constraints do not apply to CoffeeScript.

(I also recommend checking out more of Peter’s articles. Some really good stuff in there).