Chris Ferdinandi is a web developer with ADHD, helping people build the web better.
Visit gomakethings.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2022 – Oct 2025
For years, a trend in our industry has been to build single-page apps, or SPAs. With an SPA, the entire site or app lives in a single HTML file. After the initial load, everything about the app is handled with JavaScript. This is, in theory, supposed to result in web apps that feel as fast and snappy as native apps…
One of the weirdest “debates” I seem to perpetually have with framework-enthusiastic developers is whether or not a <div> is “just as good” as a <button>. Spoiler: it’s not. Let’s dig in. The problem Among the React crowd, and also among people who seem to enjoy HTMX, I see a lot this… <div onclick="showSignIn()">…
One of the most common accessibility issues I find (and fix) on client projects is dynamically disabled form buttons when a form is being submitted. Today I want to talk about why developers do it, why it’s bad, and what you can do instead. Let’s dig in! Why developers disable buttons Typically, I see the pattern used…
I’ve worked on so many projects recently that were more complicated than they needed to be because they used JavaScript to generate HTML. JavaScript is… Slower to load Slower to run More prone to breaking Harder to read and reason about Doesn’t actually look like the final output It’s inferior to just using HTML in…