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Philip Walton
Personal blog · philipwalton.comwebprogramming
Philip Walton's personal blog at philipwalton.com covers web and programming. Since 2013, 69 different Hacker News readers have linked it 109 times, most often “Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Thoughts on web development, open source, software architecture, and the future.
Most-linked posts?
- Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-14
- The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2017-02-08
- Cascading Cache Invalidation6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-10-09
- What No One Told You About Z-Index5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-01-15
- Instead of tracking page loads, track how many times it was viewed (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-04-12
- Using Native JavaScript Modules in Production Today4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-08-20
- What no one told you about HTML z-index (2013)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-04-12
- The Dark Side of Polyfilling CSS4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-12-23
- How to write better, more cross-browser flexbox code3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-05
- Responsive Components: A Solution to the Container Queries Problem3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-27
What Hacker News says?
This article may interest you: https://philipwalton.com/articles/loading-polyfills-only-whe... Also on being able to use new syntax : https://philipwalton.com/articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-p...
Comment linking /articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-production-today/
on “React 16”Submitted The Google Analytics Setup I Use on Every Site I Build as a story · 493 points
HN discussionWhy force all your users to download transpiled ES5, just to accommodate IE11 dinosaurs? Not to mention all the issues you'll have if you try to use CSS Flex or Grid. Support IE11 only if you absolutely must, is my advice, and do that with differential serving: https://philipwalton.com/articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-p... https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/doing-differential-serv...
Comment linking /articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-production-today/
on “The new Microsoft Edge is out of preview”Submitted Idle Until Urgent as a story · 295 points
HN discussionI'm surprised this didn't mention stacking contexts, which threw me for a loop a couple times: http://philipwalton.com/articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-... https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/CSS/Under...
Comment linking /articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-z-index/
on “WTF, HTML and CSS?”Submitted What No One Told You About Z-Index as a story · 282 points
HN discussionspoofing the user agent works fine I'm continually upset by this. If you know you rely on, for example, the fetch() api, test for the fetch api[0]. Whitelisting browser user agents just means chasing your tail for forever. By all means, politely warn a user that "your browser is not tested". It's getting to feel like a marketing driven decision, where pages just about say "our site is so powerful, we only work with…
Comment linking /articles/loading-polyfills-only-when-needed/
on “Chrome Won”Submitted Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today as a story · 177 points
HN discussionThis lets you provide an implementation for a CSS feature that is perhaps not yet implemented by browsers, or maybe never will be. You could always do this with Javascript, and some people have been. See: https://philipwalton.github.io/polyfill/ But this lets you do it in a less hacky, and especially, more performant way. The author of that JS CSS polyfill library above actually wrote in 2016 how that approach was p…
Comment linking /articles/the-dark-side-of-polyfilling-css/
on “CSS Houdini”Submitted What No One Told You About Z-Index (2013) as a story · 141 points
HN discussionwritten before css grid and css columns? another z-index one: https://philipwalton.com/articles/what-no-one-told-you-about...
Comment linking /articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-z-index/
on “Learn CSS layout the pedantic way (2015)”Submitted Why I'm Excited About Native CSS Variables as a story · 129 points
HN discussionThe interesting bit is this: https://philipwalton.com/articles/cascading-cache-invalidati... Without that one sentence, the entire article is moot because I thought bundlers solved the problem. I haven't thought about that in years. I didn't realize it had been solved. Browser support looks pretty good. I guess now I have to figure out how to get this to play nice with Vite and TypeScript module resolution.... and n…
Comment linking /articles/cascading-cache-invalidation/
on “A masochist's guide to web development”Submitted My challenge to the web performance community as a story · 61 points
HN discussion>Flexbox is well past the point where you should be "playing around" with it. It's time to straight-up learn it, if not start using it in production. I dont think that is 100% true quite yet. IE9 for example is still quite popular, not to mention the bugs in modern browsers. http://philipwalton.com/articles/normalizing-cross-browser-f...
Comment linking /articles/normalizing-cross-browser-flexbox-bugs/
on “Front End Developer – Interview Questions”Submitted Do We Need Specificity in CSS? (2015) as a story · 41 points
HN discussionContainer queries have been suggested for a while now, it is not a new idea. But it has gained a lot of momentum recently, for example [1]. So maybe it will not be years until all modern browsers might support it. Until then, you might want to try [2] (not a polyfill, but a workaround with JavaScript). [1] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5796 [2] https://philipwalton.com/articles/responsive-components-a-s…
Comment linking /articles/responsive-components-a-solution-to-the-container-queries-problem/
on “The anti-pattern of responsive design”Submitted Instead of tracking page loads, track how many times it was viewed (2017) as a story · 30 points
HN discussionThis topic interests me as well, and I've written about many of these ideas in the past. They're not necessarily analogous to the GoF design patterns, but I think they're similar in spirit. I hope you find them helpful. CSS Architecture http://philipwalton.com/articles/css-architecture/ Side Effects in CSS http://philipwalton.com/articles/side-effects-in-css/ Decoupling Your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript http://philipwa…
Comment linking /articles/decoupling-html-css-and-javascript/
on “Ask HN: Front-end “design patterns”?”Submitted The State of ES5 on the Web as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWhen you fork a Github project, you'll have to examine the code to see what it's doing and how. With HTML and CSS, it's mostly visual but you can find improvements on semantics or simplifying what's there. If you can improve performance by rewriting a javascript function into CSS, such as animations, submit a pull request with your suggestions. With Javascript, look for bugs and improve the code that's written. Java…
Comment linking /articles/untangling-deeply-nested-promise-chains/
on “Ask HN: What kind of projects should I build for a front-end portfolio?”Submitted Using Native JavaScript Modules in Production Today as a story · 20 points
HN discussionI am very interested about publishing ES6+ code. https://philipwalton.com/articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-p... was very inspirational on this topic, but the fact that 99% of the libraries I use are publishing transpiled code (+ polyfill) is a big disappointment. From what I understood, there is currently nothing to allow both ES5 and ES6 code to be published and let the bundler choose which one to include. Any ide…
Comment linking /articles/deploying-es2015-code-in-production-today/
on “Nearing the Babel 7.0 Release”Submitted Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today as a story · 16 points
HN discussionWould love to see a comparison of this and the set up posted last night: https://philipwalton.com/articles/the-google-analytics-setup... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13636884 ) and the other set up linked from those comments: https://github.com/thenextweb/gtm
Comment linking /articles/the-google-analytics-setup-i-use-on-every-site-i-build/
on “Google Analytics Autotrack”Submitted Tips for how to decouple your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI don't like the Bootstrap approach very much. I'd rather litter the markup with classes and then be able to change their order and location in the DOM without affecting styles than having to do changes both in HTML in CSS files - bear in mind that, with DOM dependency, most style changes would imply you to change or at least check the HTML file. It will also make you end up "plugging" exceptions on top of exception…
Comment linking /articles/side-effects-in-css/
on “How to Pick a Front End Web Framework”Submitted Responsive Components: A Solution to the Container Queries Problem as a story · 8 points
HN discussionNot exactly, it's something I've been noticing from my experience with CSS and many teams with many members which were experienced programmers but without any CSS experience. I've shared these ones with my team, however: http://philipwalton.com/articles/css-architecture/ http://philipwalton.com/articles/side-effects-in-css/ http://philipwalton.com/articles/extending-styles/ http://benfrain.com/the-ten-commandments-o…
Comment linking /articles/extending-styles/
on “How to Pick a Front End Web Framework”Submitted How We Track Pageviews Is All Wrong [GA] as a story · 8 points
HN discussion
