Visual design involves a lot of grouping and aligning elements, and there isn't always semantic reasons for it. Grouping is usually best done in the HTML, so it's hard keep this part of the visual design out of your HTML.

In the code from the link, the element is serving as the wrapper element, that gives you a hook to get the layout you want. But when you're not lucky enough to have a semantic wrapper tag like that, you've usually got to add a generic tag help. Or write CSS that's closely coupled with the HTML, so they aren't really separate anyway.

> we would all be writing purely semantic html with completely orthogonal and swappable css. And today literally no one designs web sites that way - html today is mostly specific to presentation

I think of HTML + CSS as the presentation layer now, and the data lives in your e.g. database and Markdown files, so the data and its presentation are still separate enough.

The idea of just swapping out the CSS to completely restyle a complex site is nice, but people need to accept this hasn't worked out (and not because devs are bad at CSS) and move on.

CSS isn't powerful enough by itself to create any layout you want without modifying the HTML. You almost always need wrapper elements to group elements you want to align together for presentation purposes only (e.g. "a vertically centered row containing one paragraph next to two vertically stacked images"), so there often aren't semantic HTML tags that would make sense.

It's similar to how you use numerous groups/frames in design apps like Inkscape and Figma to help align elements, where nobody would suggest you were a bad designer for using groups that don't have semantic meaning.

You can only really avoid wrapper elements for simple Markdown style pages with simple designs, where the CSS for that is straightforward.

I think in these discussions, it needs to be clearer how complex the page designs being discussed are. The CSS advice that makes sense for simple Markdown style pages is very different to what makes sense for a complex web app UI or a highly designed marketing page.

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

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Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

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SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

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The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

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Similar for adding static type checking, which makes it easier for AI and coworkers to understand the code, catch mistakes, and to refactor. And now there's coders willing to add static type checking to help AI but didn't see the benefit before for some reason.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008054

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Note: For large projects, my partner usually assists me in the background (I’m working on starting a design studio with her in the future)

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Email sw@seanw.org with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you in one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together!

The general trick is you can rely on differences in color lightness, patterns, text and icons, but not differences in color hue. The page should be usable in grayscale.

Maybe it's the speed of LLM iteration that makes the benefit more immediately obvious, vs seeing it unfold with a team of people over a longer time? It's almost like running a study?

I have a similar reaction to strong static types being advocated to help LLMs understanding/debugging code, catching bugs, refactoring... when it's obvious to me this helps humans as well.

Curious how "this practice helps LLMs be more productive" relates to studies that try to show this with human programmers, where running convincing human studies is really difficult. Besides problems with context sizes, are there best practices that help LLMs a lot but not humans?

> 4 bytes of number, 24 bytes of machinery to support dynamism. a + b means: dereference two heap pointers, look up type slots, dispatch to int.__add__, allocate a new PyObject for the result (unless it hits the small-integer cache), update reference counts.

Would Python be a lot less useful without being maximally dynamic everywhere? Are there domains/frameworks/packages that benefit from this where this is a good trade-off?

I can't think of cases in strong statically typed languages where I've wanted something like monkey patching, and when I see monkey patching elsewhere there's often some reasonable alternative or it only needs to be used very rarely.

https://www.inclusivecolors.com/

The current web tool lets you export to CSS, Tailwind and Figma, and uses HSLuv for the color picker. HSL color pickers that most design tools like Figma use have the very counterintuitive property that the hue and saturation sliders will change the lightness of a color (which then impacts its WCAG contrast), which HSLuv fixes to make it much easier to find accessible color combinations.

I'm working on a Figma plugin version so you can preview colors directly on a Figma design as you make changes. It's tricky shrinking the UI to work inside a small plugin window!

I've used HSLuv for an accessible palette editor (https://www.inclusivecolors.com/), so you get the familiarity of an HSL color picker, but unlike with HSL, when you change hue or saturation, the lightness and WCAG contrast stay the same, which makes HSLuv a great for exploring accessible color combinations without breaking the contrast you've set up already between your existing color pairs.

OKLCH is becoming a popular choice if you need P3 colors and perceptual uniformity because it's built into CSS now, but I find the colors pickers for OKLCH tend to look really complex and unfamiliar to use so I'm skeptical it's going to get popular with designers (it's mostly developers recommending OKLCH that are interested in the technical/coding part rather than the design part?). What are good choices if you want P3, perceptual uniformity, and an intuitive color picker UI?

Remote: Yes (I’m used to time zone differences and async work)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, TypeScript, JavaScript, Vue, Hugo, Jekyll, WordPress, Django, HTML/CSS, Bootstrap, Tailwind, OCaml, Java, Python, C, analytics, WCAG accessibility, website SEO/speed optimisation.

Résumé/CV: See https://seanw.org/ for portfolio, and https://checkbot.io/ and https://inclusivecolors.com/ for live example projects

Email: sw@seanw.org

---

SEEKING FREELANCE WORK | UX/UI & web design

I help startups with the UX/UI and web design of their products. This includes web apps, websites, landing pages, copywriting, and I can assist with frontend development where needed. My background of launching my own products and being a full stack developer helps me create practical designs that balance usability, aesthetics, development effort, and performance. I work to fixed price quotes for self-contained projects.

---

The best live example of my work is Checkbot (https://checkbot.io/), a browser extension that tests websites for SEO/speed/security problems. The entire project is my own work including coding the extension itself, UX/UI design, website design (the homepage is optimised to load in 0.7 seconds, 0.3MB data transferred), marketing, website copy, and website articles on web best practices.

[ Rated 4.9/5, 80K+ active users, 100s of paying subscribers ]

---

I have 10+ years of experience, including a PhD in software verification and 5+ years working for myself helping over 25 companies including Just Eat, Triumph Motorcycles and Fogbender (YC W22). See my website for testimonials, portfolio and more: https://seanw.org

Note: For large projects, my partner usually assists me in the background (I’m working on starting a design studio with her in the future)

---

Email sw@seanw.org with a short description of 1) your project 2) how you think I can help 3) the business outcome you’re looking for and 4) any deadlines. I can get back to you in one working day to arrange a call to discuss a quote and how we can work together!

Yeah, I can't relate at all with not using a type for this after having to write gross defensive code a couple of times e.g. if it's not a phone number you've got to return undefined or throw an exception? The typed approach is shorter, cleaner, self-documenting, reduces bugs and makes refactoring easier.

In most strong statically typed languages, you wouldn't often pass strings and generic dictionaries around. You'd naturally gravitate towards parsing/transforming raw data into typed data structures that have guaranteed properties instead to avoid writing defensive code everywhere e.g. a Date object that would throw an exception in the constructor if the string given didn't validate as a date (Edit: Changed this from email because email validation is a can of worms as an example). So there, "parse, don't validate" is the norm and not a tip/idea that would need to gain traction.