DevTools Articles

Who invented JSON? Douglas Crockford's 'discovery' of an existing format

JSON vs XML — the war that shaped modern APIs

The $1B JSON bug — how a missing comma crashed Knight Capital

JSON5, JSONC, NDJSON — the variants you've never heard of

Why JSON has no comment syntax (and why that was intentional)

The ASCII origin story: 128 characters that built the internet

Why   is the most misunderstood HTML entity

Unicode's 149,000 characters: from emoji to ancient scripts

Mojibake — when encoding goes catastrophically wrong

From SGML to HTML5: 30 years of character encoding evolution

Who invented CSS? Håkon Wium Lie's 1994 proposal that changed the web

The pixel lie: why 1px isn't actually 1 pixel anymore

Retina displays and device pixel ratios — the story behind sharp screens

rem vs em vs px vs vw: a complete history of CSS units

CSS Zen Garden: the one site that proved CSS could do anything

How WCAG was born: the 1999 guidelines that defined web accessibility

The science of contrast: how the human eye distinguishes colors

Famous accessibility failures — brands that got it catastrophically wrong

Color blindness affects 300 million people — how design can help

Apple, Google, and the race to WCAG AAA compliance

The favicon: born by accident in Internet Explorer 5, 1999

How 16×16 pixels became the most scrutinized image on the web

SVG favicons — the modern standard 95% of sites still haven't adopted

The web manifest: why mobile needs more than a favicon

25 years of browser tab icons — a visual history