The most important articles ever written about web development

Yesterday, Zach Leatherman and Cloud Cannon released “a historical record of foundational web development blog posts.”

It’s a nice collection of articles that kicked off or documented foundational shifts in how we build for the web, starting with Tim Berners-Lee’s “Cool URI’s don’t change” from back in 1998.

You should go dig through the whole list, but I wanted to pull out a few of the ones that had a huge impact on my career over the last decade or so…

• “Responsive Web Design” by Ethan Marcotte came out when I was just starting out as a web dev, and shaped how I build websites forever.
• “Object-Oriented CSS” by Nicole Sullivan transformed how I write code (and was my suggestion for this list when Zach was putting it together).
• I saw Jeremy Keith’s talk on “Resilient Web Design” before I read the book, and then later Jake Archibald’s “Progressive Enhancement is Still Important.” I will forever be team HTML-first because of them!
• Brad Frost was the first professional web developer I ever talked to, back when I was considering switching careers from HR. A few months after our Skype chat, he published Atomic CSS, which is still a great model for building websites.

You can read the full list here. I’d love to hear what your favorites are!