| 5th | 10th | 15th | 20th | 25th | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12am | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4am | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8am | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 12pm | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4pm | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 8pm |
My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.
A beautiful interactive visualisation of every paper published in Nature.
I use Apple’s Mail app for my email so this is very handy:
An email tracker, read receipt and spy pixel blocker plugin for macOS Apple Mail.
The web is so much bigger than the little boxes we try to put it in. The web is good at many things and not great (yet) at others. The web is a snowball rolling down hill, absorbing other technologies along the way. The web is an interactive window across space and time, a near instant connection to anyone on the planet. The web is something different. I wish we’d see the web more for itself, not defined by its nearest neighbor or navel-gazing over some hypothetical pathway we could have gone down decades ago.
This is a really nice introduction to CSS transitions with interactive demos you can tinker with.
One of the other arguments we hear in support of the SPA is the reduction in cost of cyber infrastructure. As if pushing that hosting burden onto the client (without their consent, for the most part, but that’s another topic) is somehow saving us on our cloud bills. But that’s ridiculous.
A thorough deep dive into generated content in CSS.
This is a terrific approach to tackling cross-site surveillance. I’d love it to be implemented in all browsers. I can imagine Safari implementing this. Chrome …we’ll see.
We need engineers, we need designers, and we absolutely need design engineers to make that connection across the great divide between the front-of-the-front-end and the back-of-the-front-end. It’s only then that we can make truly great things together.
Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.
Here’s a seven-year old post by Snook—this design engineer thing is not new.
Such an elegant idea!
Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
Small pieces, loosely joined.
Thirty years later, it is easy to overlook the web’s origins as a tool for sharing knowledge. Key to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision were open standards that reflected his belief in the Rule of Least Power, a principle that choosing the simplest and least powerful language for a given purpose allows you to do more with the data stored in that language (thus, HTML is easier for humans or machines to interpret and analyze than PostScript). Along with open standards and the Rule of Least Power, Tim Berners-Lee wanted to make it easy for anyone to publish information in the form of web pages. His first web browser, named Nexus, was both a browser and editor.
I’m excited by this documentary project from John! The first video installment features three historic “pages”:
Hana recounts the preparation she did for an online presentation, including some advice from me. I’m right in the middle of preparing my own online presentation right now, and I should really heed that advice. But I fear what I told Hana was “do as I say, not as I do.”
These definitions work for me:
A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.
A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.
chef’s kiss!
(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries
)
Favicons are snitches.
Increasingly, I think UX doesn’t live up to its original meaning of “user experience.” Instead, much of the discpline today, as it’s practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.
UX is now “user exploitation.”
Heydon keeps on producing more caustically funny videos that are made for me. After the last one about progressive enhancement, this one is about the indie web.
This is the story of the birth of the web, its loss of innocence, its decline, and what we can do to make it a bit less gross.
SETI—the Search for Extra Terrestrial Information processing:
What we get is a computational device surrounding the Asymptotic Giant Branch star that is roughly the size of our Solar System.
The problem with developing front end projects isn’t that it’s harder or more complicated, it’s that you made it harder and more complicated.
Yes! THIS!
Web development did not change. Web development grew. There are more options now, not different options.
You choose complexity. You can also choose simplicity.
Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components.
During the workshop, several online publishers indicated that if it weren’t for the privileged position in the Google Search carousel given to AMP content, they would not publish in that format.
I can relate to the sentiment.
Starting a new project? Make sure to write your project idea down because by the time you are finished setting up the vast boilerplate you have probably forgotten it.
League tables for the game of probe-throwing currently underway in our solar system.
The league covers expensive hardware lob matches held between planets in the Solar System. Two dwarf planets have recently been admitted to the league and lost their first matches against league champions Team Earth.
Sounds like some convergent thinking with the ideas behind Utopia.
I think that the idea that that any typographic attribute (including variable font parameters) can be a function (linear, exponential, stepped, Bezier, random, or otherwise) of any given input variable (user preference, screen dimensions, connection speed, time of day, display language, or whatever else) is an incredibly powerful one, and worth exploring as an aesthetic as well as a technical proposition.
Here’s a demo you can play with.
All of these graphic design books, magazines, and type specimens are available for perusal on the Internet Archive.
The right coding language, system architecture, or interface design will vary wildly from project to project. But there are characteristics particular to software that consistently cause traditional management practices to fail, while allowing small startups to succeed with a shoestring budget:
- Reusing good software is easy; it is what allows you to build good things quickly;
- Software is limited not by the amount of resources put into building it, but by how complex it can get before it breaks down; and
- The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.
Understanding these characteristics may not guarantee good outcomes, but it does help clarify why so many projects produce bad outcomes. Furthermore, these lead to some core operating principles that can dramatically improve the chances of success:
- Start as simple as possible;
- Seek out problems and iterate; and
- Hire the best engineers you can.