The history of ‘this website is well-crafted’ hints | Holovaty.com

This page is under construction - localghost

I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.

Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.

Justified Text: Better Than Expected? – Cloud Four

Some interesting experiments in web typography here.

Progressive enhancement brings everyone in - The History of the Web

This is a great history of the idea of progressive enhancement:

It is an idea that has been lasting and enduring for two decades, and will continue.

Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:

The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).

The Neverending Story

Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.