She Built a Microcomputer Empire From Her Suburban Home
The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.
The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.
“And so what we did is we started looking at, internally, all of the places where we’re using web technology — so all of our internal web UIs — and realized that they were just really unacceptably slow.”
Why were they slow? The answer: React.
“We realized that our performance, especially on low-end machines, was really terrible — and that was because we had adopted this React framework, and we had used React in probably one of the worst ways possible.”
Recall undermines trust, and once an institution loses trust it’s really hard to regain it.
Here’s a nice HTML web component that uses structured data in the markup to populate a Leaflet map.
Personally I’d probably use microformats rather than microdata, but the princple is the same: progressive enhancement from plain old HTML to an interactive map.
The EU is not the FCC. I wish every American tech pundit would read and digest this explainer before writing their thinkpieces.
It’s very common for US punditry to completely misunderstand the EU and analyse it as if it were a US political entity – imagining that its actions are driven by the same political and social dynamics as a protectionist industry within the US.
‘Sfunny, I’d been meaning to write a blog post on exactly this topic, but Tyler says it all …and that’s before Apple’s scandalous shenanigans.
It’s a dream team of former Clearlefties: Harry and Cennydd joined forces to investigate and write an in-depth report looking into deceptive design practices used by Microsoft to stop people changing their default browser from Edge. They don’t pull their punches:
We judge that Microsoft cannot justify the use of these techniques, and should stop using them immediately. If they do not, we would welcome – where the law provides for it – regulatory intervention to protect against these harms.
Here’s a good walkthrough of adding microformats to your site, starting with h-card
and moving on to h-entry
.
These updated definitions makes sense to me:
- Newly available. The feature is marked as interoperable from the day the last core browser implements it. It marks the moment when developers can start getting excited and learning about a feature.
- Widely available. The feature is marked as having wider support thirty months or 2.5 years later. It marks the moment when it’s safe to start using a feature without explicit cross-browser compatibility knowledge.
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
From Patrick Tanguay:
A list of small micro-publishers — most of them run by one person — putting out great content through their websites, newsletters, and podcasts.
Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.
The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.
But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.
10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.
We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.
We’ve enjoyed a relatively long period when we didn’t have to think about which browser to use. Alas, that period is ending: I must now keep Chrome running all the time, much like I needed that PC in the early 2000s.
I really enjoyed this trip down memory lane with Chris:
From the Web’s inception, an ancient to contemporary history of the Web.
The latest edition in this wonderful series of science-fictional typography has some truly twisty turbolift tangents.
Ariel gave a TED talk and it’s mind-blowingly good!
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:
For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.
I absolutely love this in-depth history of the web, written in a snappy, snarky tone.
In the beginning, there was no CSS.
This was very bad.
Even if you—like me—lived through all this stuff, I guarantee there’ll still be something in here you didn’t know.