The World Wide Web

You’ve stumbled upon my working notes. They’re kind of strange, so some context might help.

These notes are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment (Evergreen notes; My morning writing practice). But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment (Work with the garage door up). If a note seems confusing or under-explained, it’s probably because I didn’t write it for you! Sorry—that’s sort of an essential tension of this experiment (Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience).

For now, there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some starting point. You might be interested in §What’s top of mind.

If present trends continue, there is the real chance that articles warning about page bloat could exceed 5 megabytes in size by 2020.

The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.

I would like to anchor the discussion in something more timeless.

To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.

I wonder if I have twenty years of experience making websites, or if it is really five years of experience, repeated four times.

My problem [with Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision], from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is terrible.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you're a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

Different they may seem, search, tags, folders, hyperlinks, and algorithmic recommendations are all really interface ideas trying to address the same fundamental problem: looking for the needle in an information haystack.

...When designing an interface for finding a note in a small pile of personal notes, or building an app to organize a small team’s working documents, most of the “finding stuff” interface ideas are in play. It’s in these situations where I want to make the argument: prefer interfaces that let the user incrementally move towards the right answer over direct search.

Humans are much better at choosing between a few options than conjuring an answer from scratch. We’re also much better at incrementally approaching the right answer by pointing towards the right direction than nailing the right search term from the beginning. When it’s possible to take a “type in a query” kind of interface and make it more incrementally explorable, I think it’s almost always going to produce a more intuitive and powerful interface.

On the visual weariness of the web.

A reproduction of Oliver Byrne’s celebrated work from 1847 plus interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters designed by Nicholas Rougeux.

We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.

I’ve built this little backyard to my website, because every website should have a garden, a backyard, a basement, or any other wild space. Treated with lovely care it grows various experiments in a natural, playful, hypertext way.

What the Web has done to documents it is doing to just about every institution it touches. The Web isn't primarily about replacing atoms with bits so that we can, for example, shop on line or make our supply chains more efficient. The Web isn't even simply empowering groups, such as consumers, that have traditionally had the short end of the stick. Rather, the Web is changing our understanding of what puts things together in the first place

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

A website is a poem that is already in everyone's pocket, a house built from photos of other houses, a book where every chapter is another book where every chapter is another book. In this class we will be studying the poetics of the web: the raw material of HTML, the systemic visuals of CSS, the endless interactive possibilities of Javascript and the browsers, servers, protocols, and infrastructure that holds it all together. Each week we will make websites. We will make small websites that only convey a single, tiny idea. We will make large websites whose clutter and convoluted interlocking pages feel like exploring an abandoned mansion. We will make websites that speak, websites with secrets, and websites that tell one perfectly executed joke. And as we build the web we will also learn its history from the early geocities days to the ways we tried to be fully present over the pandemic, and all the wonderful and useless websites artists have made in between.

Any individual trying to use the Internet for community use at the South Pole, as of October 2023, likely faced:

• Round-trip latency averaging around 750 milliseconds, with jitter between packets sometimes exceeding several seconds.
• Available speeds, to the end-user device, that range from a couple kbps (yes, you read that right), up to 2 mbps on a really good day.
• Extreme congestion, queueing, and dropped packets, far in excess of even the worst oversaturated ISP links or bufferbloat-infested routers back home.
• Limited availability, frequent dropouts, and occasional service preemptions.

These constraints drastically impact the modern web experience! Some of it is unavoidable. The link characteristics described above are truly bleak. But – a lot of the end-user impact is caused by web and app engineering which fails to take slow/intermittent links into consideration.

If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?

What I like about multiplayer cursors, cursor chat, and shared highlighting is that it’s like the opposite of a feature...

It’s not differentiation. It wouldn’t dilute me if you did it too. (But it shouldn’t be a browser feature, it’s part of the site, it’s me designing the vibe for this particular place.)

It doesn’t stand out. If there’s nobody else on this site you wouldn’t even notice.

It should be everywhere. It’s how the web should be.

How a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.

The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.

Radio Garden invites you to explore live radio from around the world.

By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.

According to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.

I’m not a “[full-stack] developer”, regardless of what my last job title says.

I’m not even a front-end developer, thanks to the JavaScript–industrial complex.

I’m a front-of-the-front-end developer, but that’s too long.

So, I’m a web designer. And I also specialise in accessibility, design systems, and design.

...The current landscape of front-end development presents challenges for web designers like me. As I navigate through the complexities of our industry, I will continue to advocate for the importance of expertise in these undervalued areas.

Imagine the internet like a huge neighborhood. There's a lot of folks around, but we rarely bump into each other, right? Kagi's all about humanizing the web and we want to help surface the people behind the posts and stories that zip by. This less known corner of the web is also known as the "small web".

I’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.

When brutalist web design isn’t going all in on rationalism and functionality, it’s laughing in the face of rationalism and functionality. All clear?

The term has grown to encompass approaches that are in many senses at odds with each other. Indeed, Pascal Deville, who founded the Brutalist Websites directory after coining the term in 2014, thinks the style has splintered into three micro-stylistics:

1. Purists,
2. UX minimalists,
3. Anti-ists (or artists).

A Global Design System would centralize common UI components, reduce so much of this unnecessary duplication, integrate with any web-based tech stack, and create a connected vehicle for delivering front-end best practices to the world’s web experiences.

...Thanks to the tireless work of browser folks and standards bodies, I think that by and large we have most HTML elements and primitives in place to make most common web user interfaces. What we need now are more prefabricated UI components that abstract away much of the close-to-the-metal HTML and give developers composed, ready-to-use modules to drop into their projects.

So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

Situated software isn't a technological strategy so much as an attitude about closeness of fit between software and its group of users, and a refusal to embrace scale, generality or completeness as unqualified virtues. Situated software…is personal from its inception. Teachers on the Run worked this way. Everyone knew that Paul and Keren built it. You could only rate Clay and Marianne and Tom and the other ITP professors. You didn't even know it even existed unless you were on the ITP mailing list. The application's lack of generality or completeness, in other words, communicated something – "We built this for you" – that the impersonal facade of RateMyProfessors.com doesn't have and can't fake.

For too long typographic style and its accompanying attention to detail have been overlooked by website designers, particularly in body copy. In years gone by this could have been put down to the technology, but now the web has caught up. The advent of much improved browsers, text rendering and high resolution screens, combine to negate technology as an excuse.

Robert Bringhurst’s book The Elements of Typographic Style is on many a designer’s bookshelf and is considered to be a classic in the field. Indeed the renowned typographer Hermann Zapf proclaims the book to be 'a must for everybody in the graphic arts, and especially for our new friends entering the field.'

In order to allay some of the myths surrounding typography on the web, I have structured this website to step through Bringhurst’s working principles, explaining how to accomplish each using techniques available in HTML and CSS. The future is considered with coverage of CSS3, and practicality is ever present with workarounds, alternatives and compromises for less able browsers.

The "cheap" web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

• Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
• Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
• Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
• Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
• Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
• Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.

I like to think of HTML and CSS like the 2x4 in construction: When the nail gun replaced the hammer or the power drill replaced the screwdriver, they changed the context, speed, and process of building a home—but the 2x4 is still the most stable structure.

And, like building a building, building a website has evolved. There have been browser updates, faster internet speeds, and updates to the coding languages, each bringing new capabilities to working on the web. Yet the simplicity—and the accessibility—of HTML and CSS means that one can still build a functional website without any modern devices.

Generally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:

1. Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
2. Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
3. The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.

The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.

...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.

There was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.

Web Brutalism is one the most 'true' design style that prioritizes functionality over form and effectivity over aesthetics. It comes from the French phrase 'béton brut', which translates to 'raw concrete'. Some people call brutalism 'ugly' and 'gloomy', but it's just a matter of taste.

Beauty hides behind roughness.

In some ways, Web Brutalism is an ancestor of web design — insofar as the sites of the web 1.0 era took the form of their function. After the surge of interest in 10th decades the style's been forgotten a little bit. This gallery serves as a reminder as to how of Web Brutalism's raw unpolished beauty and new forms.

Everything is just a pile of barely working code added on top of previously written barely working code. It keeps growing in size and complexity, diminishing any chance for a change.

To have a healthy ecosystem you need to go back and revisit. You need to occasionally throw stuff away and replace it with better stuff.

...I want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.

I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.

We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.

At some point, we told design they couldn't sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites.

...In a lot of orgs, the people that do design are now UX designers. It's a completely different role with a different budget for head count. They sit on a different team. They're loaned and rotated out to other product teams. They're essentially cut off from their engineering partners.

We all lost when the web design role was split in two

Design is highly technical. Some will view this as a demand that designers who design for the web should learn to code, but I don't necessarily think that's true. What I think this means is that design requires a deep understanding of a subject.

We used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.

We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!

Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?

I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.

In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.

Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?

You probably build websites and think your shit is special. You think your 13 megabyte parallax-ative home page is going to get you some fucking Awwward banner you can glue to the top corner of your site. You think your 40-pound jQuery file and 83 polyfills give IE7 a boner because it finally has box-shadow. Wrong, motherfucker.

If I had to guess where this is all going, I’d say that what an internet platform is actually has already permanently shifted. Instead of apps trying to dominate specific features — a platform for video, a platform for expiring content, a platform for connecting social networking, a platform for livestreaming, a platform for resumes — we’ve already entered a new era of online networks where they all will essentially offer the same services and instead, focus increasingly on specific demographics.

Gardening, but with emojis and less time.

[John Whitehouse's personal site] is like a home in that it’s a collection of many things which are unified only by the person who collected them. I feel as if someone is giving me a tour of their apartment: I’m looking at the papers on his desk, the notes stuck to his fridge, an album of butterfly photos taken by his brother, and so on. Sure, he probably tidied up before I arrived, and he’s choosing what to show me. But nonetheless, entering the space has given me a rich portrait of its occupant. As far as I could find, John doesn’t have a formal “about” page, but he doesn’t need one: I see him far more clearly through the relationships and activities he’s chosen to share.

...I’m talking about this, of course, because I’d like to use “home” as the operative analogy for my own website.

In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.

But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?

What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?

Nowadays, seemingly everyone seems to admit online life is getting worse, both in quality and how dynamic the web used to be. At the same time, we’ve seen big tech platforms and governments be more proactive about making the internet “safer” and more “truthful.” Yet, the problem practically remains the same, if not worse.

A City Is Not a Tree can provide us with some answers. As Alexander argued almost 60 years ago, our minds are inclined to categorize the world as a tree, but an organic society and city actually resembles a semilattice. And just like with a city, organizing the internet like a tree stifles it completely.

Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.

I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.

If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves

Maybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?

During [Mark Boulton's talk on typography at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, he] admonished the audience members who don’t allocate a writing budget to projects. Riffing on his thoughts on art direction he pointed to sites like A Brief Message where the design is driven by the content rather than the content simply filling up a pre-designed template. He makes a good point but, as I said to him later, he’s talking about a certain type of website.

There are some kick-ass designers, such as Mark, Jason and Khoi, who are fortunate to work on editorial sites. There are other equally kick-ass designers, such as Hannah and George, who work on social media sites where the content is written by the audience. In many ways, that second category is more challenging. The designer must somehow create a design that communicates without ever knowing the details of the message. That lack of control might seem like a hindrance but in many ways it simply reflects the inherent lack of control in this medium.

Of course writing is still very important, even on social media sites. Perhaps especially on social media sites. Writing—and by extension, typography—is part of the user interface. One of the reasons why Moo’s design works so well is because Denise writes kick-ass copy as well as crafting great visual designs. Design is about communication and creating the right tone of voice (through words and type) is critical to successful communication—just ask 37 Signals.

Going back to Mark’s example of content-driven design, A Brief Message has published a rather wonderful piece by Dan Saffer called Making Stuff vs. Making Stuff Up in which he argues that design needs to be a craft, not a cerebral exercise.

The evidence seems to back this up. Speaking personally, all of my favourite web designers have one thing in common: they know how to write HTML and CSS. Dan Cederholm, Doug Bowman and Jon Hicks aren’t just markup-literate; they are markup craftsmen. It’s this ability to work hands-on with the raw materials of the Web that allows them to put all the theory of typography, colour and layout into practice.

We rendered over 1 million of the web's top homepages. This is the result.

A succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a button, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when that button is clicked.

It’s like breadcrums. Or bookmarks. But raw-er. These are a quick capture of my journey through the web. I often think of things from weeks ago that I want to refer to. And I’ve found that I haven’t kept the tab open. So it’s impossible.

The practice:

• Notice that I have read it and thought about it.
• Capture it here, with assistance from the Apple Shortcut.
• Actually describe it in my own words. This is just the facts ma’am.
• Add a comment if I have one. This is the place for editorializing or opinionated statements.
• These can be anything, it’s not meant to be something important or whatever. That’s decided later.

The points are to capture it, but include some minimal friction so that I actually stop and notice what I am doing here. Describe it in my own words so that I might remember it better later. And then I’m free to close the tabs, with hopefully somewhat less risk. I hope.

There are some new apps appearing that offer alternative ways of browsing the web...This canvas-based approach adds spatial dimension to the web browsing experience; they allow us to arrange browser windows above, below, to the left, and right of other browser windows.

The same way we're able to put an open book next to a piece of paper and below a row of sticky notes in meatspace. Arranging objects in space to create groupings, indicate relationships, and build hierarchies is one of those classical human skills that never goes out of style.

There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online and in wider culture by utilising a system of bots and paid employees whose job it is to produce content and respond to content online in order to further the agenda of those they are employed by.

Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

Welcome to the Recycle Bin Project.

This is an initiative to keep files in flight.

There's more room for spatial concepts to become part of our web browsing experience.

One example is an idea I call "trails." It's based on the story of Hansel and Gretel walking through the forest and leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind them, so that they could find their way back later. What if you could do this on the web?

A breadcrumb in this case is a single pixel that you can place in a precise location on a webpage. Placing a breadcrumb could be as simple as Option + click. While navigating the web, you could leave breadcrumbs on different pages you find interesting over the course of a browsing session. When you're done, that sequential "trail of breadcrumbs" would be saved. You could then jump back into the trail and navigate "forward" and "backward" through the things you found interesting in that browsing session. Or share the trail with a friend, and they could step through your spatial path of navigating the web.

this metaphor feels so true to me because life, itself, is dependent on water as source. thus, creativity is a form of psychic water — sometimes materialized. these two truths I always knew.

but to extend the water-as-life and water-as-system metaphor to everything in our internet practice — is then to make even the act of sending a newsletter, or hitting “publish” on a post — contain the energy of that which is life-giving, essential, and sacred. in this model, everything is connected. I’ve decided that this is the way I want to be on the internet, and this is the kind of world I want to build.

Companies including TikTok, Google, Netflix and Airbnb have trumpeted “new,” bespoke fonts that are essentially Proxima Nova, with a few token changes. Even Cordova, of “fonts hanging out” fame, might struggle to invent distinct personalities for lookalikes like Airbnb’s Cereal and Google’s Product Sans.

This phenomenon — which one writer dubbed (Garamond voice) “aesthetic consolidation” — isn’t limited to typefaces or fonts. Many designers and critics have griped that a wave of overwhelming sameness has also overtaken mainstream web design and visual culture writ large. 

In 2020, a fascinating study by researchers at Indiana University analyzed the color, layout and style of 10,000 websites and concluded that they’d become markedly more similar since 2010. Logos, web illustrations and product designs also increasingly look the same, as do buildings, cars, home interiors and residential paint choices. Last year, the brand strategist Alex Murrell rounded many of these examples up in a visual essay called “The Age of Average,” which I think about … almost every day. 

“From film to fashion and architecture to advertising, creative fields have become dominated and defined by convention and cliché,” Murrell wrote. “Distinctiveness has died. In every field we look at, we find that everything looks the same.”

TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.

...This gives you a ton of power, because now you can apply all the existing tools on your computer that already know how to deal with files -- terminal commands, scripting languages, point-and-click explorers, etc -- and use them to control and communicate with your browser.

Now you don't need to code up a browser extension from scratch every time you want to do anything. You can write a script that talks to your browser in, like, a melange of Python and bash, and you can save it as a single ordinary file that you can run whenever, and it's no different from scripting any other part of your computer.

I'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.

Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.

A Congress on the Visuality of the Internet

I just want to make some Cheesy Garlic biscuits. Where is the ______ing recipe?

these are all websites i think are lightweight in the feeling-based way — they have a strong concept, are relatively simple, and help me see the world in a new way ... many of them also happen to be literally lightweight, which might flow naturally from their concepts.

That our diplomat’s first impulse is to resort to a self-defeating meme speaks to a broader problem—the sort of cultural problem instinctual reactions to crisis make most clear. This is a problem of an entire generation—my generation. We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, “god tweets,” and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.

I’ve noticed a recent trend on the web — or at least, on the parts of it I’ve visited. Maybe you’ve noticed it too.

Here’s what happens: you’re on a website, and one of these little prompts pops up...[to] let you know that there’s an app, and that the website you’re on...well, it’s not quite the app, is it?

...Sometimes, the website wants me to install the app — no, it needs me to install the app. It’s like a paywall, but for apps. An appwall.

In recent years, these prompts have gotten more prominent, and occasionally impassable. And I think that trend’s interesting. Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website?

It feels like a glimpse into that company’s design priorities. And it’s possibly providing us with insight into the business value they place on the open web — a medium that’s meant to be accessible everywhere, on any screen, on any device.

And it really does feel like these glimpses are becoming more common.

a comic about growing up online

Different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.

The open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities — it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Moses’s planned cities—they often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.

The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.

A browser new type of software for searching healthy thinking on the internet.

Each year for April Fools’, rather than a prank, we like to create a project that explores the way that humans interact at large scales. This year we came up with Place, a collaborative canvas on which a single user could only place a single tile every five minutes. This limitation de-emphasized the importance of the individual and necessitated the collaboration of many users in order to achieve complex creations. Each tile placed was relayed to observers in real-time.

Multiple engineering teams (frontend, backend, mobile) worked on the project and most of it was built using existing technology at Reddit. This post details how we approached building Place from a technical perspective.

Is there a market for Michelin-starred web designers? I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s shrinking.

So why animate that header or spend time building a papier-mâché miniature set to photograph for the footer that few will see?

The same thing that drives a Michelin-starred chef to spend 12 hours agonizing over a difficult preparation for a small cube of food that will be devoured in a 2-second bite. The same reason that got me started in this field in the first place.

For fun, and for the art.

macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit.

In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe.

And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks.

Students traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.

In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.

1. Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
2. Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
3. Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
4. The back button works as expected.
5. View content by scrolling.
6. Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
7. Performance is a feature.

Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."

Find new sites without having to fight through SEO.

This extension finds similar links to a website you're already on. Once installed, all you need to do it browse the web like you already do, and Browser Buddy will recommend links.

The state of the mobile web is not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. People and incentives.

And while I appreciate as much as the next person technology that bypasses people problems — popup blockers, ad blockers, tracking blockers, etc. — I am under no illusion that these don’t solve problems. They treat symptoms.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

...Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed.

Some of the web’s early richness has gradually been getting lost in a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and calls-to-action. “Web brutalism” is a valid reminder that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and stock photos.

I’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.

The only difference between web design in 2004 and 2024 is that websites are now painted in Figma instead of Photoshop.

Some of this is nostalgia for our younger years...but some of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then.

...The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet.

A woodworker works along the grain of the wood to prevent splinter. A butcher slices across to the muscle fiber to improve tenderness. A sailor trims the sail to balance the lift and drag from the wind. When we respect the material, the material pays us back in convenience, safety, and efficiency.

Good web design requires the same understanding of and respect for the materials. And that material is the browser, along with its semantic HTML, default styles, and standard behaviors. But the wide use of design software such as Figma, Sketch, and AdobeXD has trivialized the nuances of such material into “canvases” or “artboards” of pre-defined sizes. The convenient styling and manipulation of pixels and objects have disguised the hierarchy of the DOM, the constraints of the device, and the personal preferences and browser setting from real users. Dishonest tools encourage dishonest design.

We are working against the grain of the wood.

the peculiar case of japanese web design:

• how is it different?
• why is it different?

Think about all the things they've told you that you 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑. HTML is NOT the answer!

🅸🆃 🅸🆂 🅰🅻🅻 🅻🅸🅴🆂!

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.

…Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.

In the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.

So, if you ask me, I’d like the internet to be a place, where people love to stay and play.

But with the same passion to leave for a comeback.

I think the right path forward is to stop assuming there will be some amazing site to rule them all, where you’ll suddenly achieve virality and become rich and an infinitely large following. The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.

What I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.

Much of the modern web makes me sad and I feel like I’m screaming into the wind. Every broken contact form or booking site is a truly spectacular own-goal. If your calendar was a bunch of progressively enhanced checkboxes and a submit button, you could be riding off into the sunset and counting money instead of taking support calls from frustrated octogenarians. And it’s hard for me to shut up about that.

I care. I really do. That’s why I’m mad sometimes.

In the early 1980s in Japan, a movement called mini-FM blossomed: a thousand tiny radio stations broadcast over just half a mile each.

One of the first stations was Radio Home Run, broadcast by Tetsuo Kogawa and his students from 1983–1996 in the Shimokitazawa neighbourhood of Tokyo.

...The intention was to change broadcast: The area that a one-watt transmitter covers is within walking or bicycling distance.

And so that early station Radio Home Run became a collective experience:

Radio Home Run transformed listeners into producers by inviting people tuning in to physically travel to the station’s nearby studio.

HyperCard is a programming environment that can create applications as diverse as utilities and games by linking “cards” arranged into “stacks.” Commands are executed through a natural-language scripting language called HyperTalk.

The software has been phenomenally successful and highly influential. But Atkinson feels that if only he’d realized separate cards and stacks could be linked on different people’s machines through the Net — instead of cards and stacks on a particular machine — he would have created the first Internet browser.

I have realized over time that I missed the mark with HyperCard. I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I’d grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser.

...I thought everyone connected was a pipe dream. Boy was I wrong.

A few weeks ago, I read an offhand comment somewhere (I cannot for the life of me remember where) that said…

The web is still mostly just links and forms.

It’s really stuck with me as I here people argue about how you need all of this heavy, buggy tooling to build for the web because “we’re building apps, not websites.”

Because here’s the thing: a vast majority of web apps are mostly just websites.

Today I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.

Since at least 2015, building JavaScript-first websites has been a predictably terrible idea, yet most of the sites I trace on a daily basis remain mired in script. For these sites, we have to factor in the heavy cost of running JavaScript on the client when describing how much content we can afford. HTML, CSS, images, and fonts can all be parsed and run at near wire speeds on low-end hardware, but JavaScript is at least three times more expensive, byte-for-byte.

Most sites, even those that aspire to be "lived in", feature short median sessions, which means we can't actually justify much in the way of up-front code, and first impressions always matter.

3: The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
20: Have some personality.
27: Minimalism is garbage.
35: Metaphors are fantastic.
36: Naming things is fantastic.
41: Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
69: The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
70: Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
72: A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
83: The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.

After asking about the origin of online handles, I heard back from a number of folks and loved the stories.

It’s fascinating to see an online name like “Apple Annie”, read the origin story, and see this wonderful, multi-faceted human being with a rich history behind the seemingly-random string of characters on screen.

It makes the internet more human and I love it.

The experience we have using the web deserves our attention; when the web loses, we lose too.

The front web is systematically undermined, and the main targets are precisely the aspects that make the web a powerful medium.

While these attacks are systematic, I'm not sure how conscious and intentional they are: are we never satisfied with what we have and we keep trying to improve it, or are we just “breaking things”?

Whether we are breaking things around or trying to improve the front web, what is clear to me is that instead of getting the most of it, we just keep making it heavy, inaccessible, unmanageable, and offering a very bad UX. It is hard to say who is benefiting from these attempts.

Sunday postcards with links to the quiet, odd, and poetic web.

I think curation, actual human curation, is going to play an important role in the future. In a web filled with generated nonsense, content curated by knowledgeable human beings is going to be incredibly valuable.

I find this current phase of the web incredibly interesting. I have no idea how things will evolve but I’m glad I can be part of it, even just as an external observer.

Too much has been lost already.
The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Links work seamlessly until they don’t.
And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge—
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.

The web is always changing and that’s one of my favorite things about it. But there’s a unique sadness in visiting a URL and seeing a 404 where your work once was.

I make websites for a living and most of the time it’s for companies. I don’t have any delusion about who owns that work. Don Draper voice: “That’s what the money is for!”

But that work is still also mine: the product of my brain and hands working together in the way only mine do. I made it a requirement that any job I take allows me to say so. But in the end, the code, the artwork, the domain—it belongs to them.

Companies change. They grow, have layoffs, pivot. They get acquired, they close up shop. And as team members rotate and domains expire, you see more and more of your work disappear.

I don’t have any solutions here, just thoughts and feelings about things I mostly have no control over. I feel hopeful about renewed enthusiasm for personal sites and blogs over platforms, but for most of my work, it’s just out of my hands.

There may be a lot of things that have to be studied, but there is also what I call "occupational therapy for the opposition" that says, send them off to do some more pushups on the internet. You need to be mindful that it is possible to use information, and the need for information, as a delay for the call for action.

This is a silly idea and should in no way be used for anything sensible.

One of the reasons XML (and XHTML) fell out of favour is that they are unforgiving. Miss a /? Your site is broken. Forget to close an element? Your site is broken. Incorrectly escape something? Your site is broken. Mismatched elements? Your site is broken.

HTML, by contrast, is rendered by engines which are tolerant. Made a mistake in your HTML? The browser will do its best to display the page.

One area where XML and XSL shine is if you are working with highly structured and regular data and want to display it in a more human-friendly way.

But, nowadays, there's very little reason to use XML for display purposes. Unless you want to get frustrated.

This webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.

One thing I’d love to change about how people see their website content is the idea that this is work that can be ‘finished’.

...Your website and content should always be a work in progress and always on your priority list. When you get into this mindset, you're opening the door to continuous improvements. You don't have to be making huge changes all the time. It could just be small incremental changes, like removing things that are out-of-date, improving the wording and usability based on feedback, or adding new content once in a while.

if you search for “lightweight websites” on the web, you will come across very utilitarian definitions of what lightweight sites are — small or even smaller in file size. this is great — as i am all for a web that is quickly loading, good for the environment, and accessible — but this is a very literal definition.

for this workshop, i want to extend the definition of lightweightness to a more literary or feeling-based one. i think lightweightness is about seeing the world in a new way.

Internet gardening evokes thoughts of the other side of the web: where you are on your own land, cultivating the thoughts on your mind. Letting ideas grow.

I like this metaphor [from James G] for personal websites and not just “digital gardens” because there are so many styles* and approaches to gardening, and everyone’s working with different constraints of weather and water and soil. I feel like we’ve gone through the formal garden equivalent of personal websites in the form of lookalike portfolio websites, and now we’re ready for the more naturalistic Piet Oudalf style (my aesthetic preference 😉).

Collections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.