The State of the Web — the links

An Event Apart Spring Summit is happening right now. I opened the show yesterday with a talk called The State Of The Web:

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I wrote about preparing this talk and you can see the outline on Kinopio. I thought it turned out well, but I never actually know until people see it. So I’m very gratified and relieved that it went down very well indeed. Phew!

Eric and the gang at An Event Apart asked for a round-up of links related to this talk and I was more than happy to oblige. I’ve separated them into some of the same categories that the talk covers.

I know that these look like a completely disconnected grab-bag of concepts—you’d have to see the talk to get the connections. But even without context, these are some rabbit holes you can dive down…

Apollo 8

• Earthrise by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee on Vimeo, 2018.
• Earthrise by Amanda Gorman on YouTube, 2018.
• They Saw Earth From Space. Here’s How It Changed Them by Nadia Drake in National Geographic, 2018.
• Seeing the Whole Earth from Space Changed Everything by Ahmed Kabil for The Long Now Foundation, 2018.

Hypertext

• As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly, 1945.
• The Demo by Douglas Engelbart, 1968.
• Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, 1989.

The World Wide Web

• proposed new tag: IMG by Marc Andreessen to www-talk, 1993.
• What is a Polyfill? by Remy Sharp, 2010.
• Stop solving problems you don’t yet have by Rachel Andrew, 2012.
• Re: More granularity for font-weight? by Håkon Wium Lie to www-style, 2015.
• Clean advertising on adactio.com, 2020.
• 2021 Predictions for UX and Front-End Experts (PDF) by Ire Aderinokun et al. for An Event Apart, 2021.

NASA

• Poppy Northcutt: The Woman Who Took Us to the Stars by Apriya Rai, 2020.
• Katherine Johnson Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly, 2020.
• Margaret Hamilton interview by Zoë Corbyn in The Guardian, 2019.