Links

Here’s what I didn’t know about :where() - Manuel Matuzović

I feel like I’m starting to understand how the CSS :where pseudo-class works and why it’s useful. The cogs are slowly turning in my brain.

Make Free Stuff | Max Böck

At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.

No, Apple Did Not Crowdfund :focus-visible in Safari – Eric’s Archived Thoughts

Eric has a written a clear and measured explanation that I hope Alex and Jake will read, given their petty snarky reactions to Webkit shipping a feature (reactions that do more harm than good to their cause—refuting their bullshit has taken time and energy away from the legitimate criticisms of Apple’s rendering engine monopoly on iOS; this whole debacle has been one big distraction from far more important browser bugs).

Many of us are mad at Apple for a lot of good reasons, but please don’t let the process of venting that anger tar the goals and achievements of Open Prioritization.

Interfacecritique — Olia Lialina: From My To Me

Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.

Wiki History Game

This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.

How to Increase Reach Into Your Total Addressable Market With Zero Marketing - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This checks out.

A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet - Eager Blog

A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.

The computer built to last 50 years | ploum.net

A fascinating look at what it might take to create a truly sunstainable long-term computer.

It’s not still the early days

If you’re interested in so-called web3, you should definitely follow Molly White.

How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? How long must the laymen, who are so eagerly hustled into blockchain-based projects that promise to make them millionaires, be scolded as though it is their fault when they are scammed as if they should be capable of auditing smart contracts themselves?

The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.

The monoculture web

Firefox as the asphyxiating canary in the coalmine of the web.

Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - Farnam Street

Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong.

Norton

It me.

Occasionally, I wonder whether I’ve got it all wrong. Is my age, my technical unsophistication, or my fond remembrance of an internet unencumbered by commerce blinding me to the opportunities that crypto offers me? But then I read something terrible and I recant my doubts, meditate for a while and get on with my life.

Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are

Blockchain technologies have somehow managed to land in the worst of both worlds—decentralized but not really, immutable but not really.

A great analysis of the system of smoke and mirrors that constitutes so-called web3:

Instead of being at the mercy of the “big tech” companies like Amazon and Google that monopolize the traditional way of doing things on the web, you are now at the mercy of a few other tech companies that are rapidly monopolizing the blockchain way of doing things.

Friendly Indie micro-publishers

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.

Are apps even that relevant anymore? | Tiny Projects

In most cases, a great mobile website does the trick. You don’t need an app, or the app store. We already have a pretty great app store and you’re browsing it right now.

Ban embed codes

Prompted by my article on third-party code, here’s a recommendation to ditch any embeds on your website.

How Flexbox Works

A really deep dive into flexbox. This is a great example of what I categorise as “thinking like a browser” (a skill I recommend for any front-end developer).

The Optional Chaining Operator, “Modern” Browsers, and My Mom - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is something I bump against over and over again: so-called evergreen browsers that can’t actually be updated because of operating system limits.

From what I could gather, the version of Chrome was tied to ChromeOS which couldn’t be updated because of the hardware. No new ChromeOS meant no new Chrome which meant stuck at version 76.

But what about the iPad? I discovered that my Mom’s iPad was a 1st generation iPad Air. Apple stopped supporting that device in iOS 12, which means it was stuck with whatever version of Safari last shipped with iOS 12.

So I had two older browsers that couldn’t be updated. It was device obsolescence because you couldn’t install the latest browser.

Websites stop working and the only solution is to buy a whole new device.

The Technium: Ideas Want to be Shared

The books I have written are created from words invented by others, filled with ideas created by others. Even the few new ideas that are new depend on older ideas to work. What I had to say would probably be said by someone else not long after me. (More probably there have already been said by someone I was not aware of.) I may be the lucky person to claim those rare new ideas, but the worth of my art primarily resides in the great accumulation of the ideas and works of thousands of writers and thinkers before me — what I call the commons. My work was born in the commons, it gets its value by being deeply connected to the commons, and after my brief stewardship of those tiny new bits, it should return to the commons as fast as possible, in as many ways as possible.

Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3

A balanced, even-handed look at actually using so-called web3 technology. It turns out that even if you leave the ethical and environmental concerns aside, the technological underpinning are, um, troublesome to say the least.