Link archive: June, 2013

Hot Topics Panel with Jeremy Keith - Mobilism 2013, Day 2, Afternoon, Final session on Vimeo

The closing hot topics panel I moderated at this year’s Mobilism conference in Amsterdam, featuring Remy, Wilto, Jake, and Dan.

Why the Web Doesn’t Need Another CSS Zen Garden - YouTube

A great history lesson from Dave.

Ah, I remember when the CSS Zen Garden was all fields. Now get off my CSS lawn.

timg

This is a really nice and simple idea: view photos from a specific place taken at a specific time. Voyeuristic fun.

U.S. Seemingly Unaware of Irony in Accusing Snowden of Spying : The New Yorker

Not The Onion.

B612 Foundation

Defending Earth against asteroids, just like the Spaceguard organisation described in Rendezvous With Rama.

Detect. Deflect. Defend.

Words

I love this. I love this sooooo much! The perfect reminder of what makes the web so bloody great:

You and I have been able to connect because I wrote this and you’re reading it. That’s the web. Despite our different locations, devices, and time-zones we can connect here, on a simple HTML page.

Web Fonts and the Critical Path - Ian Feather

The battle between web fonts and performance. Ian Feather outlines some possible solutions, but of course, as always, the answer is “it depends”.

‘Kitten kitten kitten kittens’ — I.M.H.O. — Medium

This is what Medium is for.

If you want to read some of Dan Catt’s lesser thoughts, he has his own blog.

The Motherfuton News

Pretty motherfuton funny.

Improving Reality 2013

The line-up for this year’s Improving Reality conference looks great (as always).

It’s the day before dConstruct so why not come on down to Brighton a day early and double your fun?

scificorridorarchive.com by Serafín Álvarez, 2013

Corridors in science fiction films.

DRM and HTML5: it’s now or never for the Open Web

Dr Harry Halpin writing in the Guardian about the crucial crossroads that we have reached with the very real possibility of DRM mechanisms becoming encoded within HTML:

Most of us are simply happy to launch our browsers and surf the web without a second thought as to how the standards like HTML are created. These standards are in the hands of a fairly small set of standards bodies that have in general acted as responsible stewards for the last few years. The issue of DRM in HTML may be the turning point where all sorts of organisations and users are going to stop taking the open web for granted.

Is Google dumping open standards for open wallets?

Google’s track record is not looking good. There seems to be a modus operandi of bait-and-switch: start with open technologies (XMPP, CalDav, RSS) and then once they’ve amassed a big enough user base, ditch the standards.

How to get your tweets displaying on your website using JavaScript, without using new Twitter 1.1 API

A little piece of JavaScript to strip out the styling from Twitter widgets.

Oh, no! How horrid! Now Twitter won’t control the “user experience” of that widget!

Instead, the person who actually posted the tweets in the first place gets to decide how they should be displayed. Crazy idea, isn’t it?

Leveraging Advanced Web Features in Responsive Design

A terrific case study in progressive enhancement: starting with a good ol’ form that works for everybody and then adding on features like Ajax, SVG, the History API …the sky’s the limit.

The Internet of Actual Things on The Morning News

A vision of neurotic network-enabled objects, as prototyped by dConstruct speaker Simone Rebaudengo.

What’s Holding Up The Internet Of Things

This echoes what Scott Jenson has been saying: the current trend with connected devices is far too reliant on individual proprietary silos instead of communicating with open standards.

So instead of talking directly to one another, devices on today’s nascent Internet of Things now communicate primarily with centralized servers controlled by a related developer or vendor. That works, after a fashion, but it also leads to a bunch of balkanized subnetworks in which devices can communicate perfectly well with each other - but can’t actually talk to devices on any other balkanized subnetwork.

Here is to ones who see things differently

An interesting observation on the changes in Apple’s advertising campaigns: it’s no longer about “here’s how great you (the user) can be”, instead it’s increasingly about “here’s how great we (the company) can be.”

A Few Notes on the Culture by Iain M Banks

I’ve linked to this before, but with the death of Iain M Banks it’s worth re-reading this fascinating insight into The Culture, one of science fictions’s few realistic utopias.

The brief mention here of The Culture’s attitude to death is apt:

Philosophy, again; death is regarded as part of life, and nothing, including the universe, lasts forever. It is seen as bad manners to try and pretend that death is somehow not natural; instead death is seen as giving shape to life.

Loon for All – Project Loon – Google

Google’s plan to bring internet connectivity to remote areas by using balloons wafting in the stratosphere.

Considering that Google seems to put as much time and effort into its April Fool’s jokes as it does into its real projects, you’d be forgiven for assuming this was a spoof.

Jeremy Keith – Beyond Tellerrand – beyond tellerrand 2013 on Vimeo

I gave the opening keynote at the Beyond Tellerand conference a few weeks back. I’m talked about the web from my own perspective, so expect excitement and anger in equal measure.

This was a new talk but it went down well, and I’m quite happy with it.

Silicon Valley through a PRISM · Ben Ward

Ben is rightly worried by the blasé attitude in the tech world to the PRISM revelations. Perhaps that attitude stems from a culture of “log everything by default”?

I think there’s a deep rooted trait within this industry that sedates the outrage. That is the normality, complicity, and dependency on ‘surveillance’ in the software we make.

The true web « Snarkmarket

The web’s walled gardens are threatened by the decentralised power of RSS.

Google is threatened by RSS. Google is closing down Google Reader.

Twitter is threatened by RSS. Twitter has switched off all of its RSS feeds.

Fuck ‘em.

It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. It lacks a kill switch.

Jeremy Keith - What We Talk About When We Talk About The Web on Vimeo

My presentation from the Industry conference in Newcastle a little while back, when I stepped in for John Allsopp to deliver the closing talk.

Common mistakes in smartphone sites

Good news from Google: it’s going to start actively penalising sites for perpetrating the worst practices for mobile e.g. redirecting a specific “desktop” URL to a the homepage of the mobile site, or for shoving a doorslam “download our app” message at users.

I wish that we could convince people not to do that crap on the basis of it being, well, crap. But when all else fails, saying “Google says so” carries a lot of weight (see also: semantics, accessibility, yadda, yadda, yadda).

The New Aesthetic: James Bridle’s Drones and Our Invisible, Networked World in Vanity Fair

James gets profiled in Vanity Fair …which is, frankly, kind of weird.

It’s also so bizarre to read about his SXSW New Aesthetic panel as being such a pivotal moment: there weren’t that many of us in the room.

Iain M Banks’ Universe

Francis Spufford—author of the excellent Backroom Boffins—writes a cover story for the New Humanist magazine remembering Iain Banks with the middle initial M firmly to the fore: it was Iain M Banks—and his creation, The Culture—that took the seemingly passé genre of space opera to new heights.

The Extensible Web Manifesto

An intriguing initiative to tighten up the loop between standards development and implementation.

Other flexible media: balloons and tattoos

Vasilis considers the inherent flexibility and unknowability of web design.

I tried to come up with other fields that need to design things for a flexible canvas, in the hope of finding inspiration there. The only media types I could come up with was the art of balloon printing and the art of tattooing.

Request Quest

A terrific quiz about browser performance from Jake. I had the pleasure of watching him present this in a bar in Amsterdam—he was like a circus carny hoodwinking the assembled geeks.

I guarantee you won’t get all of this right, and that’s a good thing: you’ll learn something. If you do get them all right, either you are Jake or you are very, very sad.

The thing and the whole of the thing: on DRM in HTML

A great post by Stuart on the prospect of DRM-by-any-other-name in HTML.

The argument has been made that if the web doesn’t embrace this stuff, people won’t stop watching videos: they’ll just go somewhere other than the web to get them, and that is a correct argument. But what is the point in bringing people to the web to watch their videos, if in order to do so the web becomes platform-specific and unopen and balkanised?

James Somers – Web developer money

A well-written piece on the nature of work and value on the web, particularly in the start-up economy.

Line-mode browser dev days at CERN

Squee! I’m going to CERN on the 19th and 20th of September to take part in this hackday-like project to recreate the first line-browser.

If you want to help out, fill in the application form.

Deep dive into the murky waters of script loading

Jake casts a scrutinising eye over the way that browsers load and parse scripts …and looks at what we can do about it.

Experience Rot

Jared explains how adding new features can end up hurting the user experience.

Best Practices for Designing a Pragmatic RESTful API by Vinay Sahni

Design principles for APIs.

An API is a user interface for developers. Put the effort in to ensure it’s not just functional but pleasant to use.

Auto-Forwarding Carousels, Accordions Annoy Users

Carousels are shit. Auto-animating carousels are really shit. Now proven with science!

2001: A Space Odyssey

A really nice piece on Robert McCall, who was artist-in-residence at NASA and worked as conceptual artist on Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Responsive News — Response-ish Web Design

Details on how the BBC Responsive News team plan to eventually make their m-dot site scale all the way up to be the default site. This “planting a seed” approach works really well, not least for political reasons.

It’s something that The Guardian and The Chicago Tribune are working on too.

Craft a better web.

A new PHP-based content management system. It uses Twig for the templating, which I like.

Advancements in the accessibility of Facebook on Marco’s accessibility blog

It’s great to see the changes that Facebook’s four-person accessibility team have managed to push through.

The State Of Responsive Web Design on Smashing Mobile

A comprehensive look at the current state of things in the world of responsive design, with a look to possible future APIs.