Link archive: September, 2015

Project Apollo Archive on Flickr

This is so, so wonderful—hundreds and hundreds of photographs from all of the Apollo missions. Gorgeous!

The shots of Earth take my breath away.

The InterPlanetary File System Wants to Create a Permanent Web | Motherboard

I’m getting increasingly intrigued by the IPFS protocol and its potential for long-term digital preservation.

How can we fix internet comments?

Here’s an interesting approach to making comments more meaningful:

Instead of blindly publishing whatever people submit, we first ask them to rate the quality and civility on 3 randomly-selected comments, as well as their own. It’s a bit more work for the commenter, but the end result is a community built on trust and respect, not harassment and abuse.

18F — Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards

The story behind the newly-released pattern library for the US government.

What “UX Design doesn’t exist” means to me — Cennydd Bowles

I completely agree with Cennydd (and Peter, and Leisa). If anyone working on a project—whether they’re a designer, developer, or anything else—isn’t considering the user experience, then what’s the point of even being there? By extension, labelling your work as “UX Design” is as redundant and pointless as labelling it “Good Design.”

But my complaint is with the label, not the activities. It’s the UX Design label that has little value for me. These activities happen in all good design: if you’re not trying to create positive experience then I don’t really understand what you are doing.

Andy Budd, Unsung Hero No.51 - Brighton Source

An interview with Andy, reminiscing about the early days of Clearleft.

WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project

Sometimes it’s nice to step back and look at where all this came from. Here’s Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal from 1990.

The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one.

The Ethos of the Web | degrading disgracefully

This is a wonderful, wonderful description of what it feels like to publish on your own site.

When my writing is on my own server, it will always be there. I may forget about it for a while, but eventually I’ll run into it again. I can torch those posts or save them, rewrite them or repost them. But they’re mine to rediscover.

An Event Apart News: Enhance! by Jeremy Keith—An Event Apart video

Here’s the video of the talk I gave at An Event Apart last year.

Guess what it’s about. Go on, guess!

No! It’s about progressive enha… oh.

What Happens Next Will Amaze You

I refuse to believe that this cramped, stifling, stalkerish vision of the commercial Internet is the best we can do.

HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web

The title is hyperbolic, and while I certainly think that the criticisms of HTTP here are justified, I don’t think it will be swept aside by IPFS—I imagine more of a peaceful coexistence. Still, there’s some really good thinking in here and this is well worth paying attention to.

Russell Davies: Designing for accountability, designing for broken-ness

One failure mode is ‘I have run out of paper’, another is ‘my data has been sold to a company I don’t trust’, another is ‘my country has been invaded and they’ve seized all the servers’.

These are things to be designed for. These are user needs too. They have to be embraced.

Designing The Future, John V Willshire, dConstruct 2015 on Vimeo

Just like Nick, John Willshire has put his slides together with the audio from his gobsmackingly good dConstruct presentation on metadesign.

The Future Mundane on Vimeo

Nick Foster has put the audio of his fantastic dConstruct talk together with his slides.

It’s a terrific, thought-provoking presentation, superbly delivered …and it even has some relevance to progressive enhancement! (you’ll know what I mean if you watch/listen to the whole thing)

More Proof We Don’t Control Our Web Pages, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Aaron collects some recent examples that demonstrate

1. why we should use HTTPS and
2. why we should use progressive enhancement.

Clearleft 10th birthday party | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

We celebrated ten years of Clearleft’s existence this weekend. A splendid time was had by all!

dConstruct : dconstruct2015 on Huffduffer

All the audio from dConstruct 2015 is now available for your huffduffing, podcasting, listening pleasure.

The conference was on Friday. Today is Monday. Drew knows what he’s doing.

How To Organise Your Library

John expands on just one part of his superbly dense and entertaining dConstruct talk.

Diversity Scholarships for ffconf

Remy and Julie are paying for diversity scholarships to Full Frontal on November 6th …including travel and accommodation costs.

The deadline for applications is October 2nd. If you know of someone who would benefit from this, please let them know.

A Hypocrite’s Guide to Public Speaking - YouTube

Some great advice from Zach Leatherman in this …presentation (I almost said “talk”, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate).

The CompuServe of Things

We need the Internet of Things to be the next step in the series that began with the general purpose PC and continued with the Internet and general purpose protocols—systems that support personal autonomy and choice. The coming Internet of Things envisions computing devices that will intermediate every aspect of our lives. I strongly believe that this will only provide the envisioned benefits or even be tolerable if we build an Internet of Things rather than a CompuServe of Things.

Locus Online Perspectives » Cory Doctorow: What If People Were Sensors, Not Things to be Sensed?

Imagine a location service that sold itself on the fact that your personal information was securely contained in its environs, used by you and you alone. You could have devices on your person that used their sensors to know things about you – when you last ate, what your dining preferences are, what your blood-sugar is, and so on, but these devices would have no truck with the cloud, and they would not deliver that information to anyone else for analysis.

The Web is Ruined and I Ruined it by David Siegel

Here’s a classic. David Siegel—of Creating Killer Websites fame—outlines exactly why he turned his back on that 1×1 spacer .gif trick he invented.

The anatomy of responsive images - JakeArchibald.com

This is the best moment to write a blog post:

I just had my responsive images epiphany and I’m writing it all down before I forget everything.

Writing something down (and sharing it) while you’re still figuring it out is, in my opinion, more valuable than waiting until you’ve understood something completely—you’ll never quite regain that perspective on what it’s like to have beginner’s mind.

The tough truth of reality by Chris Taylor

Progressive enhancement is not about “what if users turn JavaScript off” but “what happens when the page is loaded in sub-optimal circumstances”.

Where to Put Your Search Role by Adrian Roselli

This is a very handy tip. I had been putting form role="search" all over The Session. Turns out that’s overriding the default role of “form”. Oops!

GOV.UK elements

I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.