You see, diversity of rendering engines isn’t actually in itself the point. What’s really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?
Stuart responds to a post from Brian that was riffing off a post of mine from a while back. I like this kind of social network.
This is a lovely little interview with Cassie—it really is an honour and a privilege to work with her!
You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.
This is a damning and all-too typical example of what it’s like for someone to trying to get to grips with the current state of the JavaScript ecosystem:
Note that John is a computer scientist that knows a fair bit about the Web: He had Node & npm installed, he knew what MIME types are, he could start a localhost when needed. What hope do actual novices have?
I think it’s even worse than that. Not only are potential new devs being put off ever getting started, I know plenty of devs with experience who have pushed out by the overwhelming and needless complexity of the modern web’s toolchain. It’s like a constant gaslighting where any expression of unease is summarily dismissed as being the whinings of “the old guard” who just won’t get with the programme.
John gives up. Concludes never to touch Node, npm, or ES6 modules with a barge pole.
The End.
(Just watch as Lea’s post gets written off as an edge case.)
It went unnamed by Doris Lessing and Cormac McCarthy. William Gibson called it The Jackpot:
On the one hand, naming the crisis allows one to apprehend it, grasp it, fight back against it. On the other hand, no word can fully encompass it, and any term is necessarily a reduction—the essence of “it” or “change” is not any singular instance but rather their constancy.
Memoirs Of A Survivor, The Peripheral, Parable Of The Sower, New York 2140, The Road, Children Of Men, Station Eleven, Severance, The Rapture, Ridley Walker:
Fiction can portray ecologies, timescales, catastrophes, and forms of violence that may be otherwise invisible, or more to the point, unnameable. We will never grasp the pandemic in its entirety, just like we will never see the microbe responsible for it with the naked eye. But we can try to articulate how it has changed us—is changing us.
2010 was quite a year:
And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.
Nothing’s been quite the same since.
I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.