Link archive: August, 2021

Why are hyperlinks blue?

A wonderful bit of spelunking into the annals of software interfaces by Elise Blanchard.

Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense (Interconnected)

What about a scarf or collar so the back of your neck prickles when somebody is talking about you on Twitter.

Or a ghost detector for homes, restaurants, etc that glows when someone is “visiting” in Google Maps/Facebook Pages or looking through a webcam? Maybe it would be better to control the air conditioning to produce a chill, or play barely audible infrasound, indications that there is a haunting in progress and the veil here is thin.

My love-hate affair with technology | Read the Tea Leaves

A very open and honest post by Nolan on trying to live with technology without sacrificing privacy.

Representation and what happened to women in Tech

Men specialized in hardware while software development was seen as an exciting alternative to secretarial work. In 1967, Cosmopolitan published an article titled The Computer Girls, encouraging young women to pursue careers in computer science. So the curve went up, and continued to do so up until 1984. That’s when personal computers appeared.

Marketing matters:

When Apple released the Macintosh 128K and the Commodore 64 was introduced to the market, they were presented as toys. And, as toys were gendered, they were targeted at boys. We can look at advertisements from that time and quickly find a pattern: fathers and sons, young men, even one where a man is being undressed by two women with the motto Two bytes are better than one. It’s more evident with the ads for computer games; if women appear, they do so sexualized and half-naked. Not that appealing for young girls, one could imagine.

Software Crisis 2.0 – Baldur Bjarnason

Baldur Bjarnason writes an immense treatise on the current sad state of software, grounded in the historical perspective of the past sad state of software.

Letters to the future

On one hand, it shows optimism, hope and compassion for the future of the planet. On the other hand, it shows the ever lasting detriment of our actions when it comes to single-use plastic.

Demystifying Public Speaking by Lara Callender Hogan

Lara’s superb book on public speaking is now available in its entirity for free as a web book!

And a very beautiful web book it is too! All it needs is a service worker so it works offline.

How I experience web today dot com

Truth.

A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment | The MIT Press Reader

From Mary Shelley and Edgar Rice Burroughs to John Brunner, Frank Herbert and J.G. Ballard to Kim Stanley Robinson, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Octavia Butler.

Scope Proposal & Explainer

This detailed proposal from Miriam for scoping CSS is well worth reading—it makes a lot of sense to me.

How Steven Weinberg Transformed Physics and Physicists | Quanta Magazine

His first popular book — The First Three Minutes, about cosmology and the Big Bang — became an instant classic and proved profoundly influential for both the general public and professional researchers. Many physicists, including me, started learning cosmology from this book.

The First Three Minutes blew my little mind as a teenager. It has stayed with me.

Thank You For Reading - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Your attentive kindness doesn’t get picked up by any analytical tool I’ve got other than my heart and my memory—however short lived.

canistilluse.com - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

…you would be forgiven if you saw an API where a feature went from green (supported) to red (unsupported) and you thought: is the browser being deprecated?

That’s the idea behind my new shiny domain: canistilluse.com. I made the site as satire after reading Jeremy Keith’s insightful piece where he notes:

the onus is not on web developers to keep track of older features in danger of being deprecated. That’s on the browser makers. I sincerely hope we’re not expected to consult a site called canistilluse.com.

It’s weirdly gratifying to see a hastily-written sarcastic quip tuned into something real.

Sentence Forms (not Mad Libs) | Adrian Roselli

Apparently the sentence forms that I kicked off with Huffduffer are making a comeback.

Is Safari the new Internet Explorer?

The transcript from the latest episode of the HTTP 203 podcast is well worth perusing.

• Internet Explorer halted development, no innovation. Would you say Safari is the new IE?
• There was loads of stuff missing. Is Safari the new IE?
• My early career was built on knowing the bugs in IE6 and how to solve them. Is Safari the new IE?
• Internet Explorer 6, it had a really slow JavaScript engine, performance was bad in that browser. Is Safari the new IE?
• Internet Explorer had a fairly cavalier attitude towards web standards. Is Safari the new IE?
• Back in the day that we had almost no communication whatsoever. Is Safari the new IE?
• Slow-release cycle. Is Safari the new IE?

MD Nichrome by Mass-Driver

Marvin has some competition! Here’s another beautiful sci-fi variable font:

MD Nichrome is a display typeface based on the typography of paperback science fiction from the 70s and early 80s.

WICG/shared-element-transitions

I’m very excited about this proposal for animating transitions between web pages!

I’m less excited about doing it for single page apps, but I get why it’s the simplest place to start.

This builds on Jake’s earlier proposal which I always thought was excellent and much needed. I’m not the only one. Chris agrees.

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond | The MIT Press

A new biography of Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager. One for the wishlist!

Letters to a Young Technologist

A handsome web book that’s a collection of thoughtful articles on technology, culture, and society by Jasmine Wang, Saffron Huang, and other young technologists:

Letters to a Young Technologist is a collection of essays addressed to young technologists, written by a group of young technologists.

Collecting my thoughts about notation and user interfaces (Interconnected)

HTML sits on a boundary between the machine, the creator, and the reader.

Nestflix

This is so in-depth! Movies and TV shows from within movies and TV shows. All of them are real …I mean, they’re not real, they’re fake—that’s but the point—but they’re all from real movies and TV …ah, never mind.

The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” ❧ Current Affairs

I should emphasize that rejecting longtermism does not mean that one must reject long-term thinking. You ought to care equally about people no matter when they exist, whether today, next year, or in a couple billion years henceforth. If we shouldn’t discriminate against people based on their spatial distance from us, we shouldn’t discriminate against them based on their temporal distance, either. Many of the problems we face today, such as climate change, will have devastating consequences for future generations hundreds or thousands of years in the future. That should matter. We should be willing to make sacrifices for their wellbeing, just as we make sacrifices for those alive today by donating to charities that fight global poverty. But this does not mean that one must genuflect before the altar of “future value” or “our potential,” understood in techno-Utopian terms of colonizing space, becoming posthuman, subjugating the natural world, maximizing economic productivity, and creating massive computer simulations stuffed with 10⁴⁵ digital beings.

Care at Scale | Comment Magazine

A superb piece of writing by Debbie Chachra on infrastructure, fairness, and the future.

Alone in my apartment, when I reach out my hand to flip a switch or turn on a tap, I am a continent-spanning colossus, tapping into vast systems that span thousands of miles to bring energy, atoms, and information to my household. But I’m only the slenderest tranche of these collective systems, constituting the whole with all the other members of our federated infrastructural cyborg bodies.

Stay alert - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

It’s not just a story about unloved APIs, it’s a story about power, standards design, and who owns the platform — and it makes me afraid for the future of the web.

A thoughtful, considered post by Rich Harris on the whole ballyhoo with alert and its ilk:

For all its flaws, the web is generally agreed to be a stable platform, where investments made today will stand the test of time. A world in which websites are treated as inherently transient objects, where APIs we commonly rely on today could be cast aside as unwanted baggage by tomorrow’s spec wranglers, is a world in which the web has already lost.

HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

I spend most of my time in the application layers—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—so I fascinating to dive below the surface and learn about the upcoming HTTP/3. Sounds like it’s really more of a change to how things have always worked with the TCP protocol, still chugging away since it was created by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf.

Turning 30 · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

I have no idea what the web will look like in another 30 years. But I am sure that we will look back at the first 30 years of the Web like we look back at the silent era in cinema today: as the formative years of a medium that was about to evolve to even higher heights.

The Web has always been about what each and every one of us contributes. And contributing is easier and more important than ever. So let’s not leave the future of the Web to big tech alone. Inclusiveness, accessibility, performance, security, usability, decentralization, openness – in almost all areas, the Web is far from done.

Choice Words about the Upcoming Deprecation of JavaScript Dialogs | CSS-Tricks

Believe it or not, I generally am a fan of Google and think they do a good job of pushing the web forward. I also think it’s appropriate to waggle fingers when I see problems and request they do better. “Better” here means way more developer and user outreach to spell out the situation, way more conversation about the potential implications and transition ideas, and way more openness to bending the course ahead.

Google vs. the web | Go Make Things

With any changes to the platform, but especially breaking ones, communication and feedback on how this will impact people who actually build things with the web is super important, and that was not done here.

Chris has written a thoughtful reflection on last week’s brouhaha around confirm, prompt, and alert being deprecated in Chrome. The way that the “developer relations” folks at Google handled feedback was less than ideal.

I reached out to one of the Google Chrome developer advocates I know to see if I could learn more. It did not go well.

Design Titles

Keep refreshing until you find your next job title.

Chromium Blog: Increasing HTTPS adoption

At some point, you won’t be able to visit the first web page ever published without first clicking through a full-page warning injected by your web browser:

Chrome will offer HTTPS-First Mode, which will attempt to upgrade all page loads to HTTPS and display a full-page warning before loading sites that don’t support it. Based on ecosystem feedback, we’ll explore making HTTPS-First mode the default for all users in the future.

Making Reasonable Use of Computer Resources

The paradox of performance:

This era of incredibly fast hardware is also the era of programs that take tens of seconds to start from an SSD or NVMe disk; of bloated web applications that take many seconds to show a simple list, even on a broadband connection; of programs that process data at a thousandth of the speed we should expect. Software is laggy and sluggish — and the situation shows little signs of improvement. Why is that?

Because we prioritise the developer experience over the user experience, that’s why:

Although our job is ostensibly to create programs that let users do stuff with their computers, we place a greater emphasis on the development process and dev-oriented concerns than on the final user product.

We would do well to heed Craig’s observations on Fast Software, the Best Software.

Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today

Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).

Browsers and Representation - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

It feels like the web we’re making now is a web designed for commercial interests.

If the web is “for everyone”, how and where are “everyone’s” interested being represented?

Browsers are not an enterprise of the people. We do not elect our browser representatives who decide what a browser is and is not.

He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars by Grace Chan : Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

The future of OnlyFans?

How To Build Resilient JavaScript UIs — Smashing Magazine

The opening paragraphs of this article should be a mantra recited by every web developer before they begin their working day:

Things on the web can break — the odds are stacked against us. Lots can go wrong: a network request fails, a third-party library breaks, a JavaScript feature is unsupported (assuming JavaScript is even available), a CDN goes down, a user behaves unexpectedly (they double-click a submit button), the list goes on.

Fortunately, we as engineers can avoid, or at least mitigate the impact of breakages in the web apps we build. This however requires a conscious effort and mindset shift towards thinking about unhappy scenarios just as much as happy ones.

I love, love, love the emphasis on reducing assumptions:

Taking a more defensive approach when writing code helps reduce programmer errors arising from making assumptions. Pessimism over optimism favours resilience.

Hell, yeah!

Accepting the fragility of the web is a necessary step towards building resilient systems. A more reliable user experience is synonymous with happy customers. Being equipped for the worst (proactive) is better than putting out fires (reactive) from a business, customer, and developer standpoint (less bugs!).

Hacks Are Fine / Matt Hogg FYI

If you employ a hack, don’t be so ashamed. Don’t be too proud, either. Above all, don’t be lazy—be certain and deliberate about why you’re using a hack.

I agree that hacks for prototyping are a-okay:

When it comes to prototypes, A/B tests, and confirming hypotheses about your product the best way to effectively deliver is actually by writing the fastest, shittiest code you can.

I’m not so sure about production code though.

The Oxymoron of “Data-Driven Innovation” – Chelsea Troy

Businesses focus on efficiencies—doing the things that net them the most money for the least effort. By contrast, taxpayer-funded public programs are designed and expected to cover everyone—including, and especially, the most marginalized. That’s why they’re taxpayer-funded; so they don’t face existential risk be eschewing profit-driven decision-making. Does this work perfectly? No. But I think about it a lot when people shit on the bigness and slowness of government. That bigness & slowness is supposed to create space and resources to account for the communities, that a “lean,” fast approach deliberately ignores.