Tags: architecture

ANALEMMA TOWER - Clouds Architecture Office

A thoroughly impractical—but fun to imagine—alternative to a space elevator:

Analemma inverts the traditional diagram of an earth-based foundation, instead depending on a space-based supporting foundation from which the tower is suspended. This system is referred to as the Universal Orbital Support System (UOSS). By placing a large asteroid into orbit over earth, a high strength cable can be lowered towards the surface of earth from which a super tall tower can be suspended. Since this new tower typology is suspended in the air, it can be constructed anywhere in the world and transported to its final location.

The construction might sound like Clarke’s The Fountains Of Paradise, but I imagine life in the tower would be more like Ballard’s High Rise.

Render Search

🎵 If there’s something strange, in your neighbourhood’s architectural renders, who you gonna call? 🎵

James Bridle!

(I ain’t ‘fraid of no render ghost.)

Front-End Developers Are Information Architects Too ◆ 24 ways

Some great thoughts here from Francis on how crafting solid HTML is information architecture.

Thoughtful CSS Architecture | Sparkbox | Web Design and Development

A good overview of ideas and techniques for structuring CSS and naming classes.

Can These Pornographers End ‘MILFs,’ ‘Teens,’ and ‘Thugs’? | The Nation

A fascinating look at an attempt to redefine the taxonomy of online porn.

Porn is part of the ecosystem that tells us what sex and sexuality are. Porn terms are, to use Foucault’s language, part of a network of technologies creating truths about our sexuality.

Reminds of the heady days of 2005, when it was all about tagging and folksonomies.

The project, at its most ambitious, seeks to create a new feedback loop of porn watched and made, unmoored from the vagaries of old, bad, lazy categories.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Did you know that Abby Covert’s book is available online in its gloriously hyperlinked entirety?

How Will Web Components Change CSS Architecture? - Snook.ca

Depending on how you’re currently structuring your CSS and class attributes, web components might not make all that much of a difference to your workflow.

Introduction to Ember FastBoot by Tom Dale on Vimeo

I’m so happy that Ember is moving to a server-side rendering model. Not only that, but as Tom points out here, it’s crucial that the server-side rendering is the default and the client-side functionality than becomes an enhancement.

EnhanceConf - Stefan Tilkov - How to embrace the browser - YouTube

The videos from EnhanceConf are started to go up already. Stefan’s talk really struck me—all the talks were great but this one had the most unexpected insight for me. It really clarifies a lot of ideas that I’ve been trying to articulate, but which Stefan crystalises by taking the long-zoom view.

Connected Copies, Part Two | Hapgood

A really good explanation of how a peer-to-peer model for the web would differ from the current location-centric approach.

What really interests me is the idea of having both models co-exist.

You just have to think about the ways in which our location-centrism is contributing to the problems we are hitting, from the rise of Facebook, to the lack of findability of OER, to the Wikipedia Edit Wars.

The Pain With No Name · An A List Apart Article

This rousing call-to-arms by Abby the IA makes a great companion piece to her interview on The Big Web Show.

JavaScript web apps considered valuable · molily

A response to a rant I linked to recently.

The solution for bad JavaScript web apps is not to abandon them altogether, but to make better ones.

I couldn’t agree more. The tools have evolved and we now have frameworks and practices that allow us to render from the server and use the same code to render on the client, progressively enhancing from a solid robust base.

JavaScript is the best technology to build excellent interactivity in the browser. Still, the most important skill of a client-side JavaScript developer is to know when not to solve a problem with client-side JavaScript. It’s always more robust to solve a problem further down in the stack.

The problem is that I don’t see a willingness from developers to embrace this way of thinking. Instead I see it dismissed as being unrealistic or more expensive.

Still, it always takes time for behaviour to change so maybe things will only get better. I certainly hope so.

Why I hate your Single Page App by Stefan Tilkov

A linkbaity title for a ranty post. But it’s justified.

My point is that from an architectural perspective, most single page apps are the result of making the wrong choices and missing important opportunities.

Universal React ◆ 24 ways

I have no hands-on experience with React, but this tutorial by Jack Franklin looks like a great place to start. Before the tutorial begins he succinctly and clearly outlines the perfect architecture for building on the web today:

• The user visits www.yoursite.com and the server executes your JavaScript to generate the HTML it needs to render the page.
• In the background, the client-side JavaScript is executed and takes over the duty of rendering the page.
• The next time a user clicks, rather than being sent to the server, the client-side app is in control.
• If the user doesn’t have JavaScript enabled, each click on a link goes to the server and they get the server-rendered content again.

YES!!!

Y’know, I had a chance to chat briefly with Jack at the Edge conference in London and I congratulated him on the launch of a Go Cardless site that used exactly this technique. He told me that the decision to flip the switch and make it act as a single page app came right at the end of the project. I think that points to a crucial mindset that’s reiterated here:

Now we’ll build the React application entirely on the server, before adding the client-side JavaScript right at the end.

The System of the World Wide Web

A fascinating ten-year old essay looking at the early days of the web and how it conquered FTP and Gopher.

And though glitz, politics, hard work, and competitors’ mistakes all played a role in the success of the web, there are also aspects of the architecture that ensured the web would catch on. I think the web won because of the URI.

URIs are everywhere, and what’s vaguely funny now is the idea that they’re something special. But they’re very special: URI management is the fundamental consideration behind the design of web sites, web applications, and web services. Tim Berners-Lee originally intended URIs to be invisible, but they’re too useful for that.

Instant Loading Web Apps With An Application Shell Architecture | Web Updates - Google Developers

Outlining the architectural thinking required to create what the Google devrel folks are calling progressive apps.

Browsers without service worker support should always be served a fall-back experience. In our demo, we fall back to basic static server-side rendering…

Yay!

…but this is only one of many options.

Hmmm. In my opinion, sending usable HTML on first request isn’t an implementation detail—it’s crucial. But on the whole, this approach is very sensible indeed.

The West Pier, Brighton England on Vimeo

For almost a century and a half the West Pier has been Britain’s most iconic pier. Renowned for its wonderful architectural style, it has been visited and enjoyed by millions. Even today with its sculptural remains casting an eerie beauty over the seafront, the West Pier is still the most photographed building in Brighton.

Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web | Brewster Kahle’s Blog

I like a lot of Brewster Kahle’s ideas here for a more distributed peer-to-peer architecture for the web, but I’m very wary of relying on JavaScript: I’d much prefer a simpler declarative format.

The Internet That Was (and Still Could Be) - The Atlantic

A fantastic piece by David Weinberger on the changing uses of the internet—apparently in contradiction of the internet’s original architecture.

Some folks invented the Internet for some set of purposes. They gave it a name, pointed to some prototypical examples—sharing scientific papers and engaging in email about them—shaping the way the early adopters domesticated it.

But over time, the Internet escaped from its creators’ intentions. It became a way to communicate person-to-person via email and many-to-many via Usenet. The web came along and the prototypical example became home pages. Social networking came along and the prototype became Facebook.

Implement Server-Side Rendering for SEO · Issue #9938 · emberjs/ember.js

The motivation seems entirely misplaced to me (SEO? Really?) but never mind: the end result could be the holy grail of JavaScript MVC frameworks — code that runs on the server and the client. That would get you the reach and initial rendering speed of progressive enhancement, combined with the power of client-side application logic once the page has loaded.

Watch this space.