BBC News has switched to HTTPS—hurrah!
Here, one of the engineers writes on Ev’s blog about the challenges involved. Personally, I think this is far more valuable and inspiring to read than the unempathetic posts claiming that switching to HTTPS is easy.
Update: Paul found the original URL for this …weird that they don’t link to it from the syndicated version.
Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:
In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.
The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
A lovely profile of the lovely In Our Time.
In part because “In Our Time” is unconnected to things that are coming out, things happening right this minute, things being promoted, it feels aligned with the eternal rather than the temporal, and is therefore escapist without being junk.
Anyone remember the site After Our Time?
Two decades redesigning/realigning the BBC News home page.
The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:
Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.
Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?
Time for another video from Patterns Day. Here’s Sareh Heidari walking us through Grandstand, the CSS framework at the BBC.
Charlie conducts an experiment by living without JavaScript for a day.
So how was it? Well, with just a few minutes of sans-javascript life under my belt, my first impression was “Holy shit, things are fast without javascript”. There’s no ads. There’s no video loading at random times. There’s no sudden interrupts by “DO YOU WANT TO FUCKING SUBSCRIBE?” modals.
As you might expect, lots of sites just don’t work, but there are plenty of sites that work just fine—Google search, Amazon, Wikipedia, BBC News, The New York Times. Not bad!
This has made me appreciate the number of large sites that make the effort to build robust sites that work for everybody. But even on those sites that are progressively enhanced, it’s a sad indictment of things that they can be so slow on the multi-core hyperpowerful Mac that I use every day, but immediately become fast when JavaScript is disabled.
Hey, it’s Jamie! (and Lion, of course)
Al runs through the process of updating GEL—the BBC’s Global Experience Language design system. I particularly like the thought that’s gone into naming type sizes.
A great little primer on the origins of the internet and the web, by Aleks.
The controversial hamburger icon goes mainstream with this story on the BBC News site.
It still amazes me that, despite clear data, many designers cling to the belief that the icon by itself is understandable (or that users will “figure it out eventually”). Why the aversion to having a label for the icon?
The responsive BBC News site is live! Hurrah!
Here’s a look at the highs and lows of the site’s story, emphasising the importance of progressive enhancement and all that enables: feature detection (by “cutting the mustard”), conditional loading, and a mobile-first approach.
The minimum dependency for a web site should be an internet connection and the ability to parse HTML.
Tim Maughan reports on the same container ship trip that Dan W. is sending his postcards from.
I like the idea of there being an Apollo-sized project all around us, if you just know where to look.
First, towering above and over the ship, are the loading cranes. Vast structures mounted on huge, four-legged frames, they resemble the naked scaffolding of unbuilt skyscrapers, and trigger nostalgic reminders of Saturn V rocket launch towers from the 1960s.
Once in port at night I saw one suddenly fire into life next to the ship in a stroboscopic explosion of lights, before it tracked slowly above my high vantage point, bathing me in the orange glow of a dozen small halogen suns.
This episode of Click on the BBC World Service does a great job of distilling some of the ideas and themes from this year’s dConstruct.
The Click podcast is available for your huffduffing pleasure.
Two years ago dConstruct’s theme was “Playing with the Future”. Last year it was “Communicating with Machines”. This year’s theme is “Living with the Network”. Click interviews artists, writers, hackers and coders about surveillance, connected devices, big data, and whether the ideals of the internet have been too far corrupted for them ever to be preserved.
One of the most fiendish user-unfriendly (but oh-so-witty) adventure games of all time is now online for you to enjoy with some added graphical flourishes.
A report from the BBC on this year’s Brighton Digital Festival including interviews with Honor, Timo, and Seb.
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.