Just like jQuery dominated the front end yesterday, React dominates it today. There will be something new that dominates it tomorrow. Your design system team will continue doing the same work and incurring more and more costs to keep up with framework churn. And let’s not forget the cost of updating tomorrow’s legacy apps, who are consumers of your soon to be legacy design system.
Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.
The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.
But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.
10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.
We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.
Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.
During the Industrial Revolution, as new machines were invented to increase output, business owners often dreamed of an entirely automated workforce—of a factory without workers. I assume their workers had different dreams.
Ethan thinks through the ethical implications of increasing automation and efficiency über alles:
I can’t stop thinking about how much automation has changed our industry already. And I know the rate of automation is only going to accelerate from here.
At the very least, maybe it’s worth asking ourselves what might happen next.
What a beautiful and fascinating website!
This is a layered interactive narrative that traces the life of Captain Antonio DaCosta, a Black Portuguese sailor who visited Japan in 1597. From his early life as a slave in Lisbon to his voyage to Japan, this site weaves together his personal diary and drawings, along with artwork and historical notes from 1500-1700, the Age of Exploration.
A terrific little tool from Tim that puts performance into perspective by measuring how much money users are spending just to view your website on a mobile device.
A fantastically detailed look by Michael at the evolution of the design of Chewbacca.
Colly is being transfered from prisoner cell-block 1138.