Link tags: formats

Rise of the Digital Fonts

A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.

28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube

I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.

(via Tim Berners-Lee)

The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web · Jamie Tanna

A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.

Unraveling The JPEG

A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.

Progressive Font Enrichment: reinventing web font performance | Responsive Web Typography

Jason describes the next big thing in web typography: streaming fonts!

…to enable the ability for only the required part of the font be downloaded on any given page, and for subsequent requests for that font to dynamically ‘patch’ the original download with additional sets of glyphs as required on successive page views—even if they occur on separate sites.

Four Cool URLs - Alex Pounds’ Blog

A fellow URL fetishest!

I love me a well-designed URL scheme—here’s four interesting approaches.

URLs are consumed by machines, but they should be designed for humans. If your URL thinking stops at “uniquely identifies a page” and “good for SEO”, you’re missing out.

Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018 - Opening Keynote - Taking Back The Web - YouTube

Here’s the talk I gave recently about indie web building blocks.

There’s fifteen minutes of Q&A starting around the 35 minute mark. People asked some great questions!

Squoosh

A handy in-browser image compression tool. Drag, drop, tweak, and export.

2018-11-03, 21:54 - sonniesedge.co.uk

Day one of Indie Web Camp Berlin is done, and it was great! Here’s Charlie’s recap of the sessions she attended.

Playing with the Indieweb

A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.

abc to SVG | CSS-Tricks

Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:

The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).

Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯

Sending your First Webmention from Scratch • Aaron Parecki

A nice little tutorial from Aaron.

Putting Civilization in a Box Means Choosing Our Legacy

A run-down of digital preservation technologies for very, very long-term storage …in space.

Compressive Images Revisited - TimKadlec.com

Tim explains why that neat trick of making a really big JPEG with quality set to 0% is no longer necessary, and how the savings you make in bandwidth with that technique are nullified by the expense of the memory footprint needed.

Transparency and the AMP Project · Issue #13597 · ampproject/amphtml

Luke Stevens is trying to get untangle the very mixed signals being sent from different parts of Google around AMP’s goals. The response he got—before getting shut down—is very telling in its hubris and arrogance.

I believe the people working on the AMP format are well-intentioned, but I also believe they have conflated the best interests of Google with the best interests of the web.

AMP: the missing controversy – Ferdy Christant

AMP pages aren’t fast because of the AMP format. AMP pages are fast when you visit one via Google search …because of Google’s monopoly on preloading:

Technically, a clever trick. It’s hard to argue with that. Yet I consider it cheating and anti competitive behavior.

Preloading is exclusive to AMP. Google does not preload non-AMP pages. If Google would have a genuine interest in speeding up the whole web on mobile, it could simply preload resources of non-AMP pages as well. Not doing this is a strong hint that another agenda is at work, to say the least.

AMPlified. — Ethan Marcotte

As of this moment, the power dynamics are skewed pretty severely in favor of Google’s proprietary AMP standard, and against those of us who’d ask this question:

What can I do about AMP?

The Two Faces of AMP - TimKadlec.com

So, to recap, the web community has stated over and over again that we’re not comfortable with Google incentivizing the use of AMP with search engine carrots. In response, Google has provided yet another search engine carrot for AMP.

This wouldn’t bother me if AMP was open about what it is: a tool for folks to optimize their search engine placement. But of course, that’s not the claim. The claim is that AMP is “for the open web.”

Spot on, Tim. Spot on.

If AMP is truly for the open web, de-couple it from Google search entirely. It has no business there.

Look, AMP, you’re either a tool for the open web, or you’re a tool for Google search. I don’t mind if you’re the latter, but please stop pretending you’re something else.

Href Tools - Free online web tools

Handy web-based tools—compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and convert files from one format to another.

AMP letter

I signed this open letter.

We are a community of individuals who have a significant interest in the development and health of the World Wide Web (“the Web”), and we are deeply concerned about Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a Google project that purportedly seeks to improve the user experience of the Web.