Tags: formats

The Analog Web | Jim Nielsen’s Blog

This is wonderful meditation on the history of older technologies that degrade in varied conditions versus newer formats that fall of a “digital cliff”, all tied in to working on the web.

When digital TV fails, it fails completely. Analog TV, to use parlance of the web, degrades gracefully. The web could be similar, if we choose to make it so. It could be “the analog” web in contrast to “the digital” platforms. Perhaps in our hurry to replicate and mirror native platforms, we’re forgetting the killer strength of the web: universal accessibility.

Amber Wilson: Markup-Masterclass

Yesterday was a good day with Amber. She’s been marking up her CV and it was the perfect opportunity to take a deep dive into HTML.

WebPonize - webponize.github.io

A Mac app for converting PNGs and JPEGs to WebP.

From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers) | Motherboard

As always with sci-fi interfaces, the important part is telling the story, not realism or accuracy. Personally, I liked the way that the World War II trappings of Rogue One extended to communications and networking technologies.

Data on the Web Best Practices

This document provides Best Practices related to the publication and usage of data on the Web designed to help support a self-sustaining ecosystem. Data should be discoverable and understandable by humans and machines.

From WordPress to Apple News, Instant Articles, and AMP - The Media Temple Blog

Chris runs through the process and pitfalls of POSSEing a site (like CSS Tricks) to Apple’s News app, Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Google’s AMP.

Hey, whatever you want. As long as…

1. It’s not very much work
2. The content’s canonical home is my website.

I just want people to read and like CSS-Tricks.

The Typekit Blog | Variable fonts, a new kind of font for flexible design

This is what Nick Sherman has been banging on about for years, and now the time has come for variable fonts …as long as typographers, browser makers, and standards bodies get behind it.

More details on Ev’s blog.

The Long, Remarkable History of the GIF

The history of the GIF—a tale of licensing, compression, and standards.

.generation on Vimeo

A cautionary tale of digital preservation.

.generation is a short film that intimately documents three millennials in the year 2054 - uncovering their relationships with technology in the aftermath of the information age.

Standardizing the Social Web

The slides from Aaron’s talk at OS Bridge in Portland, looking at the formats and protocols powering the indie web.

PURL: A Portable Content Store - Not Enough Neon

I need to wrap my head around the details of this approach, but it sounds like it might be something I could do here on my site (where I feel nervous about my current dependency on a database).

Archiving a Website for Ten Thousand Years - The Atlantic

Prompted by the way Craig is handling the shutdown of hi.co, Glenn Fleishman takes a look at other digital preservation efforts and talk to Laura Welcher at the Long Now Foundation.

A time capsule is bottled optimism. It makes material the belief that human beings will survive long enough to retrieve and decode artifacts of the distant past.

Taking part in the IndieWeb

The slides from Calum’s presentation at Front-end London.

A Complete Guide to SVG Fallbacks | CSS-Tricks

An up-to-date round-up of the various techniques available when you want to provide a fallback for SVG.

CloudConvert - convert anything to anything

Ignore the silly name: this looks a supremely useful service—convert just about any file format into just about any other file format.

What happened to Web Intents? - Tales of a Developer Advocate

Paul Kinlan writes an honest post-mortem of his push for Web Intents.

There are some valuable lessons here, particularly for the indie web’s web actions.

The Perils of an All-Digital Movie Future

Dropping our films down the memory hole. Welcome to the digital dark age.

On File Formats, Very Briefly, by Paul Ford · The Manual

A history lesson and a love letter to the early web, taking in HTML, Photoshop, and the web standards movement.

Those were long years, the years of drop-shadows. Everything was jumping just slightly off the screen. For a stretch it seemed that drop-shadows and thin vertical columns of text would define the web. That was before we learned that the web is really a medium to display slideshows, as many slideshows as possible, with banner ads.

Software as Language, as Object, as Art — Blog of the Long Now

Language death and digital preservation.

Hello, Again — Craig Mod

Craig has redesigned and pulled various bits of his writing from around the web into his own site, prompting some thoughts on the indie web.