Link tags: is

The Organic Web - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

Growing—that’s a word I want to employ when talking about my personal sites online. Like a garden, I’m constantly puttering around in them. Sometimes I plow and sow a whole new feature for a site. Sometimes I just pick weeds.

I like this analogy. It reminds me of the the cooking analogy that others have made.

Most of my favorite websites out there are grown—homegrown in fact. They are corners of the web where some unique human has been nurturing, curating, and growing stuff for years. Their blog posts, their links, their thoughts, their aesthetic, their markup, their style, everything about their site—and themselves—shows growth and evolution and change through the years. It’s a beautiful thing, a kind of artifact that could never be replicated or manufactured on a deadline.

This part of the web, this organic part, stands in start contrast to the industrial web where websites are made and resources extracted.

Standardizing `select` And Beyond: The Past, Present And Future Of Native HTML Form Controls — Smashing Magazine

While a handful of form controls can be easily styled by CSS, like the button element, most form controls fall into a bucket of either requiring hacky CSS or are still unable to be styled at all by CSS.

Despite form controls no longer taking a style or technical dependency on the operating system and using modern rendering technology from the browser, developers are still unable to style some of the most used form control elements such as select. The root of this problem lies in the way the specification was originally written for form controls back in 1995.

Stephanie goes back in time to tell the history of form controls on the web, and how that history has led to our current frustrations:

The current state of working with controls on the modern web is that countless developer hours are being lost to rewriting controls from scratch, as custom elements due to a lack of flexibility in customizability and extensibility of native form controls. This is a massive gap in the web platform and has been for years. Finally, something is being done about it.

Amen!

Keepers of the Secrets | The Village Voice

A deeply fascinating look into the world of archives and archivists:

The reason an archivist should know something, Lannon said, is to help others to know it. But it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else. Indeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important. Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?

Zonelets Home

Zonelets is a simple HTML blogging engine with scrappy, DIY spirit! I made it because I really want everyone to blog, but I felt that the existing options were generally overcomplicated and commercially-focused in a way that made web creativity feel intimidating and arcane.

I love the philosophy behind this blogging tool, which actively encourages you to learn a little bit of HTML:

Plenty of services can help you to “create a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.” Now, thanks to Zonelets, you can create an UNPROFESSIONAL-looking website by writing NUMEROUS lines of code!

CSS Stats

A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:

CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.

Playing with Envision Glasses - Tink - Léonie Watson

The street finds its own uses for things, and it may be that the use for Google Glass is assistive technology. Here’s Léonie’s in-depth hands-on review of Envision Glasses, based on Google Glass.

The short wait whilst the image is processed is mitigated by the fact a double tap is all that’s needed to request another scene description, and being able to do it just by looking at what I’m interested in and tapping a couple of times on my glasses is nothing short of happiness in a pair of spectacles.

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

The Great Distractor — Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy

James has penned a sweeping arc from the The Mechanical Turk, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Web Platform Design Principles

Principles behind the design of web APIs:

• Put user needs first (Priority of Constituencies)
• It should be safe to visit a web page
• Trusted user interface should be trustworthy
• Ask users for meaningful consent when appropriate
• Support the full range of devices and platforms (Media Independence)

I should add these to my collection.

HTML Forms: How (and Why) to Prevent Double Form Submissions – Bram.us

I can see how this would be good to have fixed at the browser level.

Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet | MIT Technology Review

Some suggested that the digital garden was a backlash to the internet we’ve become grudgingly accustomed to, where things go viral, change is looked down upon, and sites are one-dimensional. Facebook and Twitter profiles have neat slots for photos and posts, but enthusiasts of digital gardens reject those fixed design elements. The sense of time and space to explore is key.

Copying is the way design works || Matthew Ström: designer & developer

A people’s history of copying, from art to software.

Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.

Free Download of Africanfuturism: An Anthology | Stories by Nnedi Okorafor, TL Huchu, Dilman Dila, Rafeeat Aliyu, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Mame Bougouma Diene, Mazi Nwonwu, and Derek Lubangakene

Here’s the PDF.

Here are 8 original visions of Africanfuturism: science fiction stories by both emerging and seasoned African writers staking a claim to Africa’s place in the future. These are powerful visions focused on the African experience and hopes and fears, exploring African sciences, philosophies, adaptations to technology and visions of the future both centred on and spiralling out of Africa. You will find stories of the near and almost-present future, tales set on strange and wonderful new planets, stories of a changed Earth, stories that dazzle the imagination and stimulate the mind. Stories that capture the essence of what we talk about when we talk about Africanfuturism.

This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine.

I think this is quite beautiful—no need to view source; the style sheet is already in the document.

What is the Web? - Web Directions

To be blunt, I feel we, the folks who have been involved with designing and developing for the web for a significant period of time–including me as I feel a strong sense of personal responsibility here–are in no small part responsible for it falling far short of its promise.

Web Histories

Rachel is doing her dissertation project on the history of web design and development:

I intend this site to become a place to gather the stories of the early efforts to create an open web.

Take the survey to help out!

List of Physical Visualizations

A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.

How To Protect Your Privacy Online In 8 Tips : Life Kit : NPR

Take a look at your smartphone and delete all the apps you don’t really need. For many tasks, you can use a browser on your phone instead of an app.

Privacy-wise, browsers are preferable, because they can’t access as much of your information as an app can.

BBC Radio 4 - Under the Cloud

James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:

It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.

Feds may target Google’s Chrome browser for breakup - POLITICO

The unfair collusion between Google AMP and Google Search might just bite ‘em on the ass.