Link tags: meta

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A history of metaphors for the internet - The Verge

No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”

Efficiency over performance

I quite like this change of terminology when it comes to making fast websites. After all, performance can sound like a process of addition, whereas efficiency can be a process of subtraction.

The term ‘performance’ brings to mind exotic super-cars suitable only for impractical demonstrations (or ‘performances’). ‘Efficiency’ brings to mind an electric car (or even better, a bicycle), making effective use of limited resources.

Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick

A personal site, or a blog, is more than just a collection of writing. It’s a kind of place - something that feels like home among the streams. Home is a very strong mental model.

Metaphors We Web By: Paper and Place

Out of all of these metaphors, the two most enduring are paper and physical space.

Data isn’t oil, so what is it? - How To Measure Ghosts

The discussions around data policy still feel like they are framing data as oil - as a vast, passive resource that either needs to be exploited or protected. But this data isn’t dead fish from millions of years ago - it’s the thoughts, emotions and behaviours of over a third of the world’s population, the largest record of human thought and activity ever collected. It’s not oil, it’s history. It’s people. It’s us.

My current HTML boilerplate - Manuel Matuzović

This is a great HTML boilerplate, with an explanation of every line.

My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

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.

Meta Tags — Preview, Edit and Generate

This is a handy tool if you’re messing around with Twitter cards and other metacrap.

A tale of three skeuomorphs

A trashcan, a tyepface, and a tactile keyboard. Marcin gets obsessive (as usual).

The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it - daverupert.com

We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it.

Dave follows on from my post about design systems and automation.

At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.

From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:

The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.

HEAD - A free guide to `head` elements

A one-stop shop for all the metacrap you can put in the head of your HTML documents.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog [EN]: More options to help websites preview their content on Google Search

Google’s pissing over HTML again, but for once, it’s not by making up rel values:

A new way to help limit which part of a page is eligible to be shown as a snippet is the “data-nosnippet” HTML attribute on span, div, and section elements.

This is a direct contradiction of how data-* attributes are intended to be used:

…these attributes are intended for use by the site’s own scripts, and are not a generic extension mechanism for publicly-usable metadata.

Offline listings

This is brilliant technique by Remy!

If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!

This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.

PWA asset generator based on Puppeteer.

Automatically generates icons and splash screens based on Web App Manifest specs and Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Updates manifest.json and index.html files with the generated images.

A handy command line tool. Though be aware that it will generate the shit-ton of link elements for splash screens that Apple demands you provide for a multitude of different screen sizes.

Building on Vimeo

Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!