Back in 1985, Ian wrote to NASA to get some info for a shool project (that’s how it worked before the World Wide Web). NASA sent him a treaure trove in response. Here they are, scanned as PDFs. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the Space Shuttle, and more.
Progressive Enhancement allows us to use the latest and greatest features HTML, CSS and JavaScript offer us, by providing a basic, but robust foundation for all.
Some great practical examples of progressive enhancement on one website:
type="module" to enhance a form with JavaScript,picture element to provide webp images in HTML.All of those enhancements work great in modern browsers, but the underlying functionality is still available to a browser like Opera Mini on a feature phone.
The parallels between Alex Garland’s Devs and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.
This broke my brain.
The challenge: in the fewest resources possible, render meaningful text.
- How small can a font really go?
- How many bytes of memory would you need (to store it and run it?)
- How much code would it take to express it?
Lets see just how far we can take this!
The Ballad Of Halo Jones is 35 years old this year.
Where did she go? Out.
What did she do? Everything.
If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.
From smart dust and spimes, through to online journaling and social media, to machine learning, big data and digital preservation…
Is the archive where information goes to live forever, or where data goes to die?
Browser implementations of Sol LeWitt’s conceptual and minimal art, many of which only exist as instructions like this:
Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.
Okay, I think I’m going to have to get this pack of three notebooks: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.
The terrific talk from Beyond Tellerrand by Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band.
As we face issues of privacy, identity, and society in a networked world, we have much to learn from these women, who anticipated the Internet’s greatest problems, faced them, and discovered solutions we can still use today.
The internet does not hate women. The internet doesn’t hate anyone, because the internet, being an inanimate network, lacks the capacity to hold any opinion whatsoever. People hate women, and the internet allows them to do it faster, harder, and with impunity. It’s developed into a form of relaxation after a hard day of being ground on the wheel of late-stage capitalism. Melvin Kranzberg’s statement that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral” holds true here: The internet lets us be whoever we were before, more efficiently, with fewer consequences.
The spirit of 5K.org lives on. View source: this JavaScript version of Tetris is less than 1K. Details on Github.
According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.
The most minimal responsive, flexible grid library you can find. In fact, here’s the whole thing:
.fukol-grid {
display: flex; /* 1 */
flex-wrap: wrap; /* 2 */
margin: -0.5em; /* 5 (edit me!) */
}
.fukol-grid > * {
flex: 1 0 5em; /* 3 (edit me!) */
margin: 0.5em; /* 4 (edit me!) */
}
Absolutely brilliant stuff from Mandy (again). A long hard at today’s tech industry’s narrow approach to bots and artificial intelligence compared to some far more interesting and imaginative approaches in fiction:
So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”
I don’t care about Opera Mini (I’m not its Product Manager). In the same way, I don’t care about walking sticks, wheelchairs, mobility scooters or guide dogs. But I care deeply about people who use enabling technologies — and Opera Mini is an enabling technology. It allows people on feature phones, low-powered smartphones, people in low-bandwidth areas, people with very small data plans, people who are roaming (you?) connect to the web.
The proxy browser Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers in the world, and rightly so. Ire Aderinokun has put together a handy collection—based on caniuse.com data—of all the features that are unavailable or only partially available in that browser. The point here is not to avoid using these features, but to make sure you’ve got a solid fallback in place:
This isn’t about bashing the problem, but figuring out the solution.
Using Progressive Enhancement makes your site better for all users and enables the 275 million users of Opera Mini worldwide.
The best description of Mad Max: Fury Road. Read.
Alternative histories of communication.