Marcin explains why line height works differently in print and the web. Along the way, he hits upon this key insight about CSS:
Web also took away some of the control from typesetters. What in the print era were absolute rules, now became suggestions.
Remember that every line of CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser.
A cli-fi short story by Paolo Bacigalupi.
This is a fascinating story of psychological manipulation and internal politics. It leaves me feeling queasy about the amount of power wielded by individuals in one single organisation.
What would Wiener think of the current human use of human beings? He would be amazed by the power of computers and the internet. He would be happy that the early neural nets in which he played a role have spawned powerful deep-learning systems that exhibit the perceptual ability he demanded of them—although he might not be impressed that one of the most prominent examples of such computerized Gestalt is the ability to recognize photos of kittens on the World Wide Web.
A terrific six-part series of short articles looking at the people behind the history of Artificial Intelligence, from Babbage to Turing to JCR Licklider.
The history of AI is often told as the story of machines getting smarter over time. What’s lost is the human element in the narrative, how intelligent machines are designed, trained, and powered by human minds and bodies.
There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.
Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.
This is such a well-written piece! Jay Hoffman—author of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter—talks us through the JavaScript library battles of the late 2000’s …and the consequences that arose just last year.
The closing line is perfect.
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
Martin gives a personal history of his time at the two CERN hack projects …and also provides a short history of the universe.
This history of the World Wide Web from 1996 is interesting for the way it culminates with …Java. At that time, the language seemed like it would become the programmatic lingua franca for the web. Brendan Eich sure upset that apple cart.
An interesting way of navigating through a massive amount of archival imagery from NASA.
Steven Pemberton’s presentation on the printing press, the internet, Moore’s Law, and exponential growth.
This is the lovely little film about our WorldWideWeb hack project. It was shown yesterday at CERN during the Web@30 celebrations. That was quite a special moment.
Jim Lovell, Frank Borman, and Bill Anders describe the overview effect they experienced on the Apollo 8 mission …and that photo.
Remy’s keeping a list of hyperlinks to stories covering our recent hack week at CERN.
Here’s the source code for the WorldWideWeb project we did at CERN.
Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.
This is a lovely write-up of the WorldWideWeb hack week at CERN:
The Web is a success story in open standards, natural and by-design progressive enhancement, and the future-proof archivability of human-readable code.
I linked to this a while back but now this great half hour documentary by Jessica Yu is ready and you can watch the whole thing online: Tim Berners-Lee, the birth of the web, and where the web has gone since.
In the scenes describing the early web, there’s footage of the recreated Line Mode Browser—how cool is that‽