The World’s Writing Systems
What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.
Tags: story
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djinn and juice : The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard
Cassie and I were swapping debugging stories. I shared the case of the 500 mile email with her. She shared this with me.
HTML+ Discussion Document: Images
Back in 1993, David Raggett wrote up all the proposed extensions to HTML that were being discussed on the www-talk mailing list. It was called HTML+, which would’ve been a great way of describing HTML5.
Twenty five years later, I wish that the proposed IMAGE element had come to pass. Unlike the IMG element, it would’ve had a closing tag, allowing for fallback content between the tags:
The IMAGE element behaves in the same way as IMG but allows you to include descriptive text, which can be shown on text-only displays.
Yeah, I know we have the alt attribute, but that’s always felt like an inelegant bolt-on to me.
History of the Web, Volume I by Jay Hoffmann [PDF/iPad/Kindle]
The first two years of the excellent History Of The Web newsletter is now available as a digital book. It’s volume one of …we’ll see how many.
Buried inside you’ll find fascinating narrative threads from the web’s history, starting all the way from the beginning and straight on through to the very first browsers, the emergence of web design, to the evolving landscape of our online world.
365 RFCs — Write.as
April 7th, 2019 is going to be the 50 year anniversary of the first ever Request for Comments, known as an RFC.
Darius Kazemi is going to spend the year writing commentary on the first 365 Request For Comments from the Internt Engineering Task Force:
In honor of this anniversary, I figured I would read one RFC each day of 2019, starting with RFC 1 and ending with RFC 365. I’ll offer brief commentary on each RFC.
The 100 Year Web (In Praise of XML)
I don’t agree with Steven Pemberton on a lot of things—I’m not a fan of many of the Semantic Web technologies he likes, and I think that the Robustness Principle is well-suited to the web—but I always pay attention to what he has to say. I certainly share his concern that migrating everything to JavaScript is not good for interoperability:
This is why there are so few new elements in HTML5: they haven’t done any design, and instead said “if you need anything, you can always do it in Javascript”.
And they all have.
And they are all different.
Read this talk transcript, and even if you don’t agree with everything in it today, you may end up coming back to it in the future. He’s playing the long game:
The web is the way now that we distribute information. We will need the web pages we create now to be readable in 100 years time, just as we can still read 100-year-old books.
Requiring a webpage to depend on a particular 100-year-old implementation of Javascript is not exactly evidence of future-thinking.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED
Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.
Browser diversity starts with us. | Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design
Hear, hear!
When one company decides which ideas are worth supporting and which aren’t, which access problems matter and which don’t, it stifles innovation, crushes competition, and opens the door to excluding people from digital experiences.
So how do we fight this? We, who are not powerful? We do it by doubling down on cross-browser testing. By baking it into the requirements on every project, large or small. By making sure our colleagues, bosses, and clients know what we’re doing and why.
WALL·E | Typeset In The Future
A deep dive into Pixar’s sci-fi masterpiece, featuring entertaining detours to communist propaganda and Disney theme parks.
This is the story of the ZX81…
This could’a, should’a, would’a been a great blog post.
March 1981: Shakin’ Stevens was top of the charts, Tom Baker was leaving Doctor Who and Clive Sinclair was bringing computers to the masses. Britain was moving into a new age, and one object above all would herald its coming.
Great Leap Years - Official site of Stephen Fry
I just binge-listened to the six episodes of the first season of this podcast from Stephen Fry—it’s excellent!
It covers the history of communication from the emergence of language to the modern day. At first I was worried that it was going to rehash some of the more questionable ideas in the risible Sapiens, but it turned out to be far more like James Gleick’s The Information or Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet (two of my favourite books on the history of technology).
There’s no annoying sponsorship interruptions and the whole series feels more like an audiobook than a podcast—an audiobook researched, written and read by Stephen Fry!
Essays « Object Lessons
Fax machines, pop-up books, radioactive televisions, writing boxes, microfilm readers, nuclear bomb cores, cupholders, bidets, jet engines, index cards, wiffle balls, oil barrels, lightning rods, playing cards, air conditioning, hair dryers, wheelchair ramps, handbags, diving bells, slippers, laundry chutes, sewing machines, pockets, skee-ball, safety pins, chalkboards, tote bags, holograms, hearing aids, dollhouses, billboards, airports, flash drives, cardigans, beer cans, stethoscopes, text editors, mugs, wallpaper, towel dispensers, bumber stickers, staplers, microscopes, fingerless gloves, wire hangers, toast, and more.
I’ll be in my bunk.
Can You Still Send a Telegram? - The Atlantic
The tools that characterize a person’s time and place in technological history are the ones that a person actually uses, the technologies relied upon so heavily that they can feel like an extension of oneself. This is part of how technology can define a culture, and why sometimes you forget the thing you’re using is technology at all. Until, eventually, inevitably, the technology is all but forgotten.
Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine
The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).
Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:
I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.
New kilogram standard: how the SI unit of mass is being redefined - Vox
A fascinating look at standards in the real world. In this case, it’s the kilogram, which is shedding its French Revolutionary roots in favour of the Planck constant.
Our messy human measurements have transcended their messy humanness; they have been melded with an eternal truth.
Mention of The Master Of The Kilogram reminded me of The Keeper Of Time.
Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us - YouTube
Looking back on this classic explainer video from eleven years ago, I know exactly what’s meant by this comment:
its weird that when i first saw this video it made me think of the future, and now i watch it and it reminds me of the past..
UX past, present, and future | Clearleft
This long zoom by Andy is right up my alley—a history of UX design that begins in 1880. It’s not often that you get to read something that includes Don Norman, Doug Engelbart, Lilian Gilbreth, and Vladimir Lenin. So good!
Escape from Spiderhead | The New Yorker
Madeline sent me a link to this short story from 2010, saying:
It’s like if Margaret Atwood and Thomas Pynchon wrote an episode of Black Mirror. I think you’ll like it!
Yes, and yes.
Two-Bit History
An ongoing timeline of computer technology in the form of blog posts by Sinclair Target (that’s a person, not a timeslipping transatlantic company merger).
Peter Gasston | People don’t change - YouTube
This talk from Peter—looking at the long zoom of history—is right up my alley.
