Link tags: story

Jeremy Keith | In And Out Of Style | CSS Day 2022 - YouTube

Here’s the video of my opening talk at this year’s CSS Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed!

It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!

The ‘Form’ Element Created the Modern Web. Was It a Big Mistake? | WIRED

Paul Ford:

The web was born to distribute information on computers, but the technology industry can never leave well enough alone. It needs to make everything into software. To the point that your internet browser is basically no longer a magical book of links but a virtual machine that can simulate a full-fledged computer.

What the Vai Script Reveals About the Evolution of Writing - SAPIENS

How a writing system went from being a dream (literally) to a reality, codified in unicode.

Verevolf

Glenn Davis of Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day from waaaay back in the day is writing his online memoirs.

Depending on when you got online, this will either bring back a lot of memories or sound like something from a different century (which technically it is).

City of Women London

City of Women encourages Londoners to take a second glance at places we might once have taken for granted by reimagining the iconic Underground map.

I love everything about this …except that there’s no Rosalind Franklin station.

Agile and the Long Crisis of Software

Time and again, organizations have sought to contain software’s most troublesome tendencies—its habit of sprawling beyond timelines and measurable goals—by introducing new management styles. And for a time, it looked as though companies had found in Agile the solution to keeping developers happily on task while also working at a feverish pace. Recently, though, some signs are emerging that Agile’s power may be fading. A new moment of reckoning is in the making, one that may end up knocking Agile off its perch.

UA gotta be kidding

Brian recounts the sordid messy history of user-agent strings.

I remember somebody once describing a user-agent string as “a reverse-chronological history of web browsers.”

💡 David Deutsch: Optimism, Pessimism and Cynicism

Not only was fire always dangerous as well as beneficial, so was the wheel. A spear could injure or kill your friends, not only your dinner. With clothes came not only protection but also body lice. With farming came not only a more reliable food supply but also hard, repetitive work – and plunder by hungry bandits.

Every solution creates new problems. But they can be better problems. Lesser evils. More and greater delights.

That’s what progress is. That is what is most visible today. And that is what cynicism must therefore besmirch, obfuscate and argue away if it is to make itself, and pessimism, superficially plausible.

Personal Websites as Self-Portraiture | starbreaker.org

What, then, is a personal website? It is precisely that, personal. It is a new kind of self-portraiture done not with pencils, charcoal, ink, or paint. Instead it is self-portraiture done in markup language, code, prose, images, audio, and video.

The web is a miracle

I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.

Interfacecritique — Olia Lialina: From My To Me

Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.

Wiki History Game

This is fun (and addictive)! With every new entry pulled from Wikipedia, you’ve got to arrange it onto a timeline correctly.

A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet - Eager Blog

A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.

Embrace the Platform - CSS-Tricks

This is a wonderful piece by Bram. Half history lesson, and half practical advice for building resilient websites today:

By embracing what the web platform gives us — instead of trying to fight against it — we can build better websites.

Keep it simple. Apply the Rule of Least Power. Build with progressive enhancement in mind.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — in that order.

Who is web3 for? • Robin Rendle

Thoughts from Robin, prompted by the Web History podcast I’m narrating and the other Robin’s notes on web3 that I linked to:

Who is the web for? Everyone, everywhere, and not only the few with a financial stake in it. It’s still this enormously beautiful thing that has so much potential.

But web3? That’s just not it, man.

Exactly! The blinkered web3 viewpoint is a classic example of this fallacious logic (also, as Robin points out, exemplified by AMP):

1. Something must be done!
2. This (terrible idea) is something.
3. Something has been done.

1990: Programming the World Wide Web – Web Development History

Ah, this brings back memories of hacking on the WorldWideWeb project at CERN!

(Not the original one. I’m not that old. I mean the recreation.)

The State Of The Web on Vimeo

Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.

I’ve also published a transcript.

Winnie Lim » this website as a learning and reflection tool

I love reading about how—and why—people tinker with their personal sites. This resonates a lot.

This website is essentially a repository of my memories, lessons I’ve learnt, insights I’ve discovered, a changelog of my previous selves. Most people build a map of things they have learnt, I am building a map of how I have come to be, in case I may get lost again. Maybe someone else interested in a similar lonely path will feel less alone with my documented footprints. Maybe that someone else would be me in the future.

Oh, and Winnie, I can testify that having an “on this day” page is well worth it!

A History of Design Systems on the Web - The History of the Web

It’s great to see former Clearlefties like Nat, Paul and Anna rightly getting namechecked in this history of designing for the web in a systemic way. It’s a tradition that continues to this day with projects like Utopia.

404PageFound – Active Vintage Websites, Old Webpages, and Web 1.0

Well, this is rather lovely! A collection of websites from the early days of the web that are still online.

All the HTML pages still work today …and they work in your web browser which didn’t even exist when these websites were built.