Adactio: Links—Tagged with text

Y2K @ 20 - The New York Times

This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife

For a closed system, those kinds of open connections are deeply dangerous. If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.

Anil Dash on the war on hyperlinks.

It may be presented as a cost-saving measure, or as a way of reducing the sharing of untrusted links. But it is a strategy, designed to keep people from the open web, the place where they can control how, and whether, someone makes money off of an audience. The web is where we can make sites that don’t abuse data in the ways that Facebook properties do.

AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.

After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:

A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

Jeremy Keith & Remy Sharp - How We Built the World Wide Web in Five Days on Vimeo

Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!

A Love Letter to Net.Art - The History of the Web

Click around the site a bit and you’ll find yourself tied to an endless string of hyperlinks, hopping from one page to the next, with no real rhyme or reason to tie them altogether. It is almost pure web id, unleashed structurally to engage your curiosity and make use of the web’s most primal feature: the link.

WICG/ScrollToTextFragment: Proposal to allow specifying a text snippet in a URL fragment

It looks (a more complex version of) fragmention might be coming to Chrome.

8 DOM features you didn’t know existed - LogRocket Blog

If you ignore the slightly insulting and condescending clickbaity title, this is a handy run-down of eight browser features with good support:

extra arguments in addEventListener(),
scrollTo(),
extra arguments in setTimeout() and setInterval(),
the defaultChecked property for checkboxes,
normalize() and wholeText for strings of text,
insertAdjacentElement() and insertAdjacentText(),
event.detail, and
scrollHeight and scrollWidth.

Plain Text vs. HTML Emails: Which Is Better? [New Data]

Spoiler: it’s plain text. Every time.

Nothing boosts opens and clicks as well as an old school, plain-text email.

I feel vindicated.

People say they prefer HTML emails ..but they actually prefer plain-text.

This seems like a plausable explanation:

Think about how you email colleagues and friends: Do you usually add images or use well-designed templates? Probably not, and neither does your audience. They’re used to using email to communicate in a personal way, so emails from companies that look more personal will resonate more.

Now get off my lawn, you pesky HTML-email lovin’ kids.

How Google warped the hyperlink | WIRED UK

Ignore the ludicrously clickbaity title. This is a well-considered look at thirty years of linking on the World Wide Web.

WWW:BTB — History (Overview)

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.

Content-based grid tracks and embracing flexibility

This is a really good explanation of the difference between context-aware layouts—that we’ve had up until now—and content-aware layouts, which are now possible with CSS grid:

With the min-content, max-content and auto keywords, we can size grid tracks based on their content. I think this is very cool. If we manage to embrace as much of the web’s flexibility as we can, we can get the most out of these tools, and let CSS help us with designing for the unknown.

WWW: Where’s the Writable Web?

Prompted by our time at CERN, Remy ponders why web browsers (quite quickly) diverged from the original vision of being read/write software.

FOREVERYONE.NET

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‽

Talk at Bush Symposium: Notes

On the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, Tim Berners-Lee delivered this address in 1995.

To a large part we have MEMEXes on our desks today. We have not yet seen the wide scale deployment of easy human interfaces for editing hypertext and making links. (I find this constantly frustrating, but always assume will be cured by cheap commercial products within the year.)

Transcript of Tim Berners-Lee’s talk to the LCS 35th Anniversary celebrations, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1999/April/14

Twenty years ago—when the web was just a decade old—Tim Berners-Lee gave this talk, looking backwards and forwards.

For me the fundamental Web is the Web of people. It’s not the Web of machines talking to each other; it’s not the network of machines talking to each other. It’s not the Web of documents. Remember when machines talked to each other over some protocol, two machines are talking on behalf of two people.

Tools & Craft - Episode 03: Ted Nelson

A great interview with Ted Nelson at the Internet Archive where he reminisces about Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Vannevar Bush, hypertext and Xanadu. Wind him and let him go!

There’s an interesting tidbit on what he’s up to next:

So, the first one I’m trying to build will just be a comment, but with two pages visibly connected. And the second bit will be several pages visibly connected. A nice example is Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, which is a long poem by the fictitious author John Shade, connected to a large number of idiotic footnotes by the fictitious academic Charles Kinbote.

Ironically, back in the days of the Dark Brown Project, I actually got permission from the publishers of Pale Fire to demonstrate it on the Brown system. So now I hope to demonstrate it on the new Xanadu.

Pale Fire is the poem referenced in Blade Runner 2049:

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked…

How do you figure? | CSS-Tricks

A good reminder from Chris—prompted by Scott O’Hara’s article—that the figcaption element and the alt attribute do different things. If you use an empty alt attribute on an img inside a figure, then your figcaption element is captioning nothing …and no, using the same text for both is not the solution.

It’s our job as designers to bring clarity back to the digital canvas by crafting reading experiences that put readers first.

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