Tags: text

A Simple Note – Miscelanea

A short text file, imbued with meaning and memory.

What do you want to do when you grow up, kid? • Robin Rendle

Publishing on the web really is quite marvellous:

…an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Screenreader support for text-level semantics

Bruce reveals that the theory and the reality are somewhat different when it comes to the accessibility of inline elements like em and strong.

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..

Trix: A rich text editor for everyday writing

If you must add a rich text editor to an interface, this open source offering from Basecamp looks good.

Brand New Roman

A font made of corporate logos.

Accessible Comics - Axess Lab

Nice! It sounds like Lucy and Andy went above and beyond the call of duty when it came to the alt text for 100 Demon Dialogues.

The Man Who Invented The Web - TIME

This seventeen year old profile of Tim Berners-Lee is fascinating to read from today’s perspective.

ASCIIFlow Infinity

Is it a graphic design tool? Is it a text editor? Is it just good fun?

Brutalist Web Design

A website is not a magazine, though it might have magazine-like articles. A website is not an application, although you might use it to purchase products or interact with other people. A website is not a database, although it might be driven by one.

Artificial Intelligence for more human interfaces | Christian Heilmann

An even-handed assessment of the benefits and dangers of machine learning.

Your Brain on Front-End Development | CSS-Tricks

I find this soooo relatable:

I know when I look at a design (heck, even if I know I’m not going to be building it), my front-end brain starts triggering all sorts of things I know will be related to the task.

Difference is, Chris comes up with some very, very clever techniques.

Resilient, Declarative, Contextual

This is really good breakdown of what’s different about CSS (compared to other languages).

These differences may feel foreign, but it’s these differences that make CSS so powerful. And it’s my suspicion that developers who embrace these things, and have fully internalized them, tend to be far more proficient in CSS.

Text Effects - a Collection by Mandy Michael on CodePen

Mandy’s experiments with text effects in CSS are kinda mindblowing—I can’t wait to see her at Ampersand at the end of the month!

Design systems and technological disruption – The Man in Blue

Almost every technological innovation over the last 300 years has had side effects which actually increase the number of opportunities for employment. The general trend is that the easier something is to do, the more demand there is for it.

Cameron looks at the historical effects of automation and applies that to design systems. The future he sees is one of increased design democratisation and participation.

This is actually something that designers have been championing for decades – inclusive design at all levels of the company, and an increase in design thinking at all stages of product development. Now that we finally have a chance of achieving that it’s not a time to be scared. It’s a time to be celebrated.

About txt.fyi

This is the dumbest publishing platform on the web.

Write something, hit publish, and it’s live.

The Untold Story of Jaime Levy, Punk-Rock Cyber-Publishing Pioneer

This excerpt from Claire L. Evans’s new book Broad Band sounds like Halt and Catch Fire, but for real.

Many people saw the web for the first time in Jaime’s loft, on a Mac II her hacker friend Phiber Optik set up with a 28.8K internet connection. As avant-garde guitarist Elliott Sharp performed live, and another friend, DJ Spooky, played house tracks, Jaime’s guests gathered around the Mac’s small screen. At the top of 1994, there were fewer than 1,000 websites in the world, mostly personal home pages. These converts would call themselves the “early true believers,” counting the year of their arrival online as a mark of status, the way the first punks claimed 1977.

90 Minutes | Type Supply

Tal Leming’s thoroughly delightful (and obsessive) account of designing the 90 Minutes typeface for U.S. Soccer.

FIFA has strict regulations that govern the size and stroke weight of numbers and letters used on official match uniforms. This made me unbelievably paranoid. I had a nightmare that one of the national teams would be set for kickoff of an important match and the referee would suddenly blow the whistle and say, “Hey, hey, hey! The bottom stroke of that 2 is 1 mm too light. The United States must forfeit this match!”

Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny

The text of a fascinating talk given by Tim Berners-Lee back in 1995, at a gathering to mark the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s amazing article As We May Think. The event also drew together Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, and Bob Kahn!

Thanks to Teodara Petkova for pointing to this via the marvellous Web History Community Group.

Welcome to Interactive Fiction: You’re a Wizard-Sniffing Pig - Atlas Obscura

The fascinating history of interactive fiction from adventure game to hypertext.

The split between parsers and hyperlinks reminds me of different approaches to chatbots: free text entry vs. constrained input.