Dark Ages of the Web
Notes on the old internet, its design and frontend.
Link tags: web
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Weird Wide Webring
More of the whimsical web!
The Whimsical Web
A collection of truly personal sites.
This site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.
Of course Cassie’s site is included!
Why BaseCamp & Hey.com are Wrong About the Apple App Store
I feel for BaseCamp, I do. But give up on the native app path. Make sure your existing web interface is a good progressive web app and you can end-run around Apple.
Cassie Evans’s Blog
Cassie’s redesign is gorgeous—so much attention to detail! (And performant too)
Quotebacks and hypertexts (Interconnected)
What I love about the web is that it’s a hypertext. (Though in recent years it has mostly been used as a janky app delivery platform.)
I am very much enjoying Matt’s thoughts on linking, quoting, transclusion, and associative trails.
My blog is my laboratory workbench where I go through the ideas and paragraphs I’ve picked up along my way, and I twist them and turn them and I see if they fit together. I do that by narrating my way between them. And if they do fit, I try to add another piece, and then another. Writing a post is a process of experimental construction.
And then I follow the trail, and see where it takes me.
Igalia Chats: Web Ecosystem Health with Jeremy Keith and Stuart Landridge
Myself and Stuart had a chat with Brian about browser engine diversity.
Here’s the audio file if you’d like to huffduff it.
Quotebacks
This looks like a nifty tool for blogs:
Quotebacks is a tool that makes it easy to grab snippets of text from around the web and convert them into embeddable blockquote web components.
What was it like? (Phil Gyford’s website)
Congratulations and kudos to Phil for twenty years of blogging!
Here he describes what it was like online in the year 2000. Yes, it was very different to today, but…
Anyone who thinks blogging died at some point in the past twenty years presumably just lost interest themselves, because there have always been plenty of blogs to read. Some slow down, some die, new ones appear. It’s as easy as it’s ever been to write and read blogs.
Though Phil does note:
Some of the posts I read were very personal in a way that’s less common now, in general. … Even “personal” websites (like mine) often have an awareness about them, about what’s being shared, the impression it gives to strangers, presenting a public face, maybe a feeling of, “I’m just writing personal nonsense but, why, yes, I am available for hire”.
Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying Robin’s writing so much.
Robin Rendle ･ 2D Websites
When I log onto someone’s website I want them to tell me why they’re weird. Where’s the journal or scrapbook? Where’s your stamp collection? Or the works-in-progress, the failed attempts, the clunky unfinished things?
marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page
Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a
/feedspage?
Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.
as days pass by — Browsers are not rendering engines
You see, diversity of rendering engines isn’t actually in itself the point. What’s really important is diversity of influence: who has the ability to make decisions which shape the web in particular ways, and do they make those decisions for good reasons or not so good?
Stuart responds to a post from Brian that was riffing off a post of mine from a while back. I like this kind of social network.
Responsive web design turns ten. — Ethan Marcotte
2010 was quite a year:
And exactly three weeks after Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 For Web Designers was first published, “Responsive Web Design” went live in A List Apart.
Nothing’s been quite the same since.
I remember being at that An Event Apart in Seattle where Ethan first unveiled the phrase and marvelling at how well everything just clicked into place, perfectly capturing the zeitgeist. I was in. 100%.
New PDF Preview, Better Web Publishing, Improved Editing - iA Writer: The Focused Writing App
I think this one single feature is going to get me to switch to iA Writer:
For starters, we added Micropub support. This means you can publish to Micro.blog and other IndieWeb tools.
as days pass by — Hammer and nails
We don’t give people a website any more: something that already works, just HTML and CSS and JavaScript ready to show them what they want. Instead, we give them the bits from which a website is made and then have them compile it.
Spot-on description of “modern” web development. When did this become tolerable, much less normal?
Web developers: maybe stop insisting that your users compile your apps for you? Or admit that you’ll put them through an experience that you certainly don’t tolerate on your own desktops, where you expect to download an app, not to be forced to compile it every time you run it?
Interactive Elements: A Strange Game
Just today I was discussing with Trys and Cassie why developers tend to create bespoke JavaScript-driven components rather than using the elements that browsers give us for free. It all comes down to the ability to style the user interface.
Here, Brian proposes a kind of minimum viable web component that handles logic like keyboard control and accessibility, but leaves the styling practically untouched. Check out his panel-set demo of a tabbed interface.
I really, really like the way that it wraps existing content. If the web component fails for any reason, the content is still available. So the web component is a progressive enhancement:
An experimental custom element that wraps plain-old HTML (view the source) and decorates function, keyboard handling, accessibility information.
Late weeknotes 024 - Attitude of Ingratitude
This might be the most insightful thing that Dan has written since his seminal 2013 Medium article:
The problem with Scrappy Doo, isn’t that he’s annoying, which he is, but that the ghosts suddenly became real, which is an afront to science.
I know this hot-take is about 40 years old, but I’ve been bottling it up.
It was 20 years ago today… - Web Directions
John’s article, A Dao Of Web Design, is twenty years old. If anything, it’s more relevant today than when it was written.
Here, John looks back on those twenty years, and forward to the next twenty…
This Video Has {{ viewcount }} Views - YouTube
Tom’s videos are so good! Did you see his excellent in-depth piece on copyright?
This one is all about APIs and the golden age of Web 2.0 when we were free to create mashups.
It pairs nicely with a piece by another Tom from a couple of years back on the joy of Twitterbots.
