Chris runs through the process and pitfalls of POSSEing a site (like CSS Tricks) to Apple’s News app, Facebook’s Instant Articles, and Google’s AMP.
Hey, whatever you want. As long as…
- It’s not very much work
- The content’s canonical home is my website.
I just want people to read and like CSS-Tricks.
Here’s a handy graph from Paul:
Powered by data from caniuse.com and StatCounter, this page indicates the percentage of users who have a browser that natively supports various web platform features.
This is a really great step-by-step walkthrough of adding a service worker to a website. Mike mentions the gotchas he encountered along the way, and describes how he incrementally levelled up the functionality.
If you’ve been going through a similar process, please write it down and share it like this!
Progressive Web Apps versus native is the wrong question because every step on the path to a Progressive Web App makes sense on its own, irrespective of what a company does with their native apps.
Not all of your customers are going to have your app installed. For those who visit via the web, providing them with a better experience will make them happier and generate more revenue for your business.
It’s really that simple.
Steve describes a script you can use on WebPageTest to simulate going offline so you can test how your progressive web app performs.
A nice introduction to progressive web apps. There’s a little bit of confusion about permissions—whether a site has been added to the home screen or not has no effect on the permissions granted to it (for things like push notifications)—but the wrap-up nails the advantages of using the web:
No more waiting to download an app, no more prompts for updating an app. From a developer perspective, it means we will be able to iterate a lot quicker. We don’t need to wait for app store approvals anymore, and we can deploy at our own leisure.
Another advantage that a progressive web app has over a native mobile app is that it is linkable, hence it is easier to share and, probably even more importantly, can be indexed by search engines. This makes discoverability of the app a lot better.
This is what Nick Sherman has been banging on about for years, and now the time has come for variable fonts …as long as typographers, browser makers, and standards bodies get behind it.
More details on Ev’s blog.
Jonathan takes a look at the physical web. Like me, he’s excited by the possibilities. Although he says:
Sadly, my mind quickly devolved into the annoyance of numerous notifications, like popup windows and other distracting adverts, vying for my attention.
This is a common worry with the physical web, but it’s unfounded. All a beacon does is broadcast a URL. You have to actively look for the URLs being broadcast—they can’t send notifications.
It all just feels like QR codes. They’ll be all over the place and most of them won’t be very useful.
I understand this concern, but whereas QR codes are completely opaque to humans, at least URLs can—and should—be human-readable …so, unlike QR codes, a URL can give you some idea of what awaits.
Alex runs through the features that a progressive web app must have, should have, and would be nice to have.
In general, installability criteria are tightening. Today’s Good-To-Haves may become part of tomorrow’s baseline. The opposite is unlikely because at least one major browser has made a strong commitment to tightening up the rules for installability.
Right now, this is in the nice-to-have category:
Mobile-friendly, not mobile-only.
Personally, I’d put that in the must-have category, and not just for progressive web apps.
Anyway, read on for some advice on testing and tooling when it comes to evaluating progressive web apps.
This should be a lot more straightforward than process I linked to before.
It’s always, um …”interesting” when a mainstream publication covers a topic from the web’s bikeshed. In this case, it’s progressive web apps, and—apart from the sensationalist headline—it’s actually not that bad at all.
A good ol’ polemic in favour of using web fonts. It’s a good read although I strongly disagree with this line of reasoning:
The average internet speed in the United States today is three times as fast as it was in 2011.
But that americentric view is redeemed later on:
The World Wide Web may be a creation of the West, but now, at long last, it needs to get ready for the rest.
I may not agree with all the points in this article, but I think we can all agree that if we’re going to use web fonts, we must use them responsibly …otherwise users are going to treat them as damage and route around them.
The font-display property is landing in browsers, and this is a great introduction to using it:
If you don’t know which option to use, then go with
swap. Not only does it provide an optimal balance between custom fonts and accessibility of content, it provides the same font loading behavior that we’ve relied on JavaScript for. If you have fonts on the page that you’d like to have load, but could ultimately do without, consider going withfallbackoroptionalwhen usingfont-display.
Until it’s more widely supported, you can continue to use a JavaScript solution, but even then you can feature detect first:
if ("fontDisplay" in document.body.style === false) {
/* JavaScript font loading logic goes here. */
}
This is a really good overview of progressive web apps:
An ideal web app is a web page that has the best aspects of both the web and native apps. It should be fast and quick to interact with, fit the device’s viewport, remain usable offline and be able to have an icon on the home screen.
At the same time, it must not sacrifice the things that make the web great, such as the ability to link deep into the app and to use URLs to enable sharing of content. Like the web, it should work well across platforms and not focus solely on mobile. It should behave just as well on a desktop computer as in other form factors, lest we risk having another era of unresponsive m.example.com websites.
Heartfelt congratulations to Remy on ten years of blogging.
More importantly, every single URL on my blog that’s ever been published still works, and even better than that (for me) is my archive showing off the decade of writing I’ve been producing over all this time 💪
Rachel takes a look back at twenty years of building on the web. Her conclusion: we’ve internalised constraints that are no longer relevant, and that’s holding us back from exploring new design possibilities:
Somehow the tables have turned. As the web moves on, as we get CSS that gives us the ability to implement designs impossible a few years ago, the web looks more and more like something we could have build with rudimentary CSS for layout. We’ve settled on our constraints and we are staying there, defined by not being print.
The history of the GIF—a tale of licensing, compression, and standards.
The devs at The Guardian walk through the process of building a progressive web app for the Olympics. There were some gotchas with the life cycle of service workers, but the pay-off was worth it:
Once you get there though, it’s quite magical when you load the page on a phone, switch it to airplane mode, reload, and continue using the app as though nothing was wrong.
An in-depth look at the current Shadow DOM spec. It’s well-written but I don’t think this will really click with me until I start playing around with it for myself.
It’s good to see that the examples have some thought given to fallback content.
There’s also a corresponding tutorial on custom elements
I’m in complete agreement with Heydon here:
But it turns out the only surefire way to make performant Web Stuff is also to just write less. Minify? Okay. Compress? Well, yeah. Cache? Sounds technical. Flat out refuse to code something or include someone else’s code in the first place? Now you’re talking.
Just like the “mobile first” mindset, if you demand that everything must justify its existence, you end up with a better experience for everyone:
My favorite thing about aiming to have less stuff is this: you finish up with only the stuff you really need — only the stuff your user actually wants. Massive hero image of some dude drinking a latte? Lose it. Social media buttons which pull in a bunch of third-party code while simultaneously wrecking your page design? Give them the boot. That JavaScript thingy that hijacks the user’s right mouse button to reveal a custom modal? Ice moon prison.
A browser aimed specifically at web developers. It’s got some nice features around mobile device emulation.
There’s this really common use-case I’ve seen at Codebar and Homebrew Website Club, where someone is making a static site, but they just want a contact form that sends data via email. This looks like a handy third-party service to do just that. No registration required: it’s all done via the value of the action attribute in the opening form tag:
action="https://formspree.io/your@email.com"
Another dive into the archives of the www-talk mailing list. This time there are some gems about the origins of the input element, triggered by the old isindex element.
On August 6th, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee sent a message to alt.hypertext newsgroup announcing his WorldWideWeb project.
Over the years I’ve come to realize that most difficult part of making websites isn’t the code, it’s the “hidden expectations”, the unseen aspects I didn’t know were my responsibility when I started: Accessibility, Security, Performance, and Empathy.
Adam and I share the same hopes and frustrations with web components. They can be written in a resilient, layered way that allows for progressive enhancement, but just about every example out there demonstrates a “my way or the highway” approach to using them.
We were chatting about this in the Design Systems slack channel, and it helped clarify some of my thoughts. I’ll try to poop out a blog post about this soon.
Fortunately there’s a back-up on the Internet Archive, but this tale of Google’s overnight destruction of fourteen years of writing is truly infuriating.
When we use their services, we trust that companies like Google will preserve some of the most personal things we have to share. They trust that we will not read the fine print.
When you pitch your tent in someone else’s walled garden, they can tear down your home whenever they want.
Paul argues that the biggest problems for interoperability on the web don’t come from support (or lack of support) for entire features, but from the frustrating inconsistencies when features land in different browsers at different times with different implementations:
- Platform inconsistencies hurt us more than big feature differences, we should start to try and prioritize aligning the platform
- We need better tools to help us understand what the inconsistencies are and guidance on how to manage them
- Developers should raise more issues to keep browser vendors accountable when there are differences
Sixteen years on, this still rings true.
I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they talk options, they dream options. They have IPOs. They’re richer after four months of “web” work than many web people who’ve been doing it since the beginning. They don’t have personal sites. They don’t want personal sites. They don’t get personal sites. They don’t get personal. Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures.
This is a wonderful way of progressively explaining the layered approach to building for the web that Charlotte was teaching in her Codebar workshop.
A good introduction to custom elements, one piece of the web components stack.
That said, when using custom elements—or anything involving JavaScript, for that matter—you should always design experiences for progressive enhancement, and plan for the possibility that JavaScript isn’t enabled or available.
Hmmm …that’s kind of hard when JavaScript is required to make custom elements work at all.
Charlotte did a fantastic job putting this workshop together on the weekend. It was inspiring!
Well, this is interesting! It turns out you can turn your laptop into a beacon for broadcasting a URL to devices that support The Physical Web.
Phil’s write-up of teaching web development to beginners is immensely valuable in the run-up to the Codebar workshop that Charlotte is running this weekend. This bit gave both us a real “a-ha!” moment:
It only occurred to me at the end that I should have encouraged the students to try and fix each other’s bugs. If anyone had problems I’d go round and help people and often it’d be a little typo somewhere. Helping each other would acknowledge that this is entirely normal and that a second pair of eyes is often all that’s needed.
Andrew picks out his favourite bits from this year’s Google I/O, covering web payments, CSS containment, and—of course—Service Workers and progressive web apps, although he does note (and I concur):
I wish Google would focus as much attention on ‘normal’ sites that perform navigations as they do on so called ‘app-shell’ (which is just a new name for single-page apps, as far as I can tell), but then many people will be building SPAs and these recipes will make those apps fly. In news publishing we seem to flip flop between traditional page navigations and SPAs, but I’ve never found a SPA news site (or a native app) that I really like more than a normal website. Maybe a really good progressive web app will change that. But I’m not convinced.
Still, as he says:
All this really just underscores how flexible ServiceWorker is and that with it we can disagree on what the right solution is, but we can all get what we want anyway.
A terrific rundown of all your options when it comes to web font loading.
Jason looks at the business reasons for and against building progressive web apps. In short, there’s everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Seriously, why would you not add a Service Worker and a manifest file to your site? (assuming you’re already on HTTPS)
Two weeks ago, writer and artist Dennis Cooper was checking his Gmail when something peculiar happened: the page was refreshed and he was notified that his account had been deactivated – along with the blog that he’d maintained for 14 years.
This is why the Indie Web exists.
His advice to other artists who work predominantly online is to maintain your own domain and back everything up.
The roadmap for progressive web apps from Microsoft; not just their support plans, but also some ideas for distribution.
From the ARPANET to the internet, this is a great history of the Domain Name System:
Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularly given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.
I really, really like what Ember is aiming for here:
First, we deliver the raw content, ensuring those on slow connections or without JavaScript get they’re after as soon as possible. Next, we load the minimum set of JavaScript needed to interactivity for that page, keeping transfer time and parsing time low. Once the user has an interactive page, we can start preemptively loading other parts of the application, including frequently-accessed data.
That’s how you get the holy grail of resilience and performance:
Subsequent visits and interactions are therefore nearly instantaneous, because they don’t rely on the network.
I sincerely hope other frameworks are paying attention to this layered approach.
Oh, and I also like this observation:
There’s an age-old argument about the difference between “web pages” and “web apps”. In reality, there’s a continuum between the two.
Simon’s in-depth report on the Decentralized Web Summit.
I’ve always loved the way that Edward Tufte consistently uses Bembo to typeset his books. Here’s a version made for screen and freely licensed.
Depending on how you’re currently structuring your CSS and class attributes, web components might not make all that much of a difference to your workflow.
You can think of this as a short book or a long article, but either way it’s a handy overview of typography on the web:
A concise, referential guide on best web typographic practices.
Mind you, I take issue with this assertion:
Establishing a vertical rhythm is simple.
Ten of us reminisce about where we were and what we were doing a decade ago.
Ten years ago I was writing on my blog. Lots of other people were writing on their blogs back then too. That would soon change, though. Twitter and Facebook were picking up steam and soon they’d be luring bloggers away with enticing and seductive short-form convenience. I’ve stubbornly continued writing on my own site. I fully intend to keep on writing there for the next ten years too.
I can’t wait for this documentary to come out (I linked to its website a while back).
The second book in Adam Scott’s series on ethical web development is a nice quick read, covering URL design, Service Workers, and performance.
This sixteen year old cool URI has not changed. I think this idea of domains entering an archive state is worth pursuing.
Also, I love the science fictional footnote “Note for readers after 2100”.
The World Wide Web, with all of its pages, blogs and so on- has allowed human expression in ways that would have been uneconomic and out of reach before. The most dramatic effect has been this ability for almost anyone to express himself or herself whenever they want to- and potentially be heard by many others.
Vint Cerf there, taking part in this wide-ranging discussion with, among others, Kevin Kelly and Bob Metcalfe.
The introduction leans a bit too heavily on Nicholas Carr for my liking, but it ends up in a good place.
The internet connects us cognitively and becomes a membrane through which our minds can interact, manifesting a whole new iteration of our species, who have begun to exist in a connected symbiotic relationship with technology.
The internet is the first technology we have created, that makes us more human.
The video of my talk on hypertext at the HTML Special before CSS Day. I’m pretty with my delivery here. There’s a bit of Q&A afterwards as well.
Dan Gillmor and Kevin Marks report on the Decentralized Web Summit:
Kahle framed the gathering with three key questions: How can we build a reliable decentralized web? How can we make it more private? And how do we keep it fun and evolving?
Colin pointed out this interesting perspective from an iOS developer moving to the web:
My work for the last few years has been on the web, and honestly, it’s a breath of fresh air. Instant refreshing, surprisingly good debugging / perf tools, intrinsically multi-platform, and most importantly, open.
Web tech gets a lot of shit from native devs (some of it deserved). But the alternatives are worse. I find the entire concept of App Review morally questionable despite Apple’s good intentions. So I sleep better at night not being part of that anymore. Sure, the web is messy, and it’s delicate, but it’s important and good and getting better fast.
There’s something so grim about the resigned acceptance of centralisation here.
It’s in general no longer about the creativity, it’s about the business.
Cameron looks back on his 2007 Mobile Web Design book:
I don’t anticipate native apps will die off anytime soon. But I’m warming to the idea that they may be less relevant to the future of the web, and I reaffirm that “a browser will be — or should be — sufficient for interacting with web content.”
Progressive web apps are poised to be remarkably relevant to the future of the web. Let’s not screw it up.
It is a sad and beautiful world wide web:
The technology that let people make web sites never went away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just uses Facebook and plays along.
Paul Ford shines a light on the solution:
Standing against this tide of centralization is the indie web movement. Perhaps “movement” is too strong—it’s more an aesthetic of independence and decentralization. The IndieWebCamp web page states: “When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own your information and profit from it. You should have your own servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again be your own.
Beautiful, beautiful writing:
We could still live in that decentralized world, if we wanted to. Despite the rise of the all-seeing database, the core of the internet remains profoundly open. I can host it from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever enormous explosion tears through our digital world next will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the potential of the small, where others see only scale.
The slides from Aaron’s talk at OS Bridge in Portland, looking at the formats and protocols powering the indie web.
Hidde’s write-up of the talk I gave to Vasilis’s students in Amsterdam last week, all about digital preservation and long-term thinking.
Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!
If you’re going to make a manifest file for an existing site, start with this very handy tool. You give it the URL of your site and it then parses the content for existing metadata to create a best first stab at a manifest JSON file.
A wonderful rallying cry for the indie web:
Do it yourself. Strip it down. Keep control. Make it for your community. Don’t do it for the money.
And this is where I start to understand what my friend Rebecca Gates means when she says that technologists and designers have a lot to learn from punk and indie rock. Leave the expensive, large scale, commercial arena rock to Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
We can be The Ramones.
And Bad Brains.
We can press our own records, and run our own labels.
We can make our own spaces based on our own values.
Such a shame that it’s only on Medium—the MOR of online publishing.
An in-depth, thoroughly-researched look at the threatened health of the web. It’s grim reading, for the most part, but there’s a glimmer of hope towards the end.
A good impartial overview of progressive web apps, as described at the most recent Google I/O. This is very telling:
At the start I found the term a bit confusing as some PWA examples are single page applications (SPA) controlled by JavaScript. These apps are not strictly using progressive enhancement where JavaScript is added on top to enhance the experience.
The term also begs the question; what is the difference between websites and apps? It seems many of the new capabilities fit well for any dynamic website, not just apps.
Anyhow. It’s good to have an umbrella term to talk about these things.
“The web is already decentralized,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one big social network, one Twitter for microblogging. We don’t have a technology problem, we have a social problem.”
Google have asked me to moderate a panel on the second day of this event in Amsterdam dedicated to progressive web apps. Very brave of them, considering some of my recent posts.
I think I’ve gotten tired of Google telling me “This is how you have to build websites now.” Or Apple coming down from the mountain once a year saying “Here are the two new products you will buy this year.”
I need to wrap my head around the details of this approach, but it sounds like it might be something I could do here on my site (where I feel nervous about my current dependency on a database).
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it:
When people learned about responsive design, there were many wrong assumptions. The iPhone and early Android phones all had the same screen size (320x480px) and people thought it is a good idea to change the design based on these device-specific sizes.
We wouldn’t do that now, right? We wouldn’t attempt to create something that’s supposed to be a progressive web app, only to make it device-specific, right?
We are still at the beginning of learning about the best ways to build Progressive Web Apps. I hope it will make many more people aware of progressive enhancement. I hope that nobody makes the error again and concentrates on the device part.
Jeffrey’s right. Instagram’s new deal with developers is openly hostile. It probably means the end of OwnYourGram in its current form …a service whose existence is frankly the only reason I’m able to use Instagram at all.
Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”
Why Get on the Indie Web?
In a word, autonomy.
See also:
The Indie Web is made of people. It’s made by me. It can be made by you too. There’s no gatekeeper. You can join anytime without anyone’s permission. The Indie Web is made by everyone.
I agree with everything Andrew says here. Progressive web apps are great, but as long as Google heap praise on mobile-only solutions (like the Washington Post doorslam) and also encourage separate AMP sites, they’re doing a great disservice to the web.
More features arrive regularly to make this “one web” even better and easier to maintain. Service worker, streams, app manifests, payment request, to name a few. But adding these features one at a time to large, mature applications like WaPo or FT or Nikkei is a slow and painstaking process. That’s why it’s taking us a long time for us to tick off all these new features, and why it seems like madness to try and build the entire app several times over.
However, by creating the concept of PWAs and marketing them as they do, Google is encouraging publishers to ‘start again’. And they’re doing exactly the same thing with AMP.
Dave turned Day Trip into a progressive web app.
Starting this week, Android users (~13% of our active user base) who use DayTrip more than once will eventually be asked if they want to install our web app to their Home Screen. That’s important real estate for a small startup like ourselves.
A plug-in for Craft CMS for receiving webmentions. I’ll have to tell Charlotte about this (she’s using Craft for her site).
Bravo!
In the web developer community’s collective drive to be more App Like and compete with native apps we may lose or weaken some of the web’s strongest features and we need to consider carefully before we throw away urls or the entire browser chrome in an effort to look like and behave like the cool kids of native.
You can hear more of Ada’s thoughts on progressive web apps on a recent episode of JavaScript Air.
Phew! Alex seems to have calmed down. He’s responding to my concerns about exposing URLs in progressive web apps, but thankfully without the absolutist rhetoric or insults. Progress!
So remember when I was talking about “the ends justify the means” being used for unwise short-term decisions? Here’s a classic example. Chris thinks that Progressive Web Apps should be made mobile-only (at least to start with …something something something the future):
For now, PWAs need to be the solution for the next mobile users.
End users deserve to have an amazing, form-factor specific experience.
I couldn’t disagree more. End users deserve to have an amazing experience no matter the form-factor of their device.
Matthias Beitl takes a stab at trying to tackle the tricky UI problem of exposing the URLs of Progressive Web Apps. This stuff is hard.
Remy looks at the closing gap between native and web. Things are looking pretty damn good for the web, with certain caveats:
The web is the long game. It will always make progress. Free access to both consumers and producers is a core principle. Security is also a core principle, and sometimes at the costs of ease to the developer (but if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun, right?).
That’s why there’ll always be some other technology that’s ahead of the web in terms of features, but those features give the web something to aim for:
Flash was the plugin that was ahead of the web for a long time, it was the only way to play video for heavens sake!
Whereas before we needed polyfills like PhoneGap (whose very reason for existing is to make itself obsolete), now with progressive web apps, we’re proving the philosophy behind PhoneGap:
If the web doesn’t do something today it’s not because it can’t, or won’t, but rather it is because we haven’t gotten around to implementing that capability yet.
A heartfelt call to web developers to consider the needs of the many and varied people trying to use what we build.
None of this is about Javascript. None of this is about CSS transforms or WebGL. None of this is about technology at all.
It is about making products that serve all users equally. It is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes. It is about trying to imagine the frustration and difficulty of using our products when the conditions aren’t what we’re used to. It is about being human.
I’ve been poking around at Google’s information on “instant apps” since they announced it at Google I/O. My initial impressions mirror Peter’s.
Either they allow access to more device APIs (which could be a massive security hole) or else they’re more or less websites.
While the open web still exists, we really dropped the ball protecting and strengthening it. Fewer people’s first choice for publishing is to start a web site hosted at their own domain. Like the destruction of Pennsylvania Station, sometimes you only know in hindsight that you’ve made a mistake. We were so caught up in Twitter and Facebook that we let the open web crumble. I’m not giving up — I think we can get people excited about blogging and owning their own content again — but it would have been easier if we had realized what we lost earlier.
By publishing to my own web site first…
- I feel like I’m curating a library rather than throwing loose papers into a raging torrent.
- I have the ability to quickly move to another platform if I so wish
- I can choose how things look and feel
- I can track, or not track, any metric I’d like to
- I can publish several different types of media: photos, audio
- I can turn discussion on or off
A good introduction to the Indie Web approach:
This post was primarily directed at friends and colleagues that already blog in other spaces, and wonder why/how they would re-post content to Medium or elsewhere.
Shane gave a talk recently where he outlined his reasons for publishing on the indie web:
Most people reading this will probably have an account at most or all of these sites: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, Wordpress. Many also had accounts at Friendster, Tribe, MySpace, Delicious, Magnolia, Gowalla, Geocities. But no one has an account at any of those (on the second list) anymore. And all of the content that we created on those sites is gone.
All of those super emo feeling you posted to MySpace, they’re all gone. Some of the great web designers of our generation got started on Geocities. That stuff is gone forever. And sure, it was sparkling animated GIFs and neon colors. But that’s important history. Yahoo bought it, left it alone for a while, and then decided one day to turn it off.
Oh, how I wish I could make it to this event!
June 8th-9th at Internet Archive, featuring Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and more.
We are bringing together a diverse group of Web architects, activists, engineers, archivists, scholars, journalists, and other stakeholders to explore the technology required to build a Decentralized Web and its impact.
Lovely, lovely pictures from last weekend’s brilliant Indie Web Camp in Düsseldorf.
This is so cool! The logs of the Indie Web Camp IRC channel visualised as a series of sparklines in the style of Joy Division/Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Some smart thoughts on web fonts.
If you want to go to the Indie Web Summit on June 3rd to 5th (and you should), there’s a travel assistance fund:
If you are a member of a group that is typically underrepresented (e.g. if you are not straight, white, cis and male), and otherwise could not afford to travel to IndieWeb Summit on your own, an anonymous donor has established a $1000 fund to assist individuals from underrepresented backgrounds with travel and/or lodging costs for the Indieweb Summit in Portland.
Mike’s blog is back on the Indie Web.
As someone who designs things for a living, there is a certain amount of professional pride in creating one’s own presence on the internet. It’s kind of like if an architect didn’t design their own house.
I’ve been on the web for most of my life, but, without a site to call home, I haven’t been of the web for far too long.
Adrian runs through the history of well-crafted websites:
- 1990s: Dynamic websites
- 2002: All-CSS layouts
- 2003: Nice URLs
- 2005: Ajax
- 2009: Custom web fonts
- 2010: Responsive web design
I think he’s absolutely right with his crystal ball too:
What’s a big hint that a site is crafted by forward-looking web developers? I’d say it’s service workers, the most interesting thing happening in web development.
But leaving trends aside, Adrian reminds us:
Some things never go out of style. None of the following is tied to a particular time or event, but each is a sign a website was made by people who care about their craft:
- Making sure the site works without JavaScript
- Semantic markup
- Following accessibility standards
Eric asked me some questions and I was only too happy to give some answers.
Ted has snuck a blog post out from behind Apple’s wall of silence, and it’s good news: WebKit is not going to use vendor prefixes for new features.
Chris’s homage to I, Pencil.
I, Website, am a complex combination of miracles.
I lightweight little web browser. It’s quite nice.
I particularly like Ethan’s Stop Making Sense era David Byrne suit.
Marc writes about why you (yes, you!) should come to Indie Web Camp in Düsseldorf in just under two week’s time.
A trip down memory lane with Håkon.
It’s not like the web has been done. This is history in the making. The web is only 25 years old. It’s going to be around for a long time, so there are lots of things to develop.
History, as the future will know it, is happening today on the web. And so it is the web that we must capture, package, and preserve for future generations to see who we are today.
Digital archivists run up against mismatched expectations:
But did you know that a large majority of web users think that when sharing their thoughts, images, and videos online they are going to be preserved in perpetuity? No matter how many licenses the general population clicks “Agree” to, or however many governing policies are developed that state the contrary, the millions of people sharing their content on websites still believe that there is an implicit accountability that should be upheld by the site owners.
The best of the web is just one click away.
While many challenges remain, the good news is … it’s progressive. Developers can already see the benefits by sprinkling in these technologies to their existing websites and proceed to build on them as browsers and operating systems increase support.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Facebook’s Mobile @Scale event where I was the token web guy. The talk is pretty short but there’s some fun Q&A afterwards.
I love good typography but I have to agree with the sentiment expressed here.
System fonts can be beautiful. Webfonts are not a requirement for great typography.
It’s in German, but this presentation by Joschi is a great introduction to Indie Web ideas and building blocks.
A film about Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. Details are scarce right now but watch this space.
In this extract from his forthcoming book, Richard looks at when to use ems, when to use rems …and when to use ch (no, me neither).
If you’re thinking about syndicating to Medium from your own site, this is probably the simplest way to do it—let If This, Then That take care of faffing about with the API.
A really good explanation of how a peer-to-peer model for the web would differ from the current location-centric approach.
What really interests me is the idea of having both models co-exist.
You just have to think about the ways in which our location-centrism is contributing to the problems we are hitting, from the rise of Facebook, to the lack of findability of OER, to the Wikipedia Edit Wars.
Jason is open-sourcing the code for his site’s Content Management System, filled with lots of Indie Web goodness.
This rousing call-to-arms by Abby the IA makes a great companion piece to her interview on The Big Web Show.
The slides from Calum’s presentation at Front-end London.
I invite you not just to follow along here as I expand into topics beyond design and technology, but to start your own personal blog up again if you’ve been neglecting it for a while. I’m really interested in the things you are passionate about. I want to learn from you.
I love this. I really love this. Remy absolutely nails what makes the web so great.
There’s the ubiquity:
If the viewer is using the latest technology beefy desktop computer that’s great. Equally they could view the website from a work computer, something old and locked in using a browser called IE8.
Then there’s the low barrier to entry—yes, even today:
It’s the web’s simplicity. Born out of a need to connect documents. As much as that might have changed with the latest generation of developers who might tell you that it’s hard and complex (and they’re right), at the same time it is not complicated. It’s still beautifully simple.
Anyone can do it. Anyone can publish content to the web, be it as plain text, or simple HTML formed only of <p> tags or something more elaborate and refined. The web is unabashed of it’s content. Everything and anything goes.
I might just print this out and nail it to the wall.
If you sit back for a moment, and think about just how many lives you can touch simply by publishing something, anything, to the web, it’s utterly mind blowing.
It’s okay to feel stress in response to this rapid development. It’s natural. I hate change, I hate it so so much. I like things to be consistent and for it to have it’s own place. If it doesn’t, I get stressed and my obsessive compulsive tendencies run riot in a desperate attempt to preserve order. This both benefits and hinders my work.
Chimes very nicely with the latest episode of Ctrl+Click Cast.
This is a great reminder of the fundamental nuts’n’bolts of the internet and the World Wide Web: clients, servers, URLs, DNS, HTTP, TCP/IP, packet switching, and all the other building blocks we sometimes take for granted.
This is part one of a four-part series:
A lovely reminiscence from Matt on how he came to fall in love with the World Wide Web.
I really hope he posts this on his own site—it’ll be a shame when this disappears along with everything else being posted to Medium.
Jake describes the pivotal moment of his web awakening:
I explored the world wide web. I was amazed by the freedom of information, how anyone could publish, anyone could read. Then I found a little button labeled “View source”. That was the moment I fell in love with the web.
It all goes back to having a ZX Spectrum apparently. Pah! Luxury! I had a ZX81—one K of RAM …1K! Tell that to the young people today, and they wouldn’t believe you.
Anyway, this is a lovely little reminiscence by Jake, although I have no idea why he hasn’t published it on his own site.
I really, really want to like this article—it’s chock full of confirmation bias for me. But it’s so badly-written …I mean like, just the worst.
Here’s an actual sentence:
So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.
So, yeah, I’m still linking to it, but instead of it being for the content, it’s because I want to lament the dreadful state of technology writing.
This solution to the mobile tap delay by the WebKit team sounds like what I was hoping for:
Putting
touch-action: manipulation;on a clickable element makes WebKit consider touches that begin on the element only for the purposes of panning and pinching to zoom. This means WebKit does not consider double-tap gestures on the element, so single taps are dispatched immediately.
It would be nice to know whether this has been discussed with other browser makers or if it’s another proprietary addition.
A single page showing all the weights available from Google fonts at a glance.
The transcript of a great talk by Wilto, focusing on responsive images, inlining critical CSS, and webfont loading.
When we present users with a slow website, a loading spinner, laggy webfonts—or tell them outright that they‘re not using a website the right way—we’re breaking the fourth wall. We’ve gone so far as to invent an arbitary line between “webapp” and “website” so we could justify these decisions to ourselves: “well, but, this is a web app. It… it has… JSON. The people that can’t use the thing I built? They don’t get a say.”
We, as an industry, have nearly decided that we’re doing a great job as long as we don’t count the cases where we’re doing a terrible job.
Written in 2001, this history of the web takes in CERN, hypertext, the ARPANET, SGML, and lots more.
This is a wonderful, wonderful look back at the state of hypertext in the run-up to the creation of the World Wide Web.
My jaw may have dropped when I saw the GML markup.
Now I’m going to read part two.
This is already starting to land in browsers, which makes me very happy—the ability to specify how you want fonts to load/swap without needing a clever bit of JavaScript.
Such a vividly nostalgic project. Choose an obsolete browser. Enter a URL. Select which slice of the past you want to see.
Digital archives in action. Access drives preservation.
Following on from that last link, here’s an in-depth run-down of what you can do in mobile browsers today. I think a lot of people internalised “what you can’t do on the web” a while back—it’s well worth periodically revisiting the feature landscape to revise that ever-shrinking list.
Perhaps the biggest advantage the web has over native apps is how quickly users are able to engage. All that’s between the user and your content is one click.
Visit this site using different browsers on different devices to get a feel for what you can do with web technologies.
Native will always be ahead, but the feature gap is closing impressively fast.
A really nice piece by Paul Ford on the history of databases and the dream of the Semantic Web.
Sometimes I get a little wistful. The vision of a world of connected facts, one big, living library, remains beautiful, and unfulfilled.
One thing though: the scrolling on this page is sooooo janky that I had to switch off JavaScript just to read these words comfortably.
This seems like a decent endeavour:
A collaborative research project aimed at designing better tools and practices for learning web development.
A fascinating ten-year old essay looking at the early days of the web and how it conquered FTP and Gopher.
And though glitz, politics, hard work, and competitors’ mistakes all played a role in the success of the web, there are also aspects of the architecture that ensured the web would catch on. I think the web won because of the URI.
URIs are everywhere, and what’s vaguely funny now is the idea that they’re something special. But they’re very special: URI management is the fundamental consideration behind the design of web sites, web applications, and web services. Tim Berners-Lee originally intended URIs to be invisible, but they’re too useful for that.
I really enjoyed chatting with Jen on this episode of The Web Ahead—aimless rambling fun.
Web technology is no longer limiting us or scaring us into “staying safe” moreover it’s enabling us to get inspired by our surroundings and go and create some truly amazing, Web-Specific design.
A great walkthrough of setting up a Service Worker for a blog. The code is here but more importantly, as Brandon says:
I wouldn’t be able to implement this myself if it wasn’t for some of the awesome people I mentioned earlier sharing their experience. So share, share, share!
Ben and Erin are shipping experimental support for AMP in the latest version of Known, but Ben has some concerns about the balance of power tilting towards one major player, in this case Google:
Unfortunately, AMP redefines the HTML standard with some custom tags. That’s not great. It also requires that we load JavaScript from a specific source, which radically centralizes website content.
But it’s Google’s whitelist of approved ad providers that’s most concerning:
We’ve shipped support for AMP because we see potential here, and recognize that something should be done to improve the experience of loading independently-published content on the web. But attempting to bake certain businesses into a web standard is a malformed idea that is doomed to fail. If this is not corrected in future versions of the specification, we will withdraw support.
Aaron has created a nice straightforward way to allow to POSSE posts from your Jekyll website to Medium.
I concur with this sentiment:
If you are starting a new blog, or have one already, the best thing you can do is turn off all analytics.
Especially true for your own personal site:
Just turn them off now. Then, write about whatever the fuck you want to write about.
Why Atavist is betting on the web. See also:
Lessons From Five Years in Mobile News Apps: #1 Don’t have a news app.
The promise of the web is that Alexandria’s library might be resurrected for the modern world. But today’s great library is being destroyed even as it is being built.
A fascinating account of one story’s linkrot that mirrors the woeful state of our attitude to cultural preservation on the web.
Historians and digital preservationists agree on this fact: The early web, today’s web, will be mostly lost to time.
Tom’s thoughts on what AMP means for developers and publishers. He was initially sceptical but now he’s cautiously optimistic. Like me, he’s hoping that AMP can force the hand of those third-party advertisers to get their act together.
Publisher’s development teams are very capable of creating fast experiences for mobile users, but they don’t have the clout to coordinate all the additional cruft that is added to the page. However, if all the different publishers dev team’s got together and put their weight behind a single implementation, then we can force third parties to change their habits.
A great little primer on the origins of the internet and the web, by Aleks.
Paul compares publishing on the web to publish on proprietary platforms, and concludes that things aren’t looking great right now.
Performance is the number one selling point for each of these new content platforms.
Websites should not come with minimum software requirements.
Sometimes it’s nice to step back and look at where all this came from. Here’s Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal from 1990.
The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one.
This is a wonderful, wonderful description of what it feels like to publish on your own site.
When my writing is on my own server, it will always be there. I may forget about it for a while, but eventually I’ll run into it again. I can torch those posts or save them, rewrite them or repost them. But they’re mine to rediscover.
I refuse to believe that this cramped, stifling, stalkerish vision of the commercial Internet is the best we can do.
The title is hyperbolic, and while I certainly think that the criticisms of HTTP here are justified, I don’t think it will be swept aside by IPFS—I imagine more of a peaceful coexistence. Still, there’s some really good thinking in here and this is well worth paying attention to.
Here’s a classic. David Siegel—of Creating Killer Websites fame—outlines exactly why he turned his back on that 1×1 spacer .gif trick he invented.
We become obsessed with tools and methods, very rarely looking at how these relate to the fundamental basics of web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement. We obsess about a right way to do things as if there was one right way rather than looking at the goal; how things fit into the broader philosophy of what we do on the web and how what we write contributes to us being better at what we do.
So a web app is defined as a system that requires the JavaScript excesses for it to work. And the argument for the JavaScript excesses is that we need it to build web apps. That sounds a teeny bit circular to me.
Will the Big Think piece you just posted to Medium be there in 2035? That may sound like it’s very far off in the future, and who could possibly care, but if there’s any value to your writing, you should care. Having good records is how knowledge builds.
A wonderful collection of treasures excavated from GeoCities. Explore, enjoy, and remember what a crime it is that Yahoo wiped out so much creativity and expression.
A wonderful, wonderful history of the web from Dave at this year’s Beyond Tellerrand conference. I didn’t get to see this at the time—I was already on the way back home—so I got Dave to give me the gist of it over lunch. He undersold it. This is a fascinating story, wonderfully told.
So gather round the computer, kids, and listen to Uncle Dave tell you about times gone by.
It’s really great to see the performance improvements being made by the Vox team. This is the one that I think will make the most difference:
Our Revenue Team is increasing focus on the impact our advertising has on user experience and overall performance. One of their biggest initiatives has been to change the way ads load from synchronous to asynchronous, which has been underway for several months and is nearing deployment.
Twenty-six letters of independent publishing building blocks.
Benjamin documents his experience at the first Brighton Homebrew Website Club: a most pleasant evening.
The web – by its very nature – foregrounds the connections between different clusters of knowledge. Links link. One article leads to another. As you make the journey from destination to destination, all inevitably connected by that trail of links, you begin to tease out understanding.
It’s this drawing together, this weaving together of knowledge, that is the important part. Your journey is unique. The chances of another pursuing the same path, link by link (or book by book), is – statistically – impossible. Your journey leads you to discovery and, through reflection, comprehension. You see the connections others haven’t, because your journey is your own.
The death of the web has been greatly exaggerated.
There’s nothing else like it. It’s constantly improving. It’s up to you what you do with it.
A long zoom and then a deep dive into web typography.
A magnificent presentation from Maciej that begins by drawing parallels between the aviation industry in the 20th century and the technology industry in the 21st:
So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.
Unless we screw it up.
And I want to convince you that this is the best possible news for you as designers, and for us as people.
But if that sounds too upbeat for you…
Too much of what was created in the last fifty years is gone because no one took care to preserve it.
We have heroic efforts like the Internet Archive to preserve stuff, but that’s like burning down houses and then cheering on the fire department when it comes to save what’s left inside. It’s no way to run a culture. We take better care of scrap paper than we do of the early Internet, because at least we look at scrap paper before we throw it away.
And then there’s this gem:
We complained for years that browsers couldn’t do layout and javascript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.
It finishes with three differing visions of the web, one of them desirable, the other two …not so much. This presentation is a rallying cry for the web we want.
Let’s reclaim the web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.
Tantek posts a belated round-up of indie web activity in 2014:
2014 was a year of incredible gains, and yet, a very sad loss for the community. In many ways I think a lot of us are still coping, reflecting. But we continue, day to day to grow and improve the indieweb, as I think Chloe would have wanted us to, as she herself did.
Google Fonts aren’t renowned for their quality but this is a beautiful demonstration of what you can accomplish with them.
The full text of Jason’s great talk at this year’s CSS Summit. It’s a great read, clearing up many of the misunderstandings around progressive enhancement and showing some practical examples of progressive enhancement working at each level of the web’s technology stack
A fantastic piece by David Weinberger on the changing uses of the internet—apparently in contradiction of the internet’s original architecture.
Some folks invented the Internet for some set of purposes. They gave it a name, pointed to some prototypical examples—sharing scientific papers and engaging in email about them—shaping the way the early adopters domesticated it.
But over time, the Internet escaped from its creators’ intentions. It became a way to communicate person-to-person via email and many-to-many via Usenet. The web came along and the prototypical example became home pages. Social networking came along and the prototype became Facebook.
The fascinating tales behind Top Level Domains as part of James and Nat’s Citizen Ex project. So far there’s .scot, .cymru, and .ly, with more to come.
This is the way to approach building for the web:
I want to make as few of those assumptions as possible. Because every assumption I make introduces fragility. Every assumption introduces another way that my site can break.
It’s progressive enhancement, but like Stuart, Tim is no longer planning to use that term.
Stuart writes up his thoughts on progressive enhancement following the great discussions at Edge Conf:
So I’m not going to be talking about progressive enhancement any more. I’m going to be talking about availability. About reach. About my web apps being for everyone even when the universe tries to stop it.
An in-depth look at where web components stand today, together with some very good questions about where they might be heading tomorrow.
I really like this impassioned love letter to the web. This resonates:
The web is a worthy monument for society. It cannot be taken away by apps in the app store or link bait on Facebook, but it can be lost if we don’t continue to steward this creation of ours. The web is a garden that needs constant tending to thrive. And in the true fashion of the world wide web, this is no task for one person or entity. It will require vigilance and work from us all.
If you’re not sure if Indie Web Camp is for you, have a read of Charlotte’s take on it:
The reason I didn’t attend last time is because I didn’t know if I had enough experience to spend a weekend working on something completely new. Turns out it doesn’t matter how much coding experience you have. I know I won’t be the only new person at Indie Web Camp. The idea is that we figure out solutions together.
Using Progressive Enhancement makes your site better for all users and enables the 275 million users of Opera Mini worldwide.
The system makes the website. Don’t blame the web developer, blame the organisation. A web developer embedded in a large system isn’t the one making the websites.
To make a progressively enhanced website that performs well and loads quickly even on slow connections, you need to first make an organisation that values those qualities over others.
It’s not about technology, performance and APIs – it’s about people.
Much of the web’s early cultural and design history is at risk, despite efforts by the Internet Archive and renegade archivists. One of our realizations after 20 years on the web is that our responsibility isn’t just to the new; we also need to preserve what’s been built in the past.
Grant, like Emma, has recently started blogging again. This makes me very, very happy. And he’s doing it for what I consider to be all the right reasons:
But this is mostly a place for me to capture my thoughts, and an excuse to consider them, and an opportunity to understand them more fully.
The Indieweb approach has a lot in common with Ev’s ideas for Medium, but the key difference is that we are doing it in a way that works across websites, not just within one.
Progressive Enhancement remains the best option for solving web development issues such as wide-ranging browser support, maintenance and future-proofing your application.
Instead of coming up with all these new tools and JavaScript frameworks, shouldn’t we try to emphasize the importance of learning the underlying fundamentals of the web? Teach those who are just stepping to this medium and starting their careers. By not making our stack more and more complex, but by telling about the best practices that should guide our work and the importance of basic things.
Bastian sums up his experience of attending Indie Web Camp:
But this weekend brought a new motivational high that I didn’t expect to go that far. I attended the Indie Web Camp in Düsseldorf, Germany and I’m simply blown away.
Justin is at Indie Web Camp Germany with me and he’s been converting Am I Responsive? to https—here’s his write-up.
François is here at Indie Web Camp Germany helping out anyone who wants to get their site running on https. He wrote this great post to get people started.
Apps:
Apps must run on specific platforms for specific devices. The app space, while large, isn’t universal.
Websites:
Websites can be viewed by anyone with a web browser.
And that doesn’t mean foregoing modern features:
A web browser must only understand HTML. Further, newer HTML (like HTML 5) is still supported because the browser is built to ignore HTML it doesn’t understand. As a result, my site can run on the oldest browsers all the way to the newest ones. Got Lynx? No problem. You’ll still be able to find matches nearby. Got the latest smartphone and plentiful data? It’ll work there, too, and take advantage of its features.
This is why progressive enhancement is so powerful.
My site will take advantage of newer technologies like geolocation and local storage. However, the service will not be dependent on them.
I completely understand Peter’s fears here, and to a certain extent, I share them. But I think there’s a danger in only looking to what native platforms can do that the web doesn’t (yet). Perhaps instead we should be looking to strengthen what only the web can offer: ubiquity, access, and oh yeah, URLs.
This is a wonderful presentation by Kimberley at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference, running through the history of the Line Mode Browser and the hack project we worked on at CERN to emulate it.
The key change in all of this, I think, is that Google has gone from a world of almost perfect clarity - a text search box, a web-link index, a middle-class family’s home - to one of perfect complexity - every possible kind of user, device, access and data type. It’s gone from a firehose to a rain storm. But on the other hand, no-one knows water like Google. No-one else has the same lead in building understanding of how to deal with this. Hence, I think, one should think of every app, service, drive and platform from Google not so much as channels that might conflict but as varying end-points to a unified underlying strategy, which one might characterize as ‘know a lot about how to know a lot’.
A really great piece by Scott Rosenberg that uses the myopic thinking behind “deep linking” in native apps as a jumping-off point to delve into the history of hypertext and the web.
It’s kind of weird that he didn’t (also) publish this on his own site though.
On the fifteenth anniversary of A Dao Of Web Design people who make websites share their thoughts.
Paul Ford’s is a zinger:
I don’t know if the issues raised in “A Dao of Web Design” can ever be resolved, which is why the article seems so prescient. After all, the Tao Te Ching is 2500 years old and we’re still working out what it all means. What I do believe is that the web will remain the fastest path to experimenting with culture for people of any stripe. It will still be here, alive and kicking and deployed across billions of computing machines, in 2030, and people will still be using it to do weird, wholly unexpected things.
This is a fascinating bit of web archeology: John has annotated the code from one of the earliest versions of jQuery.
Mike runs through the history of Flash. Those who forget the history of the web are doomed to repeat it:
The struggle now seems to be turning to native apps versus non-native apps on the mobile platform. It is similar to Flash’s original battle ground: the argument that the Web technology stack is not suitable for building applications with a polished user-experience.
Jeffrey muses on progressive enhancement and future-friendliness.
Because in 10 years nothing you built today that depends on JS for the content will be available, visible, or archived anywhere on the web.
Sorting out hosting is a big stumbling block for people who want to go down the Indie Web route. Frankly it’s much easier to just use a third-party silo like Facebook or Twitter. I’ve been saying for a while now that I’d really like to see “concierge” services for hosting—”here, you take care of all this hassle!”
Well, this initiative looks like exactly that.
If you don’t have time to poke around StateOfWebType.com here’s the short version.
Superb. Absolutely superb.
A magnificent tour-de-force by Frank on the web’s edgelessness.
Read. Absorb. Read again. This is the essence of responsive web design, distilled.
A quick drag’n’drop way to base 64 encode your web fonts so you can stick ‘em in local storage.
When I look around, I see our community spending a lot of time coming up with new tools and techniques to make our jobs easier. To ship faster. And it’s not that I’m against efficiency, but I think we need to consider the implications of our decisions. And if one of those implications is making our users suffer—or potentially suffer—in order to make our lives easier, I think we need to consider their needs above our own.
Paul Kinlan writes an honest post-mortem of his push for Web Intents.
There are some valuable lessons here, particularly for the indie web’s web actions.
Brewster Kahle’s short presentation at NetGain.
Worth remembering:
The Web is the printing press of our times; an amazing piece of technology facilitating a free and wide-scale dissipation of our thoughts and ideas. And all of it is based on this near 20-year old, yet timeless idea of the Hyper Text Markup Language.
Sensible words from Christian.
Web applications don’t follow new rules.
And frameworks will not help:
A lot of them are not really fixing fundamental problems of the web. What they do is add developer convenience. … This would be totally OK, if we were honest about it.
Simon St. Laurent on uncertainty as a feature, not a bug.
As much as I like “the Web Platform” sparing me syllables over HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more, Jeremy Keith is right: treating the web as a platform with all the brittle expectations of a platform is a terrible idea.
I’ve said it before: if your client-side MVC framework does not support server-side rendering, that is a bug. It cripples performance.
Smart thinking on optimising the perceived performance of loading web fonts: if you prioritise the most widely-used weight and style (usually the regular roman), and load other weights and styles subsequently, then it appears as though the font is ready sooner.
Everyone who calls for WebKit in Internet Explorer is exactly the same kind of developer who would have coded to Internet Explorer 15 years ago (and probably happily displayed the best viewed in badge).
Truth.
It’s happening again, and every petulant, lazy developer who calls for a WebKit-only world is responsible.
First, the browsers competed on having proprietary crap. Then, the browsers competed on standards support. Now, finally, the browsers are competing on what they can offer their users.
Rob Larsen was published a book with O’Reilly called “The Uncertain Web: Web Development in a Changing Landscape”. I like it:
A refreshingly honest look at the chaotic, wonderful world of web development, with handy, practical advice for making future-friendly, backward-compatible websites.
There’s more than a whiff of Indie Web thinking in this sequel to the Cluetrain Manifesto from Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger.
The Net’s super-power is connection without permission. Its almighty power is that we can make of it whatever we want.
It’s quite lawn-off-getty …but I also happen to agree with pretty much all of it.
Although it’s kind of weird that it’s published on somebody else’s website.
This is a nifty little service: if your site has a webmention endpoint, people can comment on your articles by sending an email.
That means you can comment on any post on my site by sending an email to adactio.com@questo.email (in the email, include the URL of the post you’re commenting on).
Like caniuse.com, but for typography features. Find out what’s supported in browsers today.
If your site is written in Ruby (even if it’s made with a static site generator like Jekyll), you can add webmention support with Jason’s newly-open-sourced code.
I had the great honour of being invited to speak on the 200th edition of the Working Draft podcast (there are a few sentences in German at the start, and then it switches into English).
I had a lot of fun talking about indie web building blocks (rel=me, indieauth, webmention, h-entry, etc.). Best of all, while I was describing these building blocks, one of the hosts started implementing them!
With all my talk about extending existing elements instead of making new ones, I was reminded of one of my favourite examples of custom elements in action: Github’s extensions of the time element.
My contribution to this year’s edition of the web’s best advent calendar.
I completely share Bruce’s concern about the year-zero thinking that’s accompanying a lot of the web components marketing:
Snarking aside, why do so few people talk about extending existing HTML elements with web components? Why’s all the talk about brand new custom elements? I don’t know.
Hear, hear!
I’m a fan of web components. But I’m increasingly worried about the messaging surrounding them.
A history lesson and a love letter to the early web, taking in HTML, Photoshop, and the web standards movement.
Those were long years, the years of drop-shadows. Everything was jumping just slightly off the screen. For a stretch it seemed that drop-shadows and thin vertical columns of text would define the web. That was before we learned that the web is really a medium to display slideshows, as many slideshows as possible, with banner ads.
Stuart has implemented webmentions on his site, which is great. It’s also fitting, as he is the inventor of pingback (of which webmention is a simpler reformulation).
Many of the free fonts available from Google are pretty bad, but this site showcases how some of them can be used to great effect.
This strikes me as an eminently sensible idea by Emil: using the picture element to begin providing WebP alternatives to JPG.
Of course, picture-supporting browsers will have to adjust their decision-making algorithm to support this pattern.
Oh, Jeremy, you silly billy. It turns out that this works right out of the box. Nice!
A great presentation on web components by Marcy, with an emphasis on keeping them accessible.
Paul Ford’s potted history of web standards, delivered in his own inimitable style.
Reading through the standards, which are dry as can be, you might imagine that standardization is a polite, almost academic process, where wonks calmly debate topics like semicolon placement. This is not the case.
Aaron documents the process of adding webmention support to a static site. He came with an ingenious three-tiered approach:
It’s been a pretty fun mini-project. In the end, I created a useful bit of kit that provides three distinct experiences:
- Static webmentions collected when the site was generated form the baseline experience;
- JavaScript-enabled browsers get any webmentions that were published since I last generated the site; and
- JavaScript-enabled browsers with WebSockets support get real-time updates with any webmentions that are published after the page loads.
Some good practical advice from Tim on setting a performance budget.
Use rule-based metrics to make sure you haven’t overlooked simple optimizations.
Use quantity-based metrics as guides to help designers and developers make better decisions about what goes onto a page.
I’m an advocate for progressive enhancement. Tom Dale is not. But even though we may disagree on that, there’s a lot to like in his sensible, balanced answers to some sensationalist linkbaity questions.
It’s not that the pace of innovation on the Web is slower, it’s just solving a problem that is an order of magnitude more challenging than how to build and distribute trusted apps for a single platform. As we saw on the desktop, it may take a few years to catch up to all of the capabilities of a native, proprietary platform, but in terms of the impact it will have on humanity, forgive me for not losing sleep if we have to wait a few years for it to arrive.
Aaron raises a point that I’ve discussed before in regards to the indie web (and indeed, the web in general): we don’t buy domain names; we rent them.
It strikes me that all the good things about the web are decentralised (one-way linking, no central authority required to add a node), but all the sticking points are centralised: ICANN, DNS.
Aaron also points out that we are beholden to our hosting companies, although—having moved hosts a number of times myself—that’s an issue that DNS (and URLs in general) helps alleviate. And there’s now some interesting work going on in literally owning your own website: a web server in the home.
The transcript of Owen’s talk at The Web Is. It’s a wonderful, thoughtful meditation on writing, web design, and long-term thinking.
One of the promises of the web is to act as a record, a repository for everything we put there. Yet the web forgets constantly, despite that somewhat empty promise of digital preservation: articles and data are sacrificed to expediency, profit and apathy; online attention, acknowledgement and interest wax and wane in days, hours even.
A cute videolette on web standards.
The magnificent Brid.gy has 1000 accounts. Mazel tov!
This is probably single most important piece of software I’ve used this year: it has allowed me to turbo-charge my site, and feel truly independent. Thank you, Ryan (and Kyle), sincerely.
A great primer on using srcset and picture. I think I’ll be referring back to this a lot.
High-level design principles for JavaScript on the web.
Looks like Phil’s talk at The Web Is in Cardiff was terrific.
A modest proposal: respect.
Progressive enhancement with isomorphic JavaScript, as practiced at Government Digital Services.
Angry, but true.
Don’t lock yourself into a comprehensive technology that may just die within the next few months and leave you stranded. With progressive enhancement you’ll never go wrong. Progressive enhancement means your code will always work, because you’ll always focus on providing a minimal experience first, and then adding features, functionality, and behavior on top of the content.
Tantek shares a fascinating history lesson from Tim Berners-Lee on how the IETF had him change his original nomenclature of UDI—Universal Document Identifier—to what we now use today: URL—Uniform Resource Locator.
This was a fun podcast—myself and Cyd from Code For America talk to Karen and Ethan about how we worked together. Good times.
The audio is available for your huffduffing pleasure.
Documenting common layout issues that can be solved with Flexbox. I like the fact that some of these can be used as enhancements e.g. sticky footer, input add-ons …the fallback in older browsers is perfectly acceptable.
My name is Jeremy and I am a boring front-end developer.
I hope that many of you will watch me on this journey, and follow in my wagon tracks as I leave the walled cities and strike out for the wilderness ahead.
The Android vs. iOS debate is one hinges around whether you think it makes more sense to target a (perceived) larger market, or target one that the technorati favor. But why choose? Building a good responsive web app has a series of benefits, the primary one being that you target users on every platform with one app. Every user. Every platform. All the time. Release whenever you want. A/B test with ease. Go, go go.
A look back at how Twitter evolved over time, with examples of seemingly-trivial changes altering the nature of the discourse.
Kevin finishes with a timely warning for those of us building alternatives:
In the indieweb world we are just starting to connect sites together with webmentions, and we need to consider this history as we do.
Some thoughts on progressive enhancement, although I disagree with the characterisation of progressive enhancement as being the opposite choice to making “something flashy that pushes the web to it’s limits”—it’s entirely possible to make the flashiest, limit-pushing sites using progressive enhancement. After all…
it’s much more a mindset than a particular development technique.
Companies go out of business, get bought and change policies, so what if you had one place to originate all of your content then publish it out to those great social services? And hey, why not pull comments from those services back to your original post?
That’s the idea behind Indie Web Camp: have your own website be the canonical source of what your publish. But right now, getting all of the moving parts up and running requires a fair dollop of tech-savviness. That’s where Known comes in:
It’s similar to the WordPress model: you can create a blog on their servers, or you can download the software and host it on your own.
This post is a good run-down of what’s working well with Known, and what needs more work.
This is what Scott Jenson has been working on—a first stab at just-in-time interactions by having physical devices broadcasting URLs.
Walk up and use anything
I’d go along with pretty much everything Anil says here. Wise words from someone who’s been writing on their own website for fifteen years (congratulations!).
Link to everything you create elsewhere on the web. And if possible, save a copy of it on your own blog. Things disappear so quickly, and even important work can slip your mind months or years later when you want to recall it. If it’s in one, definitive place, you’ll be glad for it.
I really like this comparison:
As a zinester and zine librarian, I see the Indie Web as a pretty direct correlation to 1980’s and 1990’s zine culture. The method of production may be completely different (photocopiers and direct mail vs web posts and servers) but the goals are almost identical – controlling the way in which your message and identity are displayed, crafted, and stored while avoiding censorship that corporate media might impose. The end goal of both zine and indieweb technologies is ownership of your own identity without a filter.
But there also challenges:
The key issue right now for diverse populations utilizing the Indie Web is accessibility. As long as the tools for creating & controlling your own identity online are still relatively obtuse & technical to implement, we won’t have great diversity within the Indie Web.
A really handy bit of code from Aaron for building a robust file uploader. A way to make your web-based photo sharing more Instagrammy-clever.
I think Aaron is spot-on here. There’s a tendency to treat web development these days as just the same as any other kind of software development—which is, on the one hand, great because it shows just how far JavaScript and browsers have come …but on the other hand, that attitude is missing a crucial understanding of the fundamental nature of the web’s technology stack (that we should be treating HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as layers; not as one big ball of webby, timey-wimey stuff).
Soledad Penadés also went to the Extensible Web Summit in Berlin, where she gave a lightning talk. Sounds like it was really good.
This also includes some good advice that, again, Alex might want to consider before denouncing any disagreement on Web Components as “piffle and tosh”:
If the W3C, or any other standardisation organisation wants to attract “normal” developers to get more diverse inputs, they/we should start by being respectful to everyone. Don’t try to show everyone how superclever you are. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t scare people away, because then only the loud ones stay, and the quieter shy people, or people who have more urgent matters to attend (such as, you know, having a working business website even if it’s not using the latest and greatest API) will just leave.
Bruce went to the Extensible Web Summit in Berlin and wrote up his notes.
Sounds like he shares my excitement, but also my nervousness.
I’m not yet entirely convinced that we’re not heralding a new era of JavaScript-only web development. I don’t want to see the fossilisation of the declarative web and a new Programmer Priesthood (re-)emerge.
There’s also this important point, that Alex would do well to remember before crying “Piffle and tosh!”:
We need to ensure that all devs who want to can participate by allowing ease of collaboration, courteous discourse.
Steve Faulkner responds to Alex’s response to my post about Web Components.
Steve shares my concerns …but he still refers to my post as “piffle”.
I can’t win.
Alex’s response to my post about Web Components, in which he ignores my excitement and dismisses my concerns as “piffle and tosh.”
I gotta say: I think cautious optimism and nervous excitement are healthy attitudes to have about any technology. For Alex to dismiss them so summarily makes me even more worried. Apparently you’re either with Web Components or you’re against them. Heaven forbid that you might voice any doubts or suggest any grey areas.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Craig has redesigned and pulled various bits of his writing from around the web into his own site, prompting some thoughts on the indie web.
There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.
In the days before comments on blogs, you could generally have a thoughtful conversation online without everything degenerating into madness and chaos simply because responding to a post required that you wrote a post on your own blog and linked back. This created a certain level of default accountability because if someone wanted to flame you, they had to do it on their own real estate, and couldn’t just crap all over yours anonymously.
A really nice little documentary about my friend Jeffrey.
Glenn eloquently gives his reasons for building Transmat:
When I was a child, my brothers and I all had a shoebox each. In these we kept our mementoes. A seashell from a summer holiday where I played for hours in the rock pools, the marble from the schoolyard victory against a bully and a lot of other objects that told a story.
Ethan Zuckerman riffs on Maciej’s talk at Beyond Tellerrand about the vortex of nastiness that we’ve spiralled down thanks to the default business model of the web: advertising.
Tantek’s great talk on the Indie Web from Web Directions Code in Melbourne earlier this year.
Here’s the very brief talk I gave about Indie Web Camp at Aral’s Indie Tech Summit here in Brighton a little while back (I was in the slightly-demeaningly-titled “stop gaps” section).
If you like what you hear, come along to the next Indie Web Camp—also in Brighton—in just over three weeks.
When Rock’n’roll and Web 2.0 collide, the result is not pretty.
A bit of web history reacted by Paravel: the Microsoft homepage from 1994. View source to see some ooooold-school markup.
Ah, memories!
Dan Donald gets to the heart of progressive enhancement:
Assumptions in themselves don’t have to be inherently bad but let’s recognise them for what they are. We know very little but that can hopefully enable us to be far more flexible and understanding in what we create.
The Web Manifest spec is still very much in draft, but it’s worth reading through Bruce’s explanation of it now. Basically, it will provide a way for us to specify in one external file what we currently have to specify in umpteen meta tags and link elements.
An astute comparison of the early years of the web with the early years of the app store. If there’s anything to this, then the most interesting native apps are yet to come. App Store 2.0?
One more reason why you should never sniff user-agent strings: Internet Explorer is going to lie some more. Can’t really blame them though—if developers didn’t insist on making spurious conclusions based on information in the user-agent string, then browsers wouldn’t have to lie.
Oh, and Internet Explorer is going to parse -webkit prefixed styles. Again, if developers hadn’t abused vendor prefixes, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Ten facets of web development that you can choose to focus on. One of them is from me …but other nine are worth paying attention to.
A nice profile of BERG’s Little Printer. That Matt Webb is a smart cookie. He is also a very thoughtful cookie.
An alternative history from a parallel timeline.
He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.
The Internet forgets every single day.
I’m with Jason.
I encourage you all to take a moment and consider the importance of preserving your online creations for yourself, your family, and for future generations.
Almost six minutes of me squinting in the sun and sharing my reckons while seagulls squawk in the background.
John peers behind the surface veneer of the web’s current screen-based setting:
The challenge for us as developers and designers for the web becomes less about screens and pixels and buttons and much more about how the web augments our lives, both actively and passively; how it makes us know ourselves and our homes and workplaces and environments better.
Here’s a dystopian vision of the web in ten years time, where professional developers are the only people able to publish on the web.
This is why it worries me when I come across very smart people who don’t seem to see a problem with the creation of web pages being taken out of the reach of any human being with an internet connection and a smattering of declarative languages—HTML, CSS—and into the hands of an elite minority of JavaScript programmers.
My interest in rich client-side apps has almost entirely reversed, and now I’m more interested in doing good ol’ server rendering with the occasional side of progressive enhancement, just like we did it in 2004.
This post resonates with me 100%.
Where will I be in 10 years? I don’t know. I hope I still will have some in-demand skills to pay the bills. But it feels like all I see are DevOps and JavaScript, and I know less and less every day about those things.
Words of wisdom from Scott on the clash of brand guidelines and the flexible nature of the web:
One thing I am pretty sure of though, is that having a fast, accessible, user-friendly site can reflect incredibly well on a company, and I’d love to see more guidelines and expectations that prioritize these aspects of a service as branding requirements in addition to the usual visual details.
A brilliant idea (and implementation) from Kartik. By combing webmentions and fragmentions, it’s possible to allow a kind of distributed marginalia: you post a comment on your site about a specific passage in a post on my site and a smattering of CSS and JavaScript can display it in the right context.
I can very much relate to what Dan is talking about here. I have no idea what I do any more.
No doubt we’ll always feel we’re behind the curve as there always seems like more to learn. That’s OK. No-one knows it all, but it is hard knowing what people expect of you.
Tantek’s talk at the Personal Democracy Forum on the past, present, and future of independent publishing on the web.
If you’re coming to the Responsive Day Out next week, bring your dog. Laura is organising a special Web Talk Dog Walk for the next day.
There are many services out there for keeping track of what you’re reading. Susan has found the best one:
Slowly, ever so slowly, as I realize how things come and go on the web, I realize that this is my home. Because this is my home, I want all the things that matter to me to reside here.
Here’s a nice little UI addition to Chrome. When you focus on the URL bar, if the current site has site-specific search discoverable via rel=”search”, then you get a greyed-out hint to press tab so you can start searching the site.
A great little piece by Russell Davies on the Indie Web movement.
Here’s the chat I had with Jen and Doug about the prospect of DRM in browsers.
If you use the Craft CMS to power your blog, you can now send webmentions, thanks to this handy plug-in by Jason.
Have a look through the README file on Github.
I, for one, don’t welcome our applinks overlords.
So, you’re checking out your news feed on your Facebook app and you see a CNN post that you want to read. After reading the post on CNN, you decide you want to to read the source article on TMZ…
I really hope that this is the kind of usage we’ll see for web components: enhancements for the browsers that support them without a good ol’ fashioned fallback for older browsers.
When I’ve been banging on at conferences about digital preservation, personal publishing and the indie web, I’ve been at pains to point out that there are huge opportunities here for startups looking to build valet services to help people publish on their own domain.
Ben and Erin at Known are doing just that, with some backing from KQED, PRX and the Knight Foundation instead of the usual short-sighted Silicon Valley venture capitalism.
One of the jobs of a startup is to look at where the world is going, extrapolating from current trends and domain knowledge, and meet a future need with a product at exactly the right time. We think the time is right for an independent web that is owned by content creators and readers alike.
I’ll be speaking at this event that Aral is putting on here in Brighon on the fourth of July (independence day — geddit?).
Today, a basic HTML/CSS site seems almost passé. But why? Is it because our new tools are so significantly better, or because we’ve gone overboard complicating simple things?
He’s right, y’know.
A truly wonderful piece by Mandy detailing why and how she writes, edits, and publishes on her own website:
No one owns this domain but me, and no one but me can take it down. I will not wake up one morning to discover that my service has been “sunsetted” and I have some days or weeks to export my data (if I have that at all). These URLs will never break.
Those smart people at Filament Group have gathered their open-source code into one handy place. Useful!
A lovely post by Mark on the value of URLs.
A decisive Indie Web move:
This site has become the place that I’m ready to host almost everything I make.
Slides from Tantek’s recent talk at Web Directions Code about the Indie Web.
Right now, this move to remove URLs from the interface of Chrome is just an experiment …but the fact that Google are even experimenting with it is very disturbing.
“Who? Me? No, I was never going to actually blow the web’s brains out—I just wanted to feel the heft of the weapon as I stroked it against the face of the web.”
This has the potential to be a terrific little documentary. What say we get it funded?
Well, this is pretty bloody brilliant—Dan Gillmor has published an article on Slate about the Indie Web movement …but the canonical URL is on his own site.
We’re in danger of losing what’s made the Internet the most important medium in history – a decentralized platform where the people at the edges of the networks – that would be you and me – don’t need permission to communicate, create and innovate.
This isn’t a knock on social networks’ legitimacy, or their considerable utility. But when we use centralized services like social media sites, however helpful and convenient they may be, we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.
Greg isn’t just lamenting a perceived “sameness” in web design here. He’s taking a long-zoom view and pointing out that there’s always a sameness …and you can choose to go along with it or you can choose to differentiate.
or: how I learnt to stop worrying and love the blog.
This is a really nice introduction to the basics of the Indie Web …with nice illustrations too.
I like this idea. It would be nice to see it catch on…
- Report a bug for any website or browser.
- Our team of volunteers diagnoses the bug.
- We send a fix to the site owner or browser.
A thoughtful in-depth piece that pulls together my hobby horses of independent publishing, responsive design, and digital preservation, all seen through the lens of music:
Music, Publishing, Art and Memory in the Age of the Internet
Greg says:
We need a web design museum.
I am, unsurprisingly, in complete agreement. And let’s make lots of copies while we’re at it.
John echoes some of my recent thinking about what qualifies as a web browser and, by extension, what qualifies as the web:
We shouldn’t think of “the web” as only what renders in web browsers. We should think of the web as anything transmitted using HTTP and HTTPS. Apps and websites are peers, not competitors. They’re all just clients to the same services.
That said, I think he is perhaps underestimating the power of URLs. Addressability—particularly over an extended time period—remains the powerful feature of the web.
What a wonderful way to go online!
I don’t work in the tech industry. I work on the Web.
A great talk by Amber on the history of personal publishing and the ideas and technologies driving the Indie Web movement.
So Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee walk into a panel…
Bruce’s thoughts on ensuring accessibility in Web Components. He thinks that the vocabulary of ARIA is up to the job, so that’s good enough for me.
Some sensible thoughts from Addy on how Web Components might be peer-reviewed.
A healthy dose of scepticism about Web Components, looking at them through the lenses of accessibility, security, and performance.
I share some of this concern: Web Components might look like handy ready-made out-of-the-box solutions, but the truth is that web developers have to do much more of the hard graft that was traditionally left to the browser.
A short video featuring Jason Scott and Brewster Kahle. The accompanying text has a shout-out to the line-mode browser hack event at CERN.
This is a wonderful piece by Maciej—a magnificent historical narrative that leads to a thunderous rant. Superb!
A terrific post from Trent, touching on all the important facets of building for the web: universality, progressive enhancement, performance …great stuff!
Well, this is pretty nifty: Dan Gilmour is at Indie Web Camp in San Francisco and he’s already got some code up and running on his site.
Y’know, I’m not missing South by Southwest in the slightest this year …but I’m really missing Indie Web Camp.
Fast Company features Aral’s tantalising Indie Phone project that he’s been working on at Clearleft Towers.
Good to see Oskar the dog getting the recognition he deserves.
On the top floor of a commercial building in the old maritime city of Brighton, England, Balkan has been quietly hacking away at Indie Phone for the last several months with the rest of his team—Victor Johansson, an industrial designer, Laura Kalbag, a professional web designer (and Balkan’s partner), and her Husky, Oskar.
The importance of long-term thinking in web design. I love this description of the web:
a truly fluid, chaotic design medium serving millions of imperfect clients
A fascinating look at the early history of HTML, tracing its roots from the dialect of SGML used at CERN.
A nice look at responsive design, progressive enhancement, and the principle of One Web.
Web-Thang is a chrome extension that replaces all instances of the term ‘web thang’ or ‘web thang/web thang’ with the term ‘web thang’.
Chris is putting together a series about the neglected building blocks of the web. First up; the much-abused hyperlink, the very foundation of the world wide web.
It is the most simple and most effective world-wide, open and free publishing mechanism. That it is why we need to protect them from extinction.
There were some technical difficulties with microphones, and it was a bit weird presenting inside a cinema, but I still had fun yapping on at last year’s Future Of Web Design in New York.
Want to implement webmentions but you’re using static pages a-la Jekyll? No problem. Pelle’s got you covered.
I like Erin’s list.
I’m with Frank. He’s going Indie Web for 2014:
I’m returning to a personal site, which flips everything on its head. Rather than teasing things apart into silos, I can fuse different kinds of content together.
Homesteading instead of sharecropping:
So, I’m doubling down on my personal site in 2014.
Follow this link to receive a love letter to the humble hyperlink.
I had a lovely dinner last night with Jeffrey, Tantek, Cindy and Daniel. A combination of nostalgia and indie web chatter prompted Jeffrey to pen this beautiful ode to independent publishing.
We were struggling, whether we knew it or not, to found a more fluid society. A place where everyone, not just appointed apologists for the status quo, could be heard. That dream need not die. It matters more now than ever.
Some good brainstorming from Tantek that follows on nicely from Anne’s recent manifesto.
Some excellent research from Chris, canvassing opinions on whether there’s a difference between web “apps” and web “sites”. His conclusion:
Almost none of the points above ring true for me. All I see are exceptions and gray area.
If nothing else, the fact that none of the proposed distinctions agree with one another show how pointless the phrase “web app” is—if people have completely differing ideas on what a phrase means, it is completely useless in furthering discussion …the very definition of a buzzword.
This leads me to think perhaps the “web app” moniker (certainly the newer of the two) is simply just a fashionable term. We like the sound of it, so we use it, regardless if it truly means anything.
But all of this is, I think, missing the more important point: why? Why would you want to separate the cornucopia of the web into two simplistic buckets? What purpose does it serve? That’s the question that really needs be answered.
If we could pin down a super accurate definition that we agreed on, even then it might not be particularly useful. And since we can’t, I argue it’s even less useful.
The most accurate (and damning) definition of a “web app” that I’ve heard so far is: a web site that requires JavaScript to work.
Chloe is going all in on the Indie Web. Here, she outlines how she’s posting to Twitter from her own site with a POSSE system (Post to Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere).
John shares his concerns about the increasing complexity involved in developing for the web.
Coming from anyone else, this glorious vision might seem far-fetched, but Anne is working to make it a reality.
Some excellent practical advice on progressive enhancement.
A nice bit of markup archeology, tracing the early development of HTML from its unspecced roots to the first drafts.
I recognise some of the extinct elements from the line-mode browser hack days at CERN e.g. HP1, HP2, ISINDEX, etc.
A fascinating snapshot from 1995, arguing for the growing power of HTML instead of the siren song of proprietary formats.
I’m very happy that this is still available to read online 18 years later.
Frank’s fantastic closing talk from this year’s Build. There’s a lot of great stuff in here about interaction design, and even more great stuff about what’s been happening to the web:
We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.
The authors of the Extensible Web Manifesto explain the thinking behind their …uh… thinking.
There’s a lot to like here, with some practical examples of where we’ve seen a disconnect between JavaScript APIs and declarative HTML (looking at you, Geolocation).
In describing her approach to building the wonderful Julius Cards project, Chloe touches on history, digital preservation, and the future of the web. There are uncomfortable questions here, but they are questions we should all be asking ourselves.
The case may be a little overstated, but I agree with the sentiment of this. The web is always playing catch-up to something. For a while, it was Flash; now it’s native.
Flash was a great stopgap measure. But it outlived its usefulness and has been reduced to niche status.
Today, we’re seeing the nearly exact same scenario with native apps on mobile devices.
Native mobile apps are a temporary solution. We’re just over 4 years into the Appstore era and this has already become apparent. Open web technologies are catching up to the point that the vast majority of web apps no longer need a native counterpart.
This is a great explanatory piece from James Bridle in conjunction with Mozilla’s Webmaker. It’s intended for a younger audience, but its clear description of how web requests are resolved is pitch-perfect primer for anyone.
The web isn’t magic. It’s not some faraway place we just ‘connect’ to, but a vast and complex system of computers, connected by actual wires under the ground and the oceans. Every time you open a website, you’re visiting a place where that data is stored.
Brian writes up his experience working on the line-mode browser hack event at CERN.
From CERN to singularity - the digital pioneer and cofounder of the WWW on 20 years of webscapades.
Once you get past the cheesy intro music, there are some gems from Robert Cailliau in here.
I took a little time out of the hacking here at CERN to answer a few questions about the line-mode browser project.
Earlier today, thanks to Robert Cailliau, I held the only notarised copy of this document. That was quite a feeling.
I had a lot of fun chatting with Jen on this week’s episode of The Web Ahead. Wind me up and let me loose; I ended up rambling on about blogging, the indie web movement, progressive enhancement, and just about everything in between.
I had a nice chat with Michelle from Future Insights about the web and long-term thinking.
It’s sad to see MyOpenID shut down, but now I can simply use IndieAuth instead …which means my delegate URL is simply adactio.com: magic!
I heartily concur with Lyza’s mini-manifesto:
I think we need to try to do as little as possible when we build the future web …putting commonality first, approaching differentiation carefully.
It’s always surprised me how quickly developers will reach for complex, potentially over-engineered solutions, when—in my experience—that approach invariably creates more problems than it solves.
Simplicity is powerful.
A cogent definition and spirited defence of progressive enhancement:
Progressive Enhancement is an extension of our shared values on the web and goes to the root of the web. I believe—and hope you agree—that the web is for everybody and should be accessible regardless of the device a user brings to the party.
Scott gives us an excellent State Of The Web address, looking at how the web can be central to the coming age of ubiquitous computing. He rightly skips through the imitation of native apps and gets down to the potential of just-in-time interactions.
John addresses the price of increasing complexity in front-end development.
Yes, tooling can make our life easier. We type fewer keystrokes, and commit more code. But as software engineers learned a long time ago, most of the life of an applications is not in its initial development. It’s in maintaining it. This is something we on the web have had the luxury of being able to largely ignore up to now. After all, how many of the things you build will last years, decades?
The internet never forgets? Bollocks!
We were told — warned, even — that what we put on the internet would be forever; that we should think very carefully about what we commit to the digital page. And a lot of us did. We put thought into it, we put heart into, we wrote our truths. We let our real lives bleed onto the page, onto the internet, onto the blog. We were told, “Once you put this here, it will remain forever.” And we acted accordingly.
This is a beautiful love-letter to the archival web, and a horrifying description of its betrayal:
When they’re erased by a company abruptly and without warning, it’s something of a new-age arson.
Get out my head, Emil! This is pretty much exactly how I feel about my work, especially this bit:
In trying to be the best web developer I can, I feel a need to understand the web. That involves a lot of what some of my friends who are not in the web business think my job is about, i.e. “clicking on funny links all day”. I read copiously about new and old technologies. I bookmark them, I try to classify them, see them in the light of history as well as projected future. Follow up on them. Try them out. Even if they’re not specifically about what I do for a living, the nature of them might have a bearing on my understanding of how other people use the web.
A profile of the Indie Web movement in Wired.
Go! Fight! Win!
If this sounds like your kind of hackery, be sure to come along to Indie Web Camp UK in Brighton right after dConstruct.
WebKit nightlies now have support for srcset. I’m pleased to see that it’s currently constrained to just handling the case of high-density displays; it doesn’t duplicate the media query functionality of picture.
I’ve always maintained that the best solution to responsive images will be some combination of srcset and picture: they each have their strengths and weaknesses. The “art direction” use case is better handled by picture, but the “retina” use case is better handled by srcset.
Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart DC.
Jason Garber took some nicely-hyperlinked notes during my presentation at An Event Apart DC.
A handy collection of links to web-related podcasts. Go forth and huffduff.
A terrific long-zoom look at web technologies, pointing out that the snobbishness towards declarative languages is a classic example of missing out on the disruptive power of truly innovative ideas …much like the initial dismissive attitude towards the web itself.
Yet another timely reminder from Tim, prompted by the naysayers commenting on his previous excellent post on progressive enhancement, universal access, and the nature of the web.
A great call-to-arms from Tim, simply asking that we create websites that take advantage of the amazing universality of the web:
The web has the power to go anywhere—any network, any device, any browser. Why not take advantage of that?
Inevitably there is pushback in the comments from developers still in the “denial” stage of coming to terms with what the web is.
Yet another cautionary tale on why you should be homesteading instead of sharecropping.
Caterina Fake takes a heartfelt look at the history of online communities:
The internet is full of strangers, generous strangers who want to help you for no reason at all. Strangers post poetry and discographies and advice and essays and photos and art and diatribes. None of them are known to you, in the old-fashioned sense. But they give the internet its life and meaning.
This a great proposal: well-researched and explained, it tackles the tricky subject of balancing security and access to native APIs.
Far too many ideas around installable websites focus on imitating native behaviour in a cargo-cult kind of way, whereas this acknowledges addressability (with URLs) as a killer feature of the web …a beautiful baby that we definitely don’t want to throw out with the bathwater.
I approve of this message.
Dan’s blog is rapidly turning into one of my favourite destinations on the web.
I hope he comes to an Indie Web Camp.
A good article on Medium on Medium.
Another great post on using progressive enhancement for JavaScript, this time by Jake. He does a great job of explaining the performance bottleneck that is created when you start doing everything on the client side.
Six months ago, Bastian wrote this fantastic vision of decentralised social web. I want to start making this a reality at the next Indie Web Camp.
A superb piece by Marco Arment prompted by the closing of Google Reader. He nails the power of RSS:
RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.
And he’s absolutely on the money when he describes what changed:
RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).
I share his anger.
Well, fuck them, and fuck that.
A great post by Emil on the importance of using progressive enhancement for JavaScript — an increasingly unpopular position in today’s climate of client-side-only frameworks and libraries.
There’s something fundamental and robust about being able to request a URL and get back at least an HTML representation of the resource: human-readable, accessible, fault tolerant.
I love this. I love this sooooo much! The perfect reminder of what makes the web so bloody great:
You and I have been able to connect because I wrote this and you’re reading it. That’s the web. Despite our different locations, devices, and time-zones we can connect here, on a simple HTML page.
The battle between web fonts and performance. Ian Feather outlines some possible solutions, but of course, as always, the answer is “it depends”.
Google’s track record is not looking good. There seems to be a modus operandi of bait-and-switch: start with open technologies (XMPP, CalDav, RSS) and then once they’ve amassed a big enough user base, ditch the standards.
I gave the opening keynote at the Beyond Tellerand conference a few weeks back. I’m talked about the web from my own perspective, so expect excitement and anger in equal measure.
This was a new talk but it went down well, and I’m quite happy with it.
The web’s walled gardens are threatened by the decentralised power of RSS.
Google is threatened by RSS. Google is closing down Google Reader.
Twitter is threatened by RSS. Twitter has switched off all of its RSS feeds.
Fuck ‘em.
It will dip and diminish, but will RSS ever go away? Nah. One of RSS’s weaknesses in its early days—its chaotic decentralized weirdness—has become, in its dotage, a surprising strength. RSS doesn’t route through a single leviathan’s servers. It lacks a kill switch.
My presentation from the Industry conference in Newcastle a little while back, when I stepped in for John Allsopp to deliver the closing talk.
An intriguing initiative to tighten up the loop between standards development and implementation.
Vasilis considers the inherent flexibility and unknowability of web design.
I tried to come up with other fields that need to design things for a flexible canvas, in the hope of finding inspiration there. The only media types I could come up with was the art of balloon printing and the art of tattooing.
A great post by Stuart on the prospect of DRM-by-any-other-name in HTML.
The argument has been made that if the web doesn’t embrace this stuff, people won’t stop watching videos: they’ll just go somewhere other than the web to get them, and that is a correct argument. But what is the point in bringing people to the web to watch their videos, if in order to do so the web becomes platform-specific and unopen and balkanised?
A well-written piece on the nature of work and value on the web, particularly in the start-up economy.
Carousels are shit. Auto-animating carousels are really shit. Now proven with science!
I need to get Matt to an Indie Web Camp.
A wonderful essay about type on the web by Jessica.
A lovely site with thoughtful articles on the long-term future of the web.
There’s audio too, which is unfortunately locked up in the unhuffduffable roach motel that is Soundcloud, but I’m hoping that might change.
A fascinating look at the history of cookies …from the inventor of cookies.
The litany of open standards that Google has been abandoning: RSS, XMPP, WebDav…
Doorslamming.
I’m in general agreement with this rousing defence of CSS. I think it does a pretty great job of balancing a whole ton of use cases.
Josh has been teaching HTML and CSS schoolkids. I love the pages that they’ve made. I really mean it. I genuinely think these are wonderful!
Wow! The CSS Zen Garden is a decade old. Crazy! It’s a true piece of web history …and it’s back!
A history lesson from Vint Cerf. I can’t help but picture him as The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented and released the World Wide Web (WWW) design in late 1991, he found an open and receptive internet in operation onto which the WWW could be placed. The WWW design, like the design of the internet, was very open and encouraged a growing cadre of self-taught webmasters to develop content and applications.
Mark writes about his work with CERN to help restore the first website to its original URL.
I have two young children and I want them to experience the early web and understand how it came to be. To understand that the early web wasn’t that rudimentary but incredibly advanced in many ways.
It was twenty years ago today:
On 30 April 1993 CERN published a statement that made World Wide Web technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.
A lovely description by Paul Ford of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
That simple handshake is the firmament upon which we have built trillion-dollar cathedrals and bazaars, the base upon which we construct other protocols and networks.
A lovely piece of writing from Richard on the nature of the web.
A good history lesson in rendering engines: KHTML, WebKit, and now, Blink.
I find it hard to agree with any part of this. To me, it shows a deep misunderstanding of the web—treating the web as just another platform, without understanding what makes it so special.
I think I may have found my polar opposite.
The hilarious obsession with file size is the start of my frustrations with the web community.
A wonderful rallying cry from Drew.
The problem:
Ever since the halcyon days of Web 2.0, we’ve been netting our butterflies and pinning them to someone else’s board.
The solution:
Hope that what you’ve created never has to die. Make sure that if something has to die, it’s you that makes that decision. Own your own data, friends, and keep it safe.
Brent Simmons pens a love-letter to RSS, a technology that you use every day, whether you realise it or not.
Tantek steps back and offers some practical approaches to reclaiming a more open web from the increasingly tight clutches of the big dominant roach motels.
Notice that he wrote this on his own domain, not on Branch, Medium, Google+, Facebook, or any other black hole.
An excellent explanation from Tom Loosemore on why the Government Digital Service is putting its energy into open standards and the web, rather than proprietary native apps.
Honestly, if you value the content you create and put online, then you need to be in control of your own stuff.
Biting satire that hits its mark superbly. Ouch! Be careful — this is sharp …and funny.
The WaSP is closing its doors. It has been a privilege and an honour to serve with such a fine organisation.
What Dan said.
A fascinating discussion on sharecropping vs. homesteading. Josh Miller from Branch freely admits that he’s only ever known a web where your content is held by somone else. Gina Trapani’s response is spot-on:
For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.
When you get old and your memory is long and you lose parents and start having kids, you value your own and others’ personal archive much more.
Here’s a treasure trove of web history: an archive of the www-talk list dating back to 1991. Watch as HTML gets hammered out by a small group of early implementors: Tim Berners-Lee, Dave Raggett, Marc Andreessen, Dan Connolly…
An ever-timely call-to-arms from Eric:
Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as open and accessible for everyone, no matter where they comes from, what speed their connection is, how capable their browsers are or how good their eyes or hands or both work. I feel proud every day to make that vision reality, and it is the job of web developers to make it a reality.
He’s right. We have tremendous power and privilege, and correspondingly tremendous responsibility.
Oh, my! This excellent, excellent post from Anil Dash is a great summation of what has changed on the web, and how many of today’s big-name services are no longer imbued with the spirit of the web.
Either you remember how things used to be and you’ll nod your head vigorously in recognition and agreement …or you’re too young to remember this, and you won’t quite believe that is how things worked.
This isn’t some standard polemic about “those stupid walled-garden networks are bad!” I know that Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest and LinkedIn and the rest are great sites, and they give their users a lot of value. They’re amazing achievements, from a pure software perspective. But they’re based on a few assumptions that aren’t necessarily correct. The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
Don’t do it. Don’t click that button just one more time. Don’t.
A lovely new service from Mike Stenhouse: install the bookmarklet and then when you come across a website with a nice combination of fonts, you can save a snapshot of the page (and its fonts) for later perusal. You can then browse those fonts on Typekit, Fontdeck, MyFonts or Google Fonts.
I wholeheartedly agree with Christian’s diagnosis of the average web page: it’s overweight to the point of obesity. Fortunately Dr. Heilmann has some remedies.
Some great thoughts from Mike Davies about the strengths of the web, prompted by some of the more extreme comments made by James Pearce at Full Frontal last week.
I should point out that James was being deliberately provocative in order to foment thought and discussion and, judging from this blog post, he succeeded.
The Web’s independence from the hardware and software platform people use is a feature. It’s better than cross-platform frameworks which are constantly criticised for not producing exact native-feeling apps on the multitude of platforms they run on. The Web is above that pettiness.
A great in-depth description by Paul of how he optimised his site. More of this please!
This is the talk I gave at the Webdagene conference in Norway a few weeks back. I called it Responsive Enhancement but I think the Norwegian title translates as “Improvements Through Responsive Design.”
A lovely bit of hypertext.
I’m really enjoying these thoughts prompted by Paul’s article in A List Apart. I particularly the idea of taking a long-zoom approach to progressive enhancement: evolving the aesthetic of web design over time.
A really great article from Paul that simultaneously takes a high-level view of the web while also focusing on the details. A lot of work went into this.
This is right up my alley: a timeline of the history of hypertext, starting with Borges.
Brad’s notes from my opening talk at the Smashing Conference in Freiburg.
This ticks all my boxes: a podcast by Eric and Jen about the history of the web. I can’t wait for this to start!
Jeffrey quite rightly singles out Derek Powazek for praise.
It was his site Fray that made me realise I wanted to build things on the web.
Luke’s notes from my talk at An Event Apart in Chicago.
Amen, Scott, A-MEN:
You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.
This post is ten years old, but I think it might still be the best attempt to demarcate a difference between web “sites” and web “apps”: think of them as stories and tools.
It’s also remarkably prescient about the need for an effort exactly like HTML5:
A widely-distributed, standards-compliant, browser and platform-independent library of functions that would perform the basic user interface functions for a web-based tool, relying on the server side only for the logic and data sourcing.
A great article by Hannah, focusing on the Long Web—it isn’t about the quantity of data you’re publishing; it’s the quality. This builds nicely on the article I linked to recently about digital scarcity.
A great talk on the nature of the web that Paul gave in Copenhagen recently.
More on View Source, this time from Bruce.
The Web has thrived on people viewing source, copying and pasting, then tweaking until they get the page they want.
How about this for a trip down memory lane—a compendium of articles from over a decade of A List Apart, also available as a Readlist epub. It’s quite amazing just how good this free resource is.
The only thing to fault is that, due to some kind of clerical error, one of my articles has somehow found its way onto this list.
If this were Twitter, you’d be at-replying me with the hashtag “humblebrag”, wouldn’t you?
A nice timeline visualisation of recent history.
This resonates deeply with me. It is worth your heartbeats.
I am a mermaid.
Chris Anderson interviews Mark Andreessen.
This is a very in-depth look at how to become a power user of the Web Inspector in Webkit browsers. I’m sitting down with a nice cup of tea to go through all of this.
This is a beautifully heartfelt post from Timoni:
Every day, I feel things because of the internet, and that’s amazing. Humans have been using abstracted communication for thousands of years, but it’s never been so instantaneous, never so capable of bringing folks of completely different backgrounds together in conversation. This is a huge step. Good job us.
An excellent longish-zoom article by Alexis Madrigal with an eerily accurate summation of the current state of the web. Although I think that a lack of any fundamentally new paradigms could be seen as a sign of stabilisation as much as stagnation.
An oldie but a goodie: Clay Shirky looks at the design principles underlying HTML in order to figure out what made it so successful. Even though this is fourteen years old, there are plenty of still-relevant insights here.
Yet another great post from Brad:
Whenever I think of the concept of “One Web” and providing universal access to information on the web, I tend to break it down into something much simpler: give people what they ask for.
Matt has transcribed the notes from his excellent Webstock talk. I highly recommend giving this a read.
Mozilla will be supporting H.264 …but they’re not happy about it.
I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance.
I really enjoyed Matt’s talk from Webstock. I know some people thought it might be a bit of a downer but I actually found it very inspiring.
The video of my talk from Webstock, all about wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff like networks and memory.
Some interesting ideas on the commonalities and differences between native apps and the web.
I’m genuinely touched by Matt’s kind words on my Webstock talk. It really means a lot to me, coming from him.
A beautiful reminder from Ben of the scale-free nature of the web.
We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is admired, respected, and praised for its actual success. All of those could be sustainable, profitable ventures. If TechCrunch doesn’t care to write about you, all the better.
If you are fortunate enough to work on your own product, with your own idea, and build it, and ship it, and reach enough people willing to sustain you financially for that immense amount of work, you should be applauded. You have poured in inordinate effort, and succeeded in making something that improved lives.
I love these sketchnotes from my presentation at Webstock.
I can’t fave this picture enough. One moment of Webstock captured by Michael B. Johnson.
Harry interviews Glenn about web intents (web actions). Glenn gives a good clear explanation of what they are.
Some valuable musings from Ben on how browsers could be better — and I don’t mean the usual moaning about performance or device APIs.
In an interesting new twist, Pictos now allows you to put together a custom subset of their icons as a font that can be served from their server just like any other webfont service.
This looks like it’s going to be a great event on February 25th right here in Brighton: a gathering of minds to brainstorm around web intents. Get there if you can.
Emigre’s font library is now available as web fonts that you can self-host (providing you take some protective measures with .htaccess). That means Mrs. Eaves is available for the screen. W00t!
What would Google+, YouTube and Facebook have looked like in 1997?
My short talk from Aral’s Update conference in Brighton last September. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If I only I had a handheld mic—then I could’ve done a microphone drop at the end.
Rachel tells the tale of how she came to be the splendid web worker she is and finishes with some advice for up-and-coming workers of the web:
Make 2012 the year you go out and do it.
Here’s a challenge for the new year: use each month as an opportunity to try out a new web technology.
Set yourself small, achievable projects to work on and use 12412.org as a support group. We will all help to motivate each other and join in to offer help where we can.
This. This is why I love the web.
Not only does the web make publishers of those willing to put in the work, it also makes most of us free sharers of our hard-won trade, craft, and business secrets. The minute we grab hold of a new angle on design, interaction, code, or content, we share it with a friend — or with friends we haven’t met yet.
View source.
Burying physical copies of dead websites in a Croatian cave.
A good round-up of what web development means today …and what web developers need to do to keep pace.
Brent Simmons follows up on that Dave Winer post with some future-friendly thoughts:
If I had to choose one or the other — if I had some crazy power but I had to wipe out either native apps or web apps — I’d wipe out native apps. (While somehow excluding browsers, text editors, outliners, web servers, and all those apps we need to make web apps.)
That’s not the case, though. Nothing has to get wiped out.
I think instead that we’ll see a more tangled future. Native apps will use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript more. Web apps will appear more often on smart phones as launchable apps.
Spot. On.
The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub.
Well, this is very intriguing: it turns out that the infamous orientation/scale bug in Mobile Safari isn’t present in in-app browsers (UIWebView). Most odd.
Remembering the camgirl community.
Luke points out that the web is everywhere: it’s accessible through the browser but also through many native applications. This is the real Web Operating System.
The Web (browser) is inside of every application instead of every application being inside the Web (browser).
A lovely new typeface from Nicole Dotin that’s available to purchase as a web font under the very reasonable terms of the Process license agreement.
This thread on whether HTML5 Boilerplate should include Respond.js by default (and whether the CSS should take a small-screen first approach) nicely summarises the current landscape for web devs: chaotic, confusing …and very, very exciting.
This is a great encapsulation of what I’ve been banging on about at conferences for a while now: let’s stop pretending we know the capabilities, network speed or viewport size of a site visitor’s browser.
Given some recent hand-wringing about the web as a “platform,” it seems appropriate to revisit this superb article from Ben. The specifics of the companies and technologies may have changed in the past year but the fundamental point remains the same:
Everything about web architecture; HTTP, HTML, CSS, is designed to serve and render content, but most importantly the web is formed where all of that content is linked together. That is what makes it amazing, and that is what defines it. This purpose and killer application of the web is not even comparable to the application frameworks of any particular operating system.
Andy responds to Joe Hewitt’s recent despondent posts about the web. I tend to agree with Andy: I think comparing the web to other “platforms” is missing the point of what the web is.
See also: http://benward.me/blog/understand-the-web
John reinforces the importance of universal access above the desire to build only for the newest shiniest devices:
Universality is a founding principle of the web. It is the manifesto the web has been built on, and I believe one of the key drivers of the almost unimaginable success of the web over these last two decades. We ignore that at the web’s peril.
An excellent point from Jonathan: both native apps and web apps require an internet connection …and both native apps and web apps can be made to work without an internet connection.
This might sound obvious, but the myth that “only native apps can work without an internet connection” is surprisingly widespread.
While others recall Steve Jobs’s legacy with Apple, Tim Berners-Lee recounts the importance of NeXT.
Glenn has written up the discussion that followed his UXCampBrighton talk on web actions.
A real-world anecdote from Jonathan illustrates some of the misconceptions around using HTML instead of going native. A lot of people don’t realise that web apps can store data offline.
An excellent article that examines the supposed benefits of publishing through someone else’s app store instead of the web.
A truly excellent article outlining the difference between share-cropping and self-hosting. It may seem that the convenience of using a third-party service outweighs the hassle of owning your own URLs but this puts everything into perspective.
Scott writes up some of the things he talked about at the Breaking Development conference: the just-in-time interactions that are inevitable in a heavily-instrumented world.
John pushes back against the idea that browser innovation is moving too slow.
This handy matrix shows the effect of different -webkit-font-smoothing setting on various text combinations (serif/san-serif light/dark, etc.).
An eye-opening insight into web usage on mobile devices in Asia from Paul Rouget.
James attempts to tackle the thorny question of what makes something a web “app” (rather than a web “site”). It reminds of the infamous definition of obscenity:
I know it when I see it.
In short, the answer to the question “what is a web app?” is “fuck knows.”
A great opinion piece from Addy Osmani prompted by the panel discussion I took part in at the Update conference.
Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside. HTML and CSS give another venue to provide structure to content in the native language of the web, and learning these guides decisions by surfacing the affordances of the medium.
A superb post by David that ties together multiple strands of personal digital preservation through homesteading instead of sharecropping.
The video of my talk/rant at the DIBI conference in Newcastle/Gateshead earlier this year, for your viewing pleasure.
Finally. Hyphenation on the web.
Pretty much the only forms of Western literature that don’t use hyphenation are children’s books and websites. Until now.
Tantek’s braindump of research he and Erin have been doing on web actions—verbs for the web, specifically interactions across sites: sharing, liking, and so on. I agree with him that this terminology feels better than “web intents.”
Erin documents the next step after web intents.
This is wonderful. A web server powered by people. Change the URL and a person will manually fetch the corresponding resource.
You can be part of the server team too.
A great reminder from Bruce that we need to remember to use cutting-edge web technology responsibly.
A quick overview and explanation of web intents.
I wholeheartedly agree with this summation of what professional web design and development entails.
This is your one-stop shop for envelope-pushing in the browser:
The very best of creative JavaScript and HTML5.
It’s a provocative title but I certainly agree with this post’s premise. And the situation it describes is all too familiar.
A nice round-up of responsible responsive web design techniques, ‘though I would go a bit further and suggest that the rallying cry is not so much about Mobile First but Content First.
A superb long-zoom view of responsive design from Andy. He also talks about the pragmatism required from any front-end developer.
I agree with this. I like it. I plus one it. So to speak.
An online book about website performance by Stoyan Steganov, released into the public domain. Excellent!
On the two-year anniversary of his arrival at Clearleft, Paul takes a look at where the craft of web design is today and where it’s heading tomorrow.
The dominance of the desktop browser is over – the web has become wider. After so long painting in a tiny corner of the canvas, it’s time to broaden our approach.
It’s understandable that the community is somewhat nervous about the changes ahead. So far, we’ve mostly responded by scratching around for device-specific tips, but this isn’t sustainable or scalable. We should transcend “platformism” and instead learn to design for diverse contexts, displays, connectivity, and inputs by breaking devices down into first principles. Instead of the defective dichotomy of the “desktop” and “mobile” web, designers should aim to create great user experiences using the truly fluid nature of the web.
A nice round-up of responsive design techniques, with a particular focus on content first.
A superb post by Dan on the bigger picture of what’s wrong with hashbang URLs. Well written and well reasoned.
Josh explains the pros and cons of embedding background images in your CSS using base 64 encoding.
A timely reminder from Jason of the killer feature of the web: hyperlinks.
Susan pushes back on the notion of the mythical mobile user.
A useful bookmarklet that suggests font stacks to match up with the web fonts on whatever page you happen to be viewing.
A nice overview of the increasing importance of UX on the web, written by Bobbie with soundbites from Andy.
Andy just debuted this at An Event Apart—lovely stuff.
An excellent statement of intent from Mark. You can either read this now and start creating websites the right way, or you can scrabble to catch up further down the line; I recommend reading this now.
Embrace the fluidity of the web. Design layouts and systems that can cope to whatever environment they may find themselves in. But the only way we can do any of this is to shed ways of thinking that have been shackles around our necks. They’re holding us back.
Start designing from the content out, rather than the canvas in.
Andy hammers home the benefit of a long-term format like HTML compared to the brittle, fleeting shininess of an ephemeral platform-specific app.
Matt casts around for new areas of scientific research.
The web demonstrates its loosely-joined nature yet again; a photo of mine from a science hack/design fiction exhibit results in Dave discovering his family crest.
A beautifully readable subset of the HTML spec, with an emphasis on writing web apps (and with information intended for browser makers has been removed). Very handy indeed!
Tim Bray calmly explains why hash-bang URLs are a very bad idea.
This is what we call “tight coupling” and I thought that anyone with a Computer Science degree ought to have been taught to avoid it.
Excellent, excellent analysis of how URLs based on fragment identifier (a la Twitter/Gawker/Lifehawker) expose an unstable tottering edifice that crumbles at the first JavaScript error.
So why use a hash-bang if it’s an artificial URL, and a URL that needs to be reformatted before it points to a proper URL that actually returns content?
Out of all the reasons, the strongest one is “Because it’s cool”. I said strongest not strong.
A great presentation by Andy on the use of progressive enhancement at Clearleft.
A curated collection of responsive web designs.
Luke points to the sweet spot between creating endpoints for classes of devices, and using responsive design to allow them to adapt.
The new HTML5 logo is quite versatile.
Lumping everything together is as silly as a carpenter referring to every tool in their toolkit as “a hammer.”
Steven nails exactly why I’m so excited about the increasing diversity of devices accessing the web; not so that we can build more silos, but so that we can sure our content is robust enough for the multitude of different devices:
To be honest, I can think of a few, but not many use cases of web sites or apps which are or should be exclusively mobile. It seems like the Mobile Web allows us to revisit all of the talk of inclusion, progressive enhancement and accessibility from years ago.
An excellent piece of writing on the fundamental question of the web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted?
Matt is, as usual, eloquent and inspiring.
Matt Webb on photography.
You don’t see comments on like this on Facebook.
Matt encapsulates a lot of what I've been thinking about recently: the real-time web is all well and good, but let's not forsake the enormous potential for fulfilment in archives.
A one-stop link shop for resources on web standards.
Nicole proposes an interesting way of clearing floats with a combination of display:table-cell and generated content.
Paul gives an excellent and thorough explanation of why systems thinking is important in web design.
All of this year's 24Ways articles are available as an £8 book with all the proceeds going to UNICEF.
A beautiful new responsive design from Mark.
An inspiring State Of The Web address by Tim Berners-Lee. He can't resist pitching linked data at the end, but it's mostly a stirring call to arms.
It'll be interesting to see how this service works out: people can report accessibility problems with any website, and other people can volunteer to help fix the issues.
37 Signals document their experiments with responsive web design. Looking good.
John Allsopp calls bullshit on the notion that native apps are intrinsically better than web apps. I concur.
An excellent summation of the responsive enhancement approach to web development.
This looks like it could be a handy little tool for creating test cases with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
A great explanation of the responsive enhancement of this site.
An excellent little rant by Cennydd that I agree with 100%: hovering does not demonstrate user intent.
Here's a little piece of web history: the proposal that was presented and rejected at the 2004 W3C workshop that led to the formation of the WHATWG.
Ethan shares his thoughts on the role of the reference design in the responsive workflow.
Think Vitamin have been their accessibility material available for free.
Oh, what a lovely metaphor! What's your online home?
The latest creation from Simon and Nat. It's surprisingly addictive and useful — play around with it for a bit and you'll see what I mean. Lovely stuff.
The newest web fonts delivery service is a collaboration between five foundries: The Font Bureau, Ascender, Roger Black, Petr van Blokland and DevBridge.
This looks like being a thoroughly excellent event at The Royal Society, featuring Tim Berners-Lee and Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
The latest Webkit nightly includes the HTML5 parsing algorithm. Now it's a race between Firefox, Safari and Chrome to see which will be first (non-beta) browser to ship with the new parser.
A wonderful document outlining the earliest history of the tags we know and love today.
This article needs a great big "citation needed" slapped on it. Yes, people need to think about what they post on the web, but no, that stuff will not stay around "forever." If anything, the web suffers from the opposite problem: memory loss.
Paul Ford sets the record straight on what editors do.
An entertaining missive from the future.
A nice manifestlet.
Jon gets flexible. This is the mark of a true web designer.
Mozilla, Opera and Google are collaborating on an open format for audio and video for the web (a wrapper for Vorbis for audio and VP8 for video).
Blaine outlines the vision for Webfinger.
An exercise in collaboration and perspective: let another designer touch your website while you touch theirs.
A clear explanation of device-width from PPK.
A (webkit-only) CSS3/HTML5 take on the Doctor Who opening titles.
The blog of the book by Gavin Bell.
A wonderful trip down memory lane to the amateur web of the 90s.
A very handy list of fonts ranked from "less likely" to "almost certain" to be installed.
This is a work of genius. This... this is a joke ...right?
A quick way of leaving Facebook, Twitter, Linked In and MySpace. It uses the password anti-pattern but after using this, I guess you won't be needing that password again.
Yes. Yes. YES! "We’ve shaken off the restrictions of the early days, opened up all kinds of technical possibilities, but web design seems less exciting and less experimental than it did fifteen years ago."
A very nice take on the to-do list app.
A nice resource (built in HTML5) to connect developers and designers who want to Make A Thing.
PPK offers a rebuttal to Paul Graham's attack on Apple's App Store policies by placing the blame firmly at the feet of developers who refuse to embrace web technologies.
The results of the second screen reader survey from WebAIM are, once again, required reading.
The Web Magazine for Young Designers and Developers. Very nicely done, and all in HTML5 too.
Anil Dash writes about the realtime web, calling it Pushbutton.
The sign up process is using the Huffduffer model. Good to see more human forms in the wild.
A classic essay from Clay Shirky on the dumb nature of the web.
This single issue is what's stopping me using the HTML 5 audio element on Huffduffer.
I think Gareth is reading my mind. Get out my mind, Gareth!
Experimenting with CSS3 and HTML5 features implemented in Webkit.
Matt's opening keynote from Reboot 11 in Copenhagen.
Shaun's new RSS reader looks sweet (and smart).
Eleven years old and more relevant than ever.
A nice description of RDFa ...but once, just once, I would like to see someone use an example that *isn't* contact details or events—situations already handled by microformats.
A sobering article on the cost of being a truly global website. This gives some context to Last.fm's recent pricing model decision.
A blog of all things webkit, itself showcasing some of the CSS niceties in the rendering engine.
This list of screenreader survey results is required reading. Conclusion: "there is no typical screen reader user."
With heavy heart, Nick announces the end of Digital Web magazine. It will be missed.
This is the ur-spring: Tim Berners Lee's original proposal for "Mesh", later "World Wide Web."
A lovely shout-out to Clearleft from the BBC: "Along with other awesome UK companies like ClearLeft, we hope the work we're doing influences more web companies to adopt more best practice, like following the principle of 'progressive enhancement'."
Sooooo.... now you can get a T-shirt of ...um... me. This feels... odd.
Neil explains how you can have your Safari cake and eat it.
An in-browser code editor from Mozilla Labs.
An excellent write-up by Bruce of a talk he gave at the Betavine birthday party. Down with .mobi! One Web FTW!
This presentation by Steven Pemberton increases in value over time.
Steven Pemberton's talk from XTech 2008 in Dublin is becoming more relevant with each passing day as yet another service shuts down; Pownce, Ficlets, Stikkit...
Garrett has launched his bug-tracking web app. Looks lovely.
Rejoice! 24 Ways is back again. Prepare for 24 days of web development articles.
This talk that James gave in Bristol last week is chock full of great stuff. Well worth a read/look.
Dirk is back. The interconnectedness of all things returns as in App Engine form.
How awesome is this? A real-world "print'n'paper magazine" for web developers. "An elegant, timeless, collectable magazine for people who love web design and are intrigued by the possibility of the web"
Mark Pesce's closing keynote from Web Directions South 2008. Great stuff, as always.
Collections of visual design patterns from web interfaces.
A wonderful short story by Matt Webb, who is clearly still thinking about movement (his theme from Web Directions North earlier this year).
I'm going to Japan in November to talk about Ajax. I am very excited about this.
Here's a great project from Andrew Mager. He takes a little time out at lunch to post a small markup or CSS tip. Over time this builds up into a really valuable resource.
A useful collection of frustrations. Find an suitable one to send to a client today.
Opera have unveiled the Web Standards Curriculum. It's released under a CC attribution non-commercial share-alike license and it looks like a very valuable resource.
Ben has written a superb article outlining the hows and whys of distributed social networks with hCard and XFN, finishing with an inspiring call to arms.
A wonderful source of data on user behaviour and perceived skill levels online.
Remember when I blogged about wanting to be able to scrobble the music that someone else in the same room as me is playing? Well, Brad Dougherty has built it.
Copy this bit of JavaScript code. Visit your website of choice in Safari. Paste said code into the address bar. Giggle with glee.
Hey, look what's back: Webmonkey! Ah, memories.
This looks like it could be a very valuable resource indeed: a user-contributed and edited reference for HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The last piece is falling into place. IE8 has ARIA support, Mozilla has ARIA support ...and now WebKit is getting there. Excellent!
Clay Shirky's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo — how contributing to the Web allows to use our intelligence far better than watching TV.
Infrastructure just got even cheaper. Between this and Amazon's EC2/S3, the barrier to entry to getting an app up and running is getting lower and lower.
Gareth is putting some wisdom of crowds behind the design of APIs. Vote on the principles that you think are important in a good API.
Gareth tries to figure out why Django seems to strike a chord with standardistas. It may that the separation of concerns resonates with the methodology of progressive enhancement. Some good comments follow
If anybody out there has some experience with the Amazon Associates Web Service API and XSLT, I could do with some help.
Live in San Diego? Interested in web standards? Come along tomorrow to the inaugural San Diego Web Standards Group meetup. You won't regret it.
David has no sense of humour.
A great narrative by Peter Nixey detailing the ups and downs of launching a web app (Clickpass in this case).
This was the best part of the best presentation at South by Southwest this year: Merlin Mann gives his spiel during Andy Baio's "Worst website ever."
Here's the first initiative from the WaSP Street Team: labeling outdated webdev books in libraries as hazardous material.
Garrett's bug tracking software is one step closer to completion.
The Highland Fling returns for its second year. This was good fun last time 'round. It's a cheap and cheerful one-day conference. This year's theme is "The Browser and Beyond."
A site devoted to cataloging good website typography.
A nice simple little app for saving URLs to read later. This kind of simplicity is remarkably hard to achieve.
Rachel adds her thoughts on Microsoft's broken implementation of version switching—and very good thoughts they are too.
Clean, businesslike icons by the icon artists behind Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux.
A brilliant braindump by Matt Webb examining the weave of the Web and the nature of reality. Set aside some time to soak this up.
A great article about designing for what Tom Coates calls a "web of data", emphasising the importance of making sure that a resource sits at one URL.
A new webzine dedicated to food, prettily put together by M. Jackson Wilkinson.
Great news from Redmond: IE8 passes the Acid2 test.
David follows up on my talk at St Paul's with cornucopia of thoughts and links that's more in-depth than the talk itself.
A comprehensive list of all the CSS properties supported in Safari including "a number of properties that are not supported for developer use."
The slides from Dan's excellent presentation on metaprogramming JavaScript.
TIm Berners-Lee explains what the "graph" part of "social graph" means. I'm still not keen on the term but I really love the idea (although I also disagree about the building blocks required today).
WebKit continues to steam ahead. Now with CSS transforms; you can scale and rotate your elements.
I just learned from Kelly that Webkit is supporting local storage and database queries, as proposed in HTML5. Kinda like Google Gears. Potentially excited for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
David Smith has written a brilliant overview of how the perception of the Web is converging towards Tim Berners-Lee original vision of a read/write environment.
Looks like Apple are trying to redefine the term "web app" to mean sites created for the iPhone. The revisionism is completely barefaced.
I'm a cartoon, which feels kinda weird. Brits... collect 'em all: Budd, Hicks, Malarkey and me.
An excellent overarching article looking at the current state of microformats adoption.
A nice overview of avoiding clutter in web design. It's not just about whitespace; the number of edges and gradients can also add up to an undifferentiated design.
Stephen Fry answers questions on VideoJug about technology and Web 2.0 amongst other things. Swoonsome.
Speaking from experience, I concur.
This Ning competitor has a lot of really nice UI touches. Also, the fact that you can play around a lot without signing up is a plus point.
Tim Lucas is using machine tagging to aggregate Flickr pics from the "I work on the web" meme started by Lisa Herrod.
Dopplr can has API.
“Attention all startups, it’s a bad idea to hang your ID hat on a speech bubble. Just don’t.”
A collection of websites incorporating noteworthy visual design elements.
Videos ands slides from the recent Oxford Geek Night.
The second part of Gareth's series for Digital Web on APIs. This time he's got some PHP code samples for parsing XML and JSON.
PayPal has a new competitor. Amazon is now offering a payment services to developers.
A nice collection of CSS tutorials and design trends.
Aaron weighs in with his thoughts on JavaScript, web apps, the iPhone, dashboard, the papernet and more. Oh, and he's built a machine-tag mashup.
A browser-based IM client from AOL. You heard it here first folks.
Great article from Brian ranging from introducing microformats right up to the current state of play.
Straight from the horse's mouth, advice for web developers on how the iPhone's browser renders pages. I'm very intrigued to find out how it handles liquid designs with no set min-width.
Mark has launched his business site. Lovely grids and typography, as you'd expect.
What excellent taste this web design shop has. I don't mean the fancy scrolling—I'm talking about what's on the bookshelf.
I'm loving this mashup of lolcats, Twitter and Flickr. Occasionally the text and the picture matches up in a serendipitously hilarious way.
A nice well-illustrated article from Larissa Meek pointing to some design trends that can be applied to the Web.
Multimap's API is now open and free as in beer (as long as the traffic is within reasonable bounds). This is good stuff. And they're all in with the Open Street Map guys too.
John answers some questions about microformats.
Track Cindy and Jason on their trip across the country... mashup style.
This looks like an interesting new piece of software from Panic. And the site's got some lovely JavaScript flourishes.
A really nice article by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain detailing the process behind a site design.
I used to think that Mike Arrington was a dick. Now I know he is.
The Future of Web Apps gets a write-up on the BBC site.
Ben's thoughts on RDF and microformats, prompted by last weekend's BarCamp shenanigans.
Aral just posted his extensions to the Twitter API.
He's right, y'know.
A nice collection of royalty free texture photos using the Flickr API.
Machine tags will now be available through the Flickr API (that's triple tags to you and me).
Supremely geeky but funny look at the history of the Web via Tolkien.
This is cargo cultism in action. Reductionism at its worst.
A brilliant list of New Year's Resolutions for Coders.
Dave Winer doesn't get JSON.
A nifty mashup in which Twitter bots update twice a day with weather updates. I am now friends with Brighton Weather. I feel so in touch with nature.
Users of the Google API take note: you're okay, but anyone else who wants to put Google search on their site is screwed.
Users of the Flickr API take note: the path to images has changed.
Dan has redesigned his site and it looks gorgeous.
Got Safari? Try resizing this page.
Roger hits the nail on the head: "fixed widths are used for the wrong reason - designer vanity. Come on, you’re designing for the Web, which means it’s your job to let things be flexible when you can."
A new site dedicated to design, both on the Web and off.
A cool way of looking at photos from your Flickr contacts, built using the Flickr API by Jason Garber and Jeremy Carbaugh (who are here with me at Refresh Orlando).
New kids on the block.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and others call for the creation and recognition of a new discipline: "What we really want is for people around the world to start calling themselves web scientists."
It's here... Patrick and Dan have unveiled their event management system and pretty sweet it is too.
There's a good list of resources about typography at the end of this article.
Here's an API for accessing material that is censored in countries like China or Iran.You can use this API to republish that information on other sites, circumventing the censorship.
Mark Boulton is self-publishing a PDF book on design. Let the eager anticipation begin.
The W3C Validator now has an API. It's SOAP only unfortunately, but this could still prove to be immensely useful for rolling into a CMS.
Registration is now open for Web Directions North in Vancouver in February. Come for the geeky presentations, stay for the skiing.
Who says the W3C don't have a sense of humour? Check out the logo of the Web API Working Group (who are doing great work, by the way).
The ultimate Web 2.0 social application: a bunch of people sign up to be in a tea group. People in the group issue requests for cups of tea. The app randomly picks someone to make 'em. Genius!
Go on, take a pot-shot. You know you want to.
This new method in the Flickr API could be used to create some fun zeitgeist-driven mashups.
Hallelujah! I've been waiting for Flickr to add this method. Now the API is truly complete.
You can now get responses from the Flickr API formatted as JSON.
I'm going to Vancouver in February. w00t! This conference looks like it's going to kick arse.
A PDF of Dan's slides from RailsConf. Looks like it was an excellent presentation.
Yahoo is opening up Hack Day to the masses. If you're anywhere near Sunnyvale on September 29th, this should be fun.
Ben was wearing a "Well Fed" t-shirt at d.Construct and it looked great. I think I'll have to get myself one.
Jonathon has found some circumstantial evidence of an API for searching the iTunes music store. That could be really interesting. It might be fun to mash it up with Amazon's API.
Happy Cog redesigns Dictionary.com and its siblings.
A great article by John Allsopp that serves as an excellent introduction to microformats.
Happy Cog Philadelphia goes to Ireland.
Steve, Kevin, and the other AOLers do the right thing and provide a transcript of their (excellent) panel from Southby. Come on, other speakers... where are your transcripts?
Andy gets interviewed and starts reminiscing about the good ol' days.
Cameron has written a great article on using APIs with Ajax. I love the idea of using .htaccess to fake a proxy and get around the same-site restriction.
I think we should get Availabots for Clearleft. I want little toys of Richard and Andy connected to my home machine. Dance, Andy! Dance, Richard!
Participating in a card-sorting exercise for the AIGA redesign.
Cindy redesigns... with standards. Gorgeous!
The best response yet to the O'Reilly Web 2.0 cease and desist debacle.
Garret gives an excellent, excellent round-up of the factors involved in the behaviour layer of front-end architecture (that's 'building websites' to you and me).
Gareth Rushgrove has launched a site devoted to web design books.
Where the worlds of web and booze collide, slap-bang in the middle of London. Arranging meet-ups, every now and then, where likeminded web peeps with sore livers can share these very special interests.
John has been working behind the scenes on this for quite a while and now it's ready for launch. Lots of yummy standards-based goodness in bite-sized chunks.
Version 2 of Google's Maps API is out. Changes, changes, read all about it.
Douglas Crockford has written a wrapper function to allow the easy interchange of JSON data between servers.
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake are on the cover of Newsweek. How cool is that?
Jeremy Zawodny rails against the continuing snobbery towards front-end engineers.
Design elements, trends and problems in Web Design... via John Oxton.
Danah Boyd's talk at ETech 2006.
Camino 1.0 is out. Come and get it.
A transcript of the Q&A session with Dave.
Useful markup statistics from Google, complete with snotty commentary.
A really nicely laid-out introductory article on typography from the folks at Red Labor.
As a follow-up to my post about Yahoo's term extractor, I should point out that Tagyu also has an API. It's RESTful and simple.
"wankr will be a place for web 2.0 people to gather together in one humongous circlejerk so they can masturbate each other into a sticky frenzy over useless, meaningless bullshit."
"Not only did the head of Waterstone's underestimate the internet. Even Rupert Murdoch was caught out"
Garret Dimon runs through some of the options available when using CSS to improve readability.
People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to 'prove' to themselves that they made a good initial decision.
Aaron uses image replacement on an image to provide one image for screen and another print. Very clever.
"...it must degrade well. It must still be accessible. It must be usable. If not, it is a cool useless piece of rubbish for some or many people."
Web Ring 2.0
Molly has written a great article about CSS and urban planning. The ensuing comments are sometimes thought-provoking, but mostly just plain antfucking.
Andy Hume has written a superb article about typography on the Web.
Yahoo! does it again. Now they've gone and snapped up del.icio.us.
Create your own Web 2.0 Company. Hit reload to create another potential million dollar idea.
One great web development tip for every day in the Advent calendar, courtesy of Drew McLellan
The W3C proves that it can move with the times: "The mission of the W3C Web API Working Group is to develop specifications that enable improved client-side application development on the Web." This is very good news indeed.
A fantastic mashup using the Flickr API to play sudoku. Warning: highly addictive.
Patrick Lauke, master of photography and accessibility.
A web app for reading RSS feeds. Pretty nice, but I'll stick with Adactio Elsewhere for now.
Yahoo! acquires Upcoming.org. First Flickr, now this. Yahoo! are snapping up all the coolest social apps.
The book that changed how websites are designed is back in a smart new second edition.
This is something I always meant to do but never got around to: a gallery site for good liquid design.
Make Flickr photos into magazine covers - another fun use of the API.
CNET's News.com explains why web services are so cool.
A handy guide to using a wrapper for the Google Maps API.
An over-the-top article at Salon about 37 Signals.
A very cool mashup of two APIs: events from EVDB and maps from Google Maps.
Multiple background images (from CSS3) is implemented in Safari.... and has been for months!
This is cool and frightening in equal measures. Eric uses the Google API to demonstrate the effect of nuclear detonations on American cities.
Weep not, Ethan! SVG lives... possibly in Safari and Dashboard.
Documentation for the new Google Maps API. Unlike most web services, this one is run entirely over JavaScript.
He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was “close to that of unpoliced conversation.” Um... I have to admit that I've never had a policed conversation, online or off.
A library of JavaScript classes: not very unobtrusive, not much graceful degradation. I think we need a bit less hype and a bit more questioning.
Geo-tagging meets social software. I must check this out and investigate the API.
There's now a centralised resource for microformats. Read it, bookmark it, fall in love with the future of the Web.
Eight people, including myself, explain what's so great about CSS.
PayPal moves into the territory of merchant accounts. With an API no less!
An XML format from Google that describes the structure of websites. A semantic sitemap.
Some good thoughts on accessibility. I'm really looking forward to seeing Derek again at @media.
I really like the layout of this blog about design details. Nary a dropped shadow and barely a gradient in sight.
The BBC is going to be offering an API. Hallelujah!
Some nice CSS based redesigns this year. Of course, most of them are fixed width. C'est la vie.
Tim Bray on the politics and practicalities of Web services.
A very nifty little OS X app for viewing the markup and style of web pages. Sehr gut gelungen.
Roger Johansson details his elastic design.
Ryan talks about microformats as part of a lowercase semantic web.
