Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?
Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.
This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Monday’s meet-up here in Brighton—it’s a very condensed version of my longer conference talk on declarative design.
Video visions of aspirational futures made from the 1950s to the 2010s, mostly by white dudes with bullshit jobs.
I had a video call this morning with someone who was in India. The call went great, except for a few moments when the video stalled.
“Sorry about that”, said the person I was talking to. “It’s the monkeys. They like messing with the cable.”
There’s something charming about an intercontinental internet-enabled meeting being slightly disrupted by some fellow primates being unruly.
It also made me stop and think about how amazing it was that we were having the call in the first place. I remembered Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions from 1964:
I’m thinking of the incredible breakthrough which has been possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and, above all, the communications satellite.
These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on Earth even if we don’t know their actual physical location.
It will be possible in that age—perhaps only 50 years from now—for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.
The casual sexism of assuming that it would be a “man” conducting business hasn’t aged well. And it’s not the communications satellite that enabled my video call, but old-fashioned undersea cables, many in the same locations as their telegraphic antecedents. But still; not bad, Arthur.
After my call, I caught up on some email. There was a new newsletter from Ariel who’s currently in Antarctica.
Just thinking about the fact that I know someone who’s in Antarctica—who sent me a postcard from Antarctica—gave me another rush of feeling like I was living in the future. As I started to read the contents of the latest newsletter, that feeling became even more specific. Doesn’t this sound exactly like something straight out of a late ’80s/early ’90s cyberpunk novel?
Four of my teammates head off hiking towards the mountains to dig holes in the soil in hopes of finding microscopic animals contained within them. I hang back near the survival bags with the remaining teammate and begin unfolding my drone to get a closer look at the glaciers. After filming the textures of the land and ice from multiple angles for 90 minutes, my batteries are spent, my hands are cold and my stomach is growling. I land the drone, fold it up into my bright yellow Pelican case, and pull out an expired granola bar to keep my hunger pangs at bay.
This is so cool—Ariel was on BBC World TV News live during the Artemis launch!
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
Excellent advice from Stuart.
Watch—and more importantly, listen—to this five minute video to get the full effect.
Here’s a short fifteen minute video (and transcript) of an interview I did about accessibility and inclusive design. I quite like how it turned out!
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at Web Dev Conf in Bristol recently. I think you can tell that I had fun—it was a good audience!
I can’t wait to see this documentary about Marc and Beyond Tellerrand!
The capture attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
Here’s the video of the talk I gave in front of an enormous audience at the We Are Developers conference …using a backup slidedeck.
I’ve published a transcription of the talk I gave at CSS Day:
The title is intended to have double meaning. The obvious reference is that CSS is about styling web pages. But the talk also covers some long-term trends looking at ideas that have appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Hence, style as in trends and fashion.
There are some hyperlinks in the transcript but I also published a list of links if you’re interested in diving deeper into some of the topics mentioned in the talk.
I also published the slides but, as usual, they don’t make much sense out of context. They’re on Noti.st too.
I made an audio recording for your huffduffing pleasure.
There are two videos of this talk. On Vimeo, there’s the version I pre-recorded for An Event Apart online. On YouTube, there’s the recording from CSS Day.
It’s kind of interesting to compare the two (well, interesting to me, anyway). The pre-recorded version feels like a documentary. The live version has more a different vibe and it obviously has more audience interaction. I think my style of delivery suits a live audience best.
I invite you to read, watch, or listen to In And Out Of Style, whichever you prefer.
Here’s the video of my opening talk at this year’s CSS Day, which I thoroughly enjoyed!
It’s an exciting time for CSS! It feels like new features are being added every day. And yet, through it all, CSS has managed to remain an accessible language for anyone making websites. Is this an inevitable part of the design of CSS? Or has CSS been formed by chance? Let’s take a look at the history—and some alternative histories—of the World Wide Web to better understand where we are today. And then, let’s cast our gaze to the future!
I’m glad that Heydon has answered this question once and for all.
I’m sure that’ll be the end of it now.
James and Trys have made this terrific explanatory video about Utopia. They pack a lot into less than twenty minutes but it’s all very clearly and methodically explained.
This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).
All the talks from this year’s State Of The Browser event are online, and they’re all worth watching.
I laughed out loud at multiple points during Heydon’s talk.
Here’s the video of my latest conference talk—I really like how it turned out.
The World Wide Web has come a long way in its three decades of existence. There’s so much we can do now with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: animation, layout, powerful APIs… we can even make websites that work offline! And yet the web isn’t exactly looking rosy right now. The problems we face aren’t technical in nature. We’re facing a crisis of expectations: we’ve convinced people that the web is slow, buggy, and inaccessible. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is no fate but what we make. In this perspective-setting talk, we’ll go on a journey to the past, present, and future of web design and development. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and by the end, you’ll be ready to make the web better.
I’ve also published a transcript.