Updates on trends, specs, expert techniques, tools and more. Just the best bits, presented quickly.
Brett "Remix Manifesto" Gaylor tells the story of his new project: a revolutionary "mashup documentary" about privacy and the Web.
The web definitely has a speed problem due to over-design and the junkyard of tools people feel they have to include on every single web page. However, I don’t agree that the web has an inherent slowness. The articles for the new Facebook feature will be sent over exactly the same connection as web pages. However, the web versions of the articles have an extra layer of cruft attached to them, and that’s what makes the web slow to load. The speed problem is not inherent to the web; it’s a consequence of what passes for modern web development. Remove the cruft and we can compete again.
Charles Severance put together a college class called "Internet History, Technology, and Security". He's an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. And in the mid-1990s, he was the host of Internet:TCI, a national television talk show about the Internet that ran for several years on the TCI cable system.
This course has been offered on Coursera for a while now, but recently, they made it on-demand — meaning you can take the class anytime. You don't have to wait for a semester to start.
As a college course, you can complete assignments, take quizzes, and pay to get a certificate. But that's not why I'm posting this link. The amazing thing is the videos. He's collected a set of videos that explain and document where the web came from better than any other source I've found.
For example, under Section 4. History: The Web Makes it Easy to Use, there's a video of an interview with Robert Cailliau — from 1999. Honestly, cable access TV shows are emerging as one of the best documentation formats for capturing the history of what happened. How can you do better than an interview with the co-inventor of the web just a few years after they created it? (Plus, TV recordings of screens, showing early websites running on old hardware with slow connections — it's some of the most accurate ways to recapture what the early web was like.)
Check it out. Watch some or all of the videos. You have to sign-in to "take the class" — but the whole thing is free (if you don't care about getting a certificate).
Or if you'd like, just watch the videos on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlRFEj9H3Oj6-srSAgLb-ZGVNGlo3v14X
In explaining why Oculus has gone slow, Mr. Carmack described what he called a “nightmare scenario” that has worried him and other Oculus executives. “People like the demo, they take it home, and they start throwing up,” he said.
Hm.
My long-time friend and several-time guest of The Web Ahead, Michael Verdi started experimenting with what's possible with Web VR. He'll be blogging about what he discovers, starting with day 1.
So I’ve been working on an idea for a few weeks now and it feels like it’s time to start making things. So I ordered a DK2 and it came in yesterday. I got it set up last night and spent most of the day trying demos and reading up on stuff. Of course MozVR is great place to get started. I literally copied Josh’s example, swapped out some images and made this super simple demo for myself (if you have a DK2, open the page and double-click to enter VR).
It doesn’t do anything but it was fun — like creating your first web page. So I’m going to load up on dramamine and see what I else I can figure out.
We want to tell you more about what motivated us to build a new rendering engine focused on interoperability with other modern browsers ― all in the name of making the web “just work” for our customers.
The folks on the Internet Explorer team just posted another article about their thinking behind Project Spartan. The video is especially interesting — with little clues to what's been going on over there. It's got a bit of a discussion about how to support billions of websites, and whether or not to rely on web standards to do it.
It's going to be interesting to see what ships.
Rachel Andrew pulled together a list of tools and recommendations for using HTML and CSS to create books.
After some trial and error I put together a process for publishing to multiple formats while maintaining one copy of the text, and learned something about Paged Media in CSS along the way. This presentation shares that knowledge, starting with a rundown of some of the CSS features that come in handy when creating an ebook and moving on to practical usage.
Once again the smart folks at Filament Group dig into the quest to find the ultimate webfont-loading solution, rethinking their conclusions from last month.
Back in 2008, Alex Bloomberg (This American Life, Planet Money, Startup, Gimlet Media) did a story titled The Giant Pool of Money. In it, he explores the 2008 financial crisis, looking for the root cause of the meltdown. He discovers one major problem: extremely rich people have a lot of money. Unfathomable sums of money. And they are looking for places to put it. You can only put so much money in the bank. You can only buy so many rental properties. You can only invest in so much stock. At some point, if you are super-duper rich, you have to find other places to stick your money. That's why these days whole apartment buildings of ballizon-dollar NYC apartments sell out and sit empty. They aren't places for people to live. They are places for money to live.
What does this have to do with the web? Well, the tech industry has become hot in recent years. Everyone now knows, the tech industry is where all the jobs are. Where all the economic growth is. Where all the get rich quick schemes are. The tech industry has become a place for this giant pool of money to find a home.
I think we still think of VC money as the small pools of money from a few of our successful friends. A tech millionaire here and there wanting to give back. Small-time millionaires who want to help people with a few good ideas. But I keep thinking of this Giant Pool of Money roaming the earth, looking for a place to land. And I believe it's been landing all over the web for a while.
Turns out, pursuing VC money can be a bad idea. Of course not all VCs are the same — not by a long shot. And sometimes carefully-considered Venture Capitalist funding is a good choice. But we still talk about closing a round of VC money like it's winning the lottery. We act like everything in our industry should be funded by big money and rush headlong towards an exit.
Let's instead be more careful. Let's not be naive about the kind of destruction the Giant Pool of Money can cause. Listen to this story from 7 years ago, and think about what the Giant Pool of Money might be up to today.
I love learning about the history of the web. And I love the Pew Research Center and the in-depth research they do. Here's something that mashes both together.
Since its founding in 1989, the World Wide Web has touched the lives of billions of people around the world and fundamentally changed how we connect with others, the nature of our work, how we discover and share news and new ideas, how we entertain ourselves and how communities form and function.
The timeline below is the beginning of an effort to capture both the major milestones and small moments that have shaped the Web since 1989. It is a living document that we will update with your contributions.
There's been a lot of great awareness about the need for net neutrality. It seems, in the U.S., we might be about to get legal protections for our open internet connections. In this battle, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon and the like have been the villains. And yet, globally, it's not just these companies who we have to watch out for.
Not satisfied with its 1.4 billion members — roughly half of the world’s internet-connected population — Facebook founded the Internet.org project in 2013 to spread internet access to poor communities around the world and thereby accelerate its own growth and reach. This week, the Internet.org app arrives in India, allowing locals free access to Facebook and a curated list of services that Facebook likes. On the surface, it seems like a net positive for India and for humanity, bringing more connectivity and information to people who might not otherwise be able to afford it. But every good thing comes at a price, and in the case of Internet.org, that price is net neutrality.
I think the most truly seminal moment in the history of the internet and the World Wide Web occurred on that fateful day in 1990 when the decision-makers at CERN Institute in Switzerland accepted a proposal written by Tim Berners-Lee regarding a new networking scheme and commissioned him to begin working on this project, and provided him with a black, cube-shaped computer with a NeXT editor and other related software on it. Or perhaps it was that day not long after that Mr. Berners-Lee, using that computer, constructed the first working http server and web page featuring an inter-document hyperlink. Though hyperlinks had been mathematically speculated upon for decades, this was the first working instance of one capable of linking assets even across a computer network. Per his proposal, his concern was to provide a way to index and connect a large and growing number of academic papers being authored by the various scientists at the CERN Institute, and other scientists around the world with whom they were in communication through the small but growing internationally-spread computer network.
For myself, I find that the unique perspective of studying those tags and attributes which are depreciated, going away, or completely gone should prove to be an interesting approach to exploring the history and nature of HTML, and occasionally a few of some of the related technologies. Even so, I don't completely restrict my considerations to the lost tags, but also take this opportunity to explore some others of the more arcane and obscure features of HTML, the kind of stuff that receives little to no coverage, original material not available elsewhere. But this treatise is not meant merely to serve as a nostalgia trip down memory lane (though it may serve as that too). Rather, it is a chance to discuss the nature of technological change and progress, to see some of the academically clever ideas that fail to take hold in the marketplace, and conversely the ideas hastily implemented by the industry but with little or no standing with the academic community due to their misuse of what HTML was really meant to be about, to discuss backward-forward compatibility issues, and to understand some of the inner workings of HTML from a layman's perspective. Furthermore, support for these depreciated and obsolete tags and attributes continues to be, in many of the more contemporary browsers and user agents, done with grave inconsistencies. A new generation of browser writers has arisen who have no real understanding of what these underdocumented tags and attributes were, what they did, or how they were meant to be used.
In a nutshell, CSS shapes allows us to wrap text around more than just rectangular boxes. You can now wrap your text around circles, ellipses and polygons and even images.
Before CSS shapes came along, we were more or less locked into standard layouts of rectangular columns. We had to explain to designers who came from print design that no, we can’t make the text flow around your beautifully cropped image of Beyoncé.
If you've followed my work over the last six months, you know already that I'm a huge fan of CSS Shapes. I've used them here on thewebahead.net quite a bit. Unlike, say, Flexbox, the code for Shapes level 1 is very simple. Easy to understand. Easy to remember.
This blog post by Chen Hui Jing will tell you everything you need to know to get started.
PPK on the state of Android device browsers:
Google Chrome is not the default browser on Android 4.3+. There are now at least eight Chromium-based Android default browsers, and they are all subtly, though not wildly, different.
So far I was aware of nine Chromes: Google Chrome, Opera, Yandex, Xiaomi, Cyanogen, Puffin (weird one, that), Samsung, Amazon Silk, and Nokia X.
In the last two weeks I found three new Chromium-based browsers, so that we now have eleven Chromium-based browsers (or thirteen if you count Google Chrome and Opera desktop and mobile as different browsers).
What. A. Mess.
Version control is an essential tool if you want to be successful in today's web & software world. This video course will take you from novice to master. Easily.
Tobias Günther and the folks at GitTower have released their video series on how to use Git. The free videos walk you thorough the basics of Git on the command line, and both basic and advanced Git via GitTower. If you want to dive deeper into advanced Git via the command line, you can pay to unlock the rest of the series.
I love GitTower. Having thorough "documentation" like this makes it just that much better.
It’s the summer of 2014, and I’m sitting in the consul’s office filling out form after form proving my right to German citizenship: filing notarized birth certificates, declaring my mother’s birthplace, documenting my parents’ marriage.
Ich bin das __ Kind meiner Mutter, one form says: “I am the __ child of my mother.”
My pen is already pressed into the paper, a half-formed 2 filling the blank, when it hits me: I’m not the second child. I’m the third.
Suddenly, I’m six years old again
Sara Wachter-Boettcher on form design, and how simple questions are not always so simple. This ties right in with what Eric Meyer talks about in Episode 91: Designing for Crisis.
look for a screenshot or image from a page of the very early web, and you'll find it almost impossible to locate. Prominent technologist Andy Baio, who runs the site Waxy.org, where he promotes tech ephemera and news, has discovered an unlikely portal to an era that has all but disappeared from today's Internet, and quite nearly from the human record: VHS tapes. With these tapes, now viewable on YouTube, comes a critical look into a period that set the stage for the massive design and technological changes society has undergone over the past 20 years.
I love studying the original web. There are so many great ideas that we haven't truly fulfilled yet, but still could. So many bad ideas that we still do today out of habit. I'm a big believer that in order to truly understand this medium, we should look at the whole 25 years, not just the last 1. These videos will take you on a trip back to the past, to a time you either forgot, or never knew.
Filament group publishes another best practice. Which of course, is a Must Read. This one is about using web fonts.
Using
@font-faceto load custom web fonts is a great feature to give our sites a unique and memorable aesthetic. However, when you use custom fonts on the web using standard techniques, they can slow down page load speed and hamper performance—both real and perceived. Luckily, we've figured out some methods to apply them carefully to ensure your site correctly balances usability, performance and style.
Even when the fonts do load correctly, custom fonts slow down the perceived speed of a site significantly because a page full of invisible text isn't exactly usable. Sure, once the first page is visited, the custom fonts are cached and display quickly, but perceived speed for the first page view is critical. If we can't paint a usable page within a few seconds, a lot of visitors will drop off.
Long story short: video isn’t responsive by default.
Huge write-ups have been done on the subject. The most famous of which is Thierry Koblentz’s A List Apart article which suggests doing a lot of stuff with position: relative and some hacks for old Internet Explorer, and by the time you’re done implementing it, you’ve added dozens of lines of code to your markup and CSS just to make a video responsive. Argh!
Thankfully we now have access to the vw sizing unit and as long as you don’t have to support old Android devices or IE8, it’s relatively safe to use.
A terrific step-by-step tutorial by Cory Simmons on how to use easily viewport units to size videos and make them responsive. No more hacks!
A lot of what's wrong on the web can be traced back to how advertising is done. They interfere with the load of a page and degrade user experience. But does it have to be like this? Mark Boulton and his team have been working to find a solution to web advertising's many problems for years, and now at Monotype, they are working on this problem full time. They did an hour-long seminar, and a post-seminar Q&A about it all.
Mozilla is trying an experiment with Firefox beta — baking a WebRTC toll right into the browser toolbar. Users can use it to make video calls to other people, without a plug-in (because it's using WebRTC), without going to a website (like Google Hangouts or talky.io), and without using a separate application (like Skype).
This is a fascinating interview with Steve Jobs from 1995, where he talks about the future of the web.
Steve Jobs has been right twice. The first time we got Apple. The second time we got NeXT. The Macintosh ruled. NeXT tanked. Still, Jobs was right both times. Although NeXT failed to sell its elegant and infamously buggy black box, Jobs's fundamental insight - that personal computers were destined to be connected to each other and live on networks - was just as accurate as his earlier prophecy that computers were destined to become personal appliances.
Now Jobs is making a third guess about the future. His passion these days is for objects. Objects are software modules that can be combined into new applications (see "Get Ready for Web Objects"), much as pieces of Lego are built into toy houses. Jobs argues that objects are the key to keeping up with the exponential growth of the World Wide Web. And it's commerce, he says, that will fuel the next phase of the Web explosion.
As we began our interview, Jobs was testy. He told me that he didn't care anymore about revolutionizing society, and that he didn't believe changes in technology could solve the most important problems we face. The future of the Web was in the hands of big corporations, he said. This was where the money was going to be made… As the conversation deepened, some of the connections slowly grew clear. Jobs's testiness faded, and he allowed himself to speculate on the democratizing effects of the Web and his hope for defending it against the threat of Microsoft. Jobs's obsession with his old rival took the form of an unusual proposal for all parties to voluntarily keep the Web simple and avoid increasingly popular client-side enhancements like HotJava… The new Steve Jobs scoffs at the naïve idealism of Web partisans who believe the new medium will turn every person into a publisher. The heart of the Web, he said, will be commerce, and the heart of commerce will be corporate America serving custom products to individual consumers. The implicit message of the Macintosh, as unforgettably expressed in the great "1984" commercial, was Power to the People. Jobs's vision of Web objects serves a different mandate: Give the People What They Want.
The Director is pleased to announce the approval of the Web Annotation Working Group charter: https://www.w3.org/annotation/charter/
This group is chartered until 1 October 2016.
The mission of the Web Annotation Working Group, part of the Digital Publishing Activity, is to define a generic data model for Annotations, and define the basic infrastructural elements to make it deployable in browsers and reading systems through suitable user interfaces.
Mark Boulton:
Making content (or anything) ‘accessible’ does not mean ‘make it for disabled people’. It means make it for everyone, regardless.
