Category: Web Design

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A few interesting links that I’ve been meaning to post for a while now.

Geography and History

Using and Building the Internet

  • Warren Ellis has given up on Facebook and Google+ because it’s just so hard to reliably reach or listen to people. Think of how many posts in your news feed you miss each day just by not being online at the right time, never mind the pre-filtering Facebook does to the firehose.
  • Page Weight Matters – an engineer at Google led an effort to cut Youtube’s bandwidth requirements by a factor of ten. Strangely enough, when they started a live test, average page load time went up. It turned out that people on low-speed connections had found out about it and started using it even though it took two minutes to load where they were…because even that was still better than the 20 minutes they’d been stuck with before. (Via Raymond Camden)
  • If you run an email newsletter, keep in mind that many of your readers will try to read it on a phone. Keep that in mind when designing your format. Giant images with no text aren’t going to be too helpful.
  • How to keep electronics going when you lose power for days: Generators, batteries, car chargers, solar or kinetic chargers, etc.

Comics

  • Some of the earliest UNIX daemon art was drawn by none other than Phil Foglio of Girl Genius fame.
  • Saturday Morning in Front of La Salle De Justice is a painting by Rey Taira in DC Comics’ gallery show, inspired by Seurat’s famous painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (the painting at the center of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George), but recast with the Justice League and other DC Comics heroes. It’s making the rounds again now, but I first saw it on Firestorm Fan a few months back.

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Last week, the webcomic XKCD ran a strip, Umwelt. Or perhaps it would be better to describe it as several comic strips.

As explained in the mouseover text, the title refers to the idea that because animals have different senses, each animal effectively inhabits a different reality. This can philosophically be extended to human perceptions.

Keeping that in mind, make sure you read it in a few different web browsers (both desktop and mobile!) for the full effect (JavaScript required). And try resizing the window.

As an art project, it’s the best use of browser-sniffing I’ve ever seen.

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A lot of web developers have forgotten the lessons of IE6, and just as they used to build desktop websites coded only for one engine, now they’re coding mobile sites specifically for Webkit, even when other browsers would be perfectly capable of rendering the designs they want.

This is exactly the sort of thing that gave IE6 such a stranglehold on the web for so many years (and as much as we’d like it to be, it’s not dead yet), with Netscape/Mozilla and Opera completely marginalized until Firefox managed to break through. It’s not quite so bad because two companies are driving WebKit (Apple & Google) rather than just one (Microsoft), but let’s try to learn from history this time around instead of repeating it.

Call for action on Vendor Prefixes – The Web Standards Project

The Web Standards Project is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards which ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Originally posted on Google+

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Cool idea: Google is designing a “Web intents” system for web apps similar to intents in Android. For those who haven’t used Android, “intents” allow apps to register actions they can take — such as “I can share (or edit) images!” — and other apps to hand data over to them. That way your camera app doesn’t need to know about every possible image-sharing or editing app you can put on your phone.

Now they’re extending the idea to web applications. There’s a JavaScript-based proof of concept, and they’re planning to add native support to Chrome.

Originally posted on Google+

Update: While it would have been cool, Web Intents never got off the ground. Paul Kinlan describes what happened.

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