Category: Responsive Web

I don’t know if there’s a uniform Mozilla position on this, but here’s mine! :) … | Hacker News

Source: I don’t know if there’s a uniform Mozilla position on this, but here’s mine! 🙂 … | Hacker News

I don’t know if there’s a uniform Mozilla position on this, but here’s mine! 🙂 The main reason I care about the Web is because it’s the world’s biggest software platform that isn’t owned. If someone can deliver their app to the world without submitting it for review by an app store and without paying a company a %-age of the revenue, and if they can market it through the viral power of URLs, then they have a lot more control over their own destiny. That’s why I think it’s important for the Web not to give up on hard but solvable problems.

But also I think there’s a false dichotomy between “the Web should just be for documents” and “the Web should just be for apps.” The Web is simultaneously an application platform that blows all other platforms out of the water for delivering content. First, there’s a reason why so many native apps embed WebViews — despite its warts, CSS is the result of hundreds of person-years of tuning for deploying portable textual content.

But more importantly, you just can’t beat the URL. How many more times will we convince the entirety of humanity to know how to visually parse “www.zombo.com” on a billboard or in a text message? It’s easy to take the Web for granted, it’s fun to snark about its warts, and there’s a cottage industry of premature declarations of its death. But I personally believe that the humble little hyperlink is at the heart of the Web’s power, competitive strength, and longevity. It was a century-old dream passed on from Vannevar Bush to Doug Englebart to Xerox PARC and ultimately to TBL who made it real.

Some of our books live on | Five Simple Steps

When we decided to close Five Simple Steps, we made the decision to hand back the rights to each book to its relevant author. We are delighted that many authors

Source: Some of our books live on | Five Simple Steps

When we decided to close Five Simple Steps, we made the decision to hand back the rights to each book to its relevant author.

We are delighted that many authors have chosen to re-publish their work, some even making updates. Here we intend to list these books along with links to their new homes.

CSS3 Layout Modules – Rachel Andrew
Designing for the Web – Mark Boulton
Colour Accessibility – Geri Coady
HTML Email – Andy Croll
Effective Workshops – Alison Coward
Web Performance – Andy Davies
Front-End Style Guides – Anna Debenham
Writing in Markdown – Matt Gemmell
CSS Animations – Val Head
The Icon Handbook – Jon Hicks
Psychology for Designers – Joe Leech
Sketchnoting – Kevin Mears
Building a device lab – Destiny Montague & Lara Hogan
Practical Responsive images – Ben Seymour
Working with Brand & Design Guidelines – Rachel Shillcock
The Craft of Words -The Standardistas
Creating Symbol Fonts – Brian Suda
Designing with Data – Brian Suda
International User Research – Chui Chui Tan
Version Control with Git – Ryan Taylor
Interviewing for Research – Andrew Travers
Web App Success – Dan Zambonini

Wait! The Web Isn’t Dead After All. Google Made Sure of It | WIRED

Wait! The Web Isn’t Dead After All. Google Made Sure of It | WIRED

IN 2010, THE web died. Or so said the publication you’re reading right now.

In a WIRED cover story that summer, then-editor-in-chief Chris Anderson proclaimed the demise of the World Wide Web—that vast, interconnected, wonderfully egalitarian universe of internet pages and services we can visit through browser software running on computers of all kinds. We had, he said, departed the web for apps—those specialized, largely unconnected, wonderfully powerful tools we download onto particular types of phones and tablets. “As much as we love the open, unfettered Web,” he wrote, “we’re abandoning it for simpler, sleeker services that just work.”

At about the same time, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury took charge of the Google team that oversees Chrome, the company’s web browser. “I remember the ‘Web is Dead’ article very clearly,” he remembers. “I thought: ‘Oh My God. I’ve made a huge mistake.’” Needless to say, he didn’t really believe that. But there’s some truth in there somewhere. Though the web was hardly dead, it was certainly struggling in the face of apps. Six years later, however, Roy-Chowdhury believes the web is on the verge of a major resurgence, even as the world moves more and more of its Internet activities away from the desktop and onto phones.

As evidence, he points to the growing popularity of the mobile version of Chrome. This morning, as Google releases the latest incarnation of its browser, the company has revealed that a billion people now use Chrome on mobile devices each month—about the same number that use it on desktops and laptops.

But Roy-Chowdhury goes further still. After another six years of work, he says, Google and others have significantly improved the web’s underlying technologies to the point where services built for browsers can now match the performance of apps in some cases—and exceed it in others. “The web needed to adapt to mobile. And it was a rocky process. But it has happened,” he proclaims from a room inside the Google building that houses the Chrome and Android teams. “We’ve figured out.”

Investigating the algorithms that govern our lives – Columbia Journalism Review

Investigating the algorithms that govern our lives – Columbia Journalism Review

TO GET STARTED:

  1. “How big data is unfair”: A layperson’s guide to why big data and algorithms are inherently biased.
  2. “Algorithmic accountability reporting: On the investigation of black boxes”: The primer on reporting on algorithms, by Nick Diakopoulos, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively on the intersection of journalism and algorithmic accountability. A must-read.
  3. “Certifying and removing disparate impact”: The computer scientist’s guide to locating and and fixing bias in algorithms computationally, by Suresh Venkatasubramanian and colleagues. Some math is involved, but you can skip it.
  4. The Curious Journalist’s Guide to Data: Jonathan Stray’s gentle guide to thinking about data as communication, much of which applies to reporting on algorithms as well.

Blogging like it’s 1999

Blogging like it’s 1999

I get ideas that are paragraph length. #

I don’t want to try to save them in Facebook. #

They don’t fit in Twitter.#

But each of these systems has a certain gravity, they pull ideas into them. #

Can my ideas have an existence outside of Twitter and Facebook?#

My blog had more features, worked better for me, in 1999. #

In the last ten years I’ve had to pull features out of my blogging system, instead of making it better, it lost functionality.#

So in a way, my “better blogging system” would just be what I already had working 15 years ago.#

I keep remembering that, between Google Reader and its limits (items must have titles), and Twitter with its limits (only 140 chars, no titles, one link, no styling), same with Facebook (no links or styling) that my online writing has diminished dramatically, conforming to the contradictory limits of each of these systems. #

I keep working on this, still am. Every day. 🙂 #

Alert.email: Get your important emails delivered to a Slack channel

Alert.email: Get your important emails delivered to a Slack channel

Useful for someone like me: sends your important emails to a private Slack channel.

Slogan: We send your important* emails to a private Slack™ channel. So you can stop constantly checking your inbox

Save “Save For Web” – Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Save “Save For Web” – Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

Adobe created a “Save For Web” option (in Photoshop 3, if I remember rightly), and Furbo Filters’s beautiful market was gone in a moment. All that remains as a memento of that time and that product is the domain name furbo.org, which is where Craig keeps his blog.

I was reminded of this during a workplace discussion about the seeming disappearance of “Save For Web” from modern Photoshop.

To be clear, “Save For Web” still exists in Photoshop CC 2015. But it has clearly been deprecated, as is indicated by both UX (“Save For Web” no longer appears in the part of the interface where we’ve been trained to look for it for the past twenty years) and language: when we stumble onto “Save For Web” hiding under Export, after not finding it where we expect it, we’re presented with the words “Save For Web (Legacy),” clearly indicating that the feature is no longer a recommended part of today’s workflow.

Adobe explains: “Because Save for Web is built on the former ImageReady product (now discontinued), the code is too antiquated to maintain and develop new features.” (If Furbo Filters and DeBabelizer didn’t resurrect dead brain cells for some of you, I bet “ImageReady” did. Remember that one? Also, how scary is it for me that half the tools I’ve used in my career only exist today as Wikipedia entries?)

Instead of Save For Web, we’re to use Export: Export As…, which Adobe has built on its Generator platform.