Tags: online

Not long now ’till Web Day Out — just three weeks!

It’s also not that long until the start of a new financial year so if you’ve got training budget that needs to be used this year, send your team to Web Day Out. Not only is it excellent value for money, it’s also going to have an incredibly high density of knowledge bombs per talk.

CSS! Progressive web apps! Web typography! Browser support! And much more.

If you like the sound of Web Day Out, you’ll also like State Of The Browser, which is just ten days away. In-person tickets for that event are now sold out, but online streaming tickets are still available.

Better yet, if you buy a ticket to Web Day Out, you automatically get a free online streaming ticket for State Of The Browser!

So get your ticket in the next ten days, enjoy State Of The Browser from the comfort of your own home, and then enjoy a trip to Brighton for Web Day Out on Thursday, 12 March. See you there!

Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag

Laura’s classic book is now a web book that you can read for free online.

The Instagram Mothers - The Offing

A short piece of speculative fiction.

Cascading Layouts | OddBird

A workshop on resilient CSS layouts

Oh, hell yes!

Do not hesitate—sign yourself up to this series of three online workshops by Miriam. This is the quickest to level up your working knowledge of the most powerful parts of CSS.

By the end of this you’re going to feel like Neo in that bit of The Matrix when he says “I know kung-fu!” …except kung-fu isn’t very useful for building resilient and maintainable websites, whereas modern CSS absolutely is.

Daring Fireball: Kottke on the Art and Power of Hypertextual Writing

Hypertext links are an information-density multiplier.

The way I’ve long thought about it is that traditional writing — like for print — feels two-dimensional. Writing for the web adds a third dimension. It’s not an equal dimension, though. It doesn’t turn writing from a flat plane into a full three-dimensional cube. It’s still primarily about the same two dimensions as old-fashioned writing. What hypertext links provide is an extra layer of depth. Just the fact that the links are there — even if you, the reader, don’t follow them — makes a sentence read slightly differently. It adds meaning in a way that is unique to the web as a medium for prose.

Digital Litter Picking – Terence Eden’s Blog

I like this framing:

If you’ve ever corrected a typo in an Open Source readme, or added alt-text to an image, or tidied up some broken references in Wikipedia - you’re doing Digital Litter Picking. You’re cleaning up after others. And I think that’s a marvellous way to spend a little time.

The 11ty International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real Good - YouTube

I wasn’t able to tune into this live (“tune in?” what century is this?) but I’ve enjoyed catching up with the great talks like:

• Hints & Suggestions (First, Do No Harm) by Miriam Suzanne
• Digital Frontiers, IndieWeb Cowboys, and A Place Online To Call Your Own by Henry Desroches
• Come to the light side: HTML Web Components by Chris Ferdinandi

The Origin of Online Handles - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

My secret is safe.

Internet Artifacts

I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:

You may touch the artifacts

The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!

Stochastic Parrots Day Tickets, Fri, Mar 17, 2023 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite

This free event is running online from 3pm to 7pm UK time this Friday. The line-up features Emily Bender, Safiya Noble, Timnit Gebru and more.

Since the publication of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?🦜 two years ago, many of the harms the paper has warned about and more, have unfortunately occurred. From exploited workers filtering hateful content, to an engineer claiming that chatbots are sentient, the harms are only accelerating.

Join the co-authors of the paper and various guests to reflect on what has happened in the last two years, what the large language model landscape currently look like, and where we are headed vs where we should be headed.

UnConference: Design Systems Culture

This free online event is happening at 7pm UK time this evening. I saw Ben give a talk on this at Clarity, and it was excellent. There was a lot of crossover with what I’ve been trying to get at with the intersection of declarative design and culture, except Ben expresses it far more clearly than me. The bastard.

If you feel like you’re swimming upstream with your design system, it’s likely the result of a cultural problem—not a technical one. It’s time for you to look at your design system from a different angle.

Privacy, Seriously | ICO

This looks like an excellent—and free!—online event centred on privacy and safety. It’s got Eva PenzeyMoog, Robin Berjon and more!

Derek Powazek - A community isn’t a garden, it’s a bar.

The first thirty years of the web may have been an orgy of unregulated expansion, but that era is over. The EU has been a leader with the GDPR, but there’s more coming. And I’m glad. The big players have had plenty of time to get their shit together and they haven’t. It’s time to regulate them as much as we regulate a shot of bourbon.

I’m not a goblin, I just play one in Google Docs (Interconnected)

We’re all LARPing on LinkedIn.

I’m very excited about speaking at CSS Day this year. My talk is called In And Out Of Style:

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!

Technically, CSS Day won’t be the first outing for this talk but it will be the in-person debut. I had the chance to give the talk online last week at An Event Apart. Giving a talk online isn’t quite the same as speaking on stage, but I got enough feedback from the attendees that I’m feeling confident about giving the talk in Amsterdam. It went down well with the audience at An Event Apart.

If the description has you intrigued, come along to CSS Day to hear the talk in person. And if you like the subject matter, I’ve put together these links to go with the talk…

• A Mind at Play: The Brilliant Life of Claude Shannon, Inventor of the Information Age by Jimmy Sonni and Rob Goodman
• The Web Is Agreement by Paul Downey
• CERN 2019 WorldWideWeb Rebuild
• What is a good standard? An essay on W3C’s design principles by Bert Bos
• Design Principles
• Tweet by Miriam Suzanne
• Open UI

Blog posts

• The Languages Which Almost Became CSS by Zack Bloom
• A Look Back at the History of CSS by Jay Hoffmann

Presentations

• On the origin of cascades by Hidde de Vries
• CSS Reset by Bert Bos and Håkon Wium Lie

Proposals (email)

• Request for Comments: STYLESHEETS by Rob Raisch, June 1993
• Stylesheet Language by Pei Wei, October 1993
• Cascading HTML style sheets — a proposal by Håkon Wium Lie, October 1994

Papers (PDF)

• A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, 1948
• Cascading Style Sheets by Håkon Wium Lie, 2006

People (Wikipedia)

• Claude Shannon
• Grace Hopper
• Tim Berners-Lee

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online - David Perell

Blogging isn’t dead. In fact, the opposite is true. We’re about to enter a golden age of personal blogs.

Make it easy for people to find you. Buy a domain name and use it to create your own website, even if it’s very simple at first. Your website is your resume, your business card, your store, your directory, and your personal magazine. It’s the one place online that you completely own and control – your Online Home.

Good advice. Also:

Don’t write on Medium.

Look, I get it. Writing on Medium is an easy way to pick up readers and increases your chances of going viral. But the costs exceed the benefits. Medium is terrible for SEO. You don’t own your content and the platform makes it difficult to turn one-time readers into loyal ones.

The more you can use platforms you own, the better. Rather than writing on Medium, do the work to build a personal blog. That way, you can have a central place to point people to.

HmntyCntrd | Critical UX Event

This looks like an excellent (and very reasonably-priced) online event happening on November 12th with three panels:

1. beyond accessibility,
2. failure of diversity, and
3. design as resistance!

Schedule / Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) 23 September 2021

The annual day-long online accessibility event is back on September 23rd.

No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.

IndieWeb Events: Gardens and Streams II

September 25th, online:

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss and build.

Design System Day, Thursday 22 July 2021

This looks interesting: a free one-day Barcamp-like event online all about design systems for the public sector, organised by the Gov.uk design system team:

If you work on public sector services and work with design systems, you’re welcome to attend. We even have some tickets for people who do not work in the public sector. If you love design systems, we’re happy to have you!