Understanding

Every so often I’ll read something on the web that somebody else has written and I’ll think Yes! That! That’s what I’ve been trying to say!

I’ve already told of experiencing just that whilst reading Raiding Eternity. Now I’ve experienced it again. This time the culprit is Ben Ward, the talented bastard.

He reeled me in with the synopsis of his latest article. It’s called Understand The Web:

Perceptions of the web are changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.

On the one hand, it’s a straightforward fact-check and slap-down for the factually-incorrect nonsense being spouted on Twitter and elsewhere by those who are reconstructing the history of the web as a work of fiction spun in the own minds to match their misunderstandings of how browsers and standards bodies work. As Ben puts it:

This is the short, perhaps selective memory that the internet suffers from. It is not acceptable to me that 21st century knowledge retention has become so short and shallow as to be overwritten by influential ranting on Twitter. A greater tool for the dissemination of misinformation has never been known.

But the real reason why you should read Ben’s piece is that it encourages all of us to take a step back and think about what the web really is. It’s not just a choice of platform for building applications (whatever that means), it’s so much more:

Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content. If your website locks content away in a container, outside the reach of hyperlinks, you’re not building any kind of ‘web’ app. You’re doing something else.

I could quote the whole thing, so perfectly does it map to my own feelings and thoughts on the web, but instead I urge you to go to Ben’s site, read what he has written and understand the web.

Verevolf

Glenn Davis of Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day from waaaay back in the day is writing his online memoirs.

Depending on when you got online, this will either bring back a lot of memories or sound like something from a different century (which technically it is).

Web Browser Engineering

It’s heavy on computer science, but this is a fascinating endeavour. It’s a work-in-progress book that not only describes how browsers work, but invites you to code along too. At the end, you get a minimum viable web browser (and more knowledge than you ever wanted about how browsers work).

As a black box, the browser is either magical or frustrating (depending on whether it is working correctly or not!). But that also make a browser a pretty unusual piece of software, with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Browsers are worth studying for the pure pleasure of it.

See how the sausage is made and make your own sausage!

This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a thousand lines of Python.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Eulogy for Flash

Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.

He also brings up this very important question:

I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?

This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.

The App-ocalypse: Can Web standards make mobile apps obsolete? | Ars Technica

I really, really want to like this article—it’s chock full of confirmation bias for me. But it’s so badly-written …I mean like, just the worst.

Here’s an actual sentence:

So with a capable, HTML-based platform and a well-designed program that makes good use of CSS, one site could support phones, tablets, PCs, and just about anything else with one site.

So, yeah, I’m still linking to it, but instead of it being for the content, it’s because I want to lament the dreadful state of technology writing.

On HTML5 and the Group That Rules the Web

Paul Ford’s potted history of web standards, delivered in his own inimitable style.

Reading through the standards, which are dry as can be, you might imagine that standardization is a polite, almost academic process, where wonks calmly debate topics like semicolon placement. This is not the case.