Tags: old

Maureen has written a really good overview of web feeds for this year’s HTMHell advent calendar.

The common belief is that nobody uses RSS feeds these days. And while it’s true that I wish more people used feed readers—the perfect antidote to being fed from an algorithm—the truth is that millions of people use RSS feeds every time they listen to a podcast. That’s what a podcast is: an RSS feed with enclosure elements that point to audio files.

And just as a web feed doesn’t necessarily need to represent a list of blog posts, a podcast doesn’t necessarily need to be two or more people having a recorded conversation (though that does seem to be the most common format). A podcast can tell a story. I like those kinds of podcasts.

The BBC are particularly good at this kind of episodic audio storytelling. I really enjoyed their series Thirteen minutes to the moon, all about the Apollo 11 mission. They followed it up with a series on Apollo 13, and most recently, a series on the space shuttle.

Here’s the RSS feed for the 13 minutes podcast.

Right now, the BBC have an ongoing series about the history of the atomic bomb. The first series was about Leo Szilard, the second series was about Klaus Fuchs, and the third series running right now is about the Cuban missile crisis.

The hook is that each series is presented by people with a family connection to the events. The first series is presented by the granddaughter of one of the Oak Ridge scientists. The second series is presented by the granddaughter of Klaus Fuch’s spy handler in the UK—blimey! And the current series is presented by Nina Khrushcheva and Max Kennedy—double blimey!

Here’s the RSS feed for The Bomb podcast.

If you want a really deep dive into another pivotal twentieth century event, Evgeny Morozov made a podcast all about Stafford Beer and Salvadore Allende’s collaboration on cybernetics in Chile, the fabled Project Cybercyn. It’s fascinating stuff, though there’s an inevitable feeling of dread hanging over events because we know how this ends.

The podcast is called The Santiago Boys, though I almost hesitate to call it a podcast because for some reason, the website does its best to hide the RSS feed, linking only to the silos of Spotify and Apple. Fortunately, thanks to this handy tool, I can say:

Here’s the RSS feed for The Santiago Boys podcast.

The unifying force behind all three of these stories is the cold war:

• 13 Minutes—the space race, from the perspective of the United States.
• The Bomb—the nuclear arms race, from Los Alamos to Cuba.
• The Santiago Boys—the CIA-backed overthrow of a socialist democracy in Chile.

Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog

I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

Also sprach Wittgenstein:

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.

Or in English, thus spoke Wittgenstein:

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Language and thinking are intertwined. I’m not saying there’s anything to the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I think George Lakoff is onto something when he talks about political language.

There’s literal political language like saying “tax relief”—framing taxation as something burdensome that needs to be relieved. But our everyday language has plenty of framing devices that might subconsciously influence our thinking.

When it comes to technology, our framing of new technologies often comes from previous technologies. As a listener to a show, you might find yourself being encouraged to “tune in again next week” when you may never have turned a radio dial in your entire life.

In the early days of the web we used a lot of language from print. John Allsopp wrote about this in his classic article A Dao Of Web Design:

The web is a new medium, although it has emerged from the medium of printing, whose skills, design language and conventions strongly influence it. Yet it is often too shaped by that from which it sprang.

One outdated piece of language on the web is a framing device in two senses: “above the fold”. It’s a conceptual framing device that comes straight from print where newspapers were literally folded in half. It’s a literal framing device that puts the important content at the top of the page.

But there is no fold. We pretended that everyone’s screens were 640 by 480 pixels. Then we pretended that everyone’s screens were 800 by 600 pixels. But we never really knew. It was all a consensual hallucination. Even before mobile devices showed up there was never a single fold.

Even if you know that there’s no literal page fold on the web, using the phrase “above the fold” is still insidiously unhelpful.

So what’s the alternative? Well, James has what I think is an excellent framing:

The landing zone.

It’s the bit of the page where people first show up. It doesn’t have a defined boundary. The landing zone isn’t something separate to the rest of the page; the content landing zone merges into the rest of the content.

You don’t know where the landing zone ends, and that’s okay. It’s better than okay. It encourages you design in a way that still prioritises the most important content but without fooling yourself into thinking there’s some invisible boundary line.

Next time you’re discussing the design of a web page—whether it’s with a colleague or a client—try talking about the landing zone.

Cold Album Drumming - full-album drum covers by Brad Frost

This is a great new musical project from Brad:

Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?

I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.

Cold-blooded software

Warm-blooded software:

Maybe your CI isn’t working because one of the services you depend on got bought or ran out of money. You add a new dependency and find yourself needing to upgrade your compiler. Another package you depend on is deprecated, and doesn’t work with the latest version of the compiler.

I aspire to build cold-blooded software:

You work alone, make some changes when you’re inspired, and then don’t touch it again for another year, or two, or three.

35mm scans — writer/editor/reporter

Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.

The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

Taken together, these flaws make LLMs look less like an information technology and more like a modern mechanisation of the psychic hotline.

Delegating your decision-making, ranking, assessment, strategising, analysis, or any other form of reasoning to a chatbot becomes the functional equivalent to phoning a psychic for advice.

Imagine Google or a major tech company trying to fix their search engine by adding a psychic hotline to their front page? That’s what they’re doing with Bard.

Ancient Web Browsers | tweedy

This is an archive of the very earliest Web browsers — the true pioneers, the Old Gods, the Ancients:

WorldWideWeb, LineMode, Viola, Erwise, Midas, TkWWW, Samba, Lynx, w3, FineWWW

A few years back, Jessica got a ceiling fan for our living room. This might seem like a strange decision, considering we live in England. Most of the time, the problem in this country is that it’s too cold.

But then you get situations like this week, when the country experienced the hottest temperatures ever recorded. I was very, very grateful for that ceiling fan. It may not get used for most of the year, but on the occasions when it’s needed, it’s a godsend. And it’s going to get used more and more often, given the inexorable momentum of the climate emergency.

Even with the ceiling fan, it was still very hot in the living room. I keep my musical instruments in that room, and they all responded to the changing temperature. The strings on my mandolin, bouzouki, and guitar went looser in the heat. The tuning dropped by at least a semitone.

I tuned them back up, but then I had to be careful when the extreme heat ended and the temperature began to drop. The strings began to tighten accordingly. My instruments went up a semitone.

I was thinking about this connection between sound and temperature when I was tuning the instruments back down again.

The electronic tuner I use shows the current tone in relation to the desired note: G, D, A, E. If the string is currently producing a tone that’s lower than, say, A, the tuner displays the difference on its little screen as lines behind the ideal A position. If the string is producing a tone higher than A, the lines appear in front of the desired note.

What if we thought about temperature like this? Instead of weather apps showing the absolute temperature in degrees, what if they showed the relative distance from a predefined ideal? Then you could see at a glance whether it’s a little cooler than you’d like, or a little hotter than you’d like.

Perhaps an interface like that would let you see at a glance how out of the tune the current temperature is.

The final five are here! The course on responsive design I wrote for web.dev is now complete, just in time for Christmas. The five new modules are:

1. Accessibility
2. Interaction
3. User interface patterns
4. Media features
5. Screen configurations

These five felt quite “big picture”, and often quite future-facing. I certainly learned a lot researching proposals for potential media features and foldable screens. That felt like a fitting way to close out the course, bookending it nicely with the history of responsive design in the introduction.

And with that, the full course is now online. Go forth and learn responsive design!

Serve folder for web development

This is a very nifty use of a service worker—choose a local folder that you want to navigate using HTTP rather than the file system.

When I wrote about the new accent-color property in CSS, I pondered how much control a web developer should have over styling form controls:

Who are we to make that decision? Shouldn’t the user’s choice take primacy over our choices?

But then again, where do we draw the line? We’re allowed over-ride link colours. We’re allowed over-ride font choices.

Ultimately, I came down on the side of granting authors more control:

If developers don’t get a standardised way to customise native form controls, they’ll just recreate their own over-engineered versions.

This question of “who gets to decide?” used to be much more prevelant in the early days of the web. One way to think about this is that there are three stakeholders involved in the presentation of a web page:

1. The author of the page. “Author” is spec-speak for designer or developer.
2. The user.
3. The browser, or user agent. A piece of software tries to balance the needs of both author and user. But, as the name implies, the user takes precedence.

These days we tend to think of web design a single-stakeholder undertaking. The author decides how something should be presented and then executes that decision using CSS.

But as Eric once said, every line of you CSS you write is a suggestion to the browser. That’s not how we think about CSS though. We think of CSS like a series of instructions rather than suggestions. Never mind respecting the user’s preferences; one of the first things we do is reset all the user agent’s styles.

In the early days of the web, more consideration was given to the idea of style suggestions rather than instructions. Heck, users could always over-ride any of your suggestions with their own user stylesheet. These days, users would need to install a browser extension to do the same thing.

The first proposal for CSS had a concept called “influence”:

h2.font.size = 20pt 40%

Here, the requested influence is reduced to 40%. If a style sheet later in the cascade also requests influence over h2.font.size, up to 60% can be granted. When the document is rendered, a weighted average of the two requests is calculated, and the final font size is determined.

I think the only remnant of “influence” left in CSS is accidental. It’s in the specificity of selectors …and the !important declaration.

I think it’s a shame that user stylesheets are no longer a thing. But I get why they were dropped from browsers. They date from a time when it was mostly nerds using the web, before “regular folks” came on board. I understand why it became a little-used feature, suitable for being dropped. But the principle of it still rankles slightly.

But in recent years there has been a slight return to the multi-stakeholder concept of styling websites. Thanks to prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme, a responsible author can choose to bow to the wishes of the user.

I was reminded of this when I added a dark mode to my website:

Y’know, when I first heard about Apple adding dark mode to their OS—and also to CSS—I thought, “Oh, great, Apple are making shit up again!” But then I realised that, like user style sheets, this is one more reminder to designers and developers that they don’t get the last word—users do.

Gaming the Iron Curtain

The ZX Spectrum in a time of revolution:

Gaming the Iron Curtain offers the first book-length social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, or anywhere in the Soviet bloc. It describes how Czechoslovak hobbyists imported their computers, built DIY peripherals, and discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression.

National Security Agency (NSA) security/motivational posters from the 1950s and 1960s [PDF]

This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was received by this office on 5 February 2016 for “A digital/electronic copy of the NSA old security posters from the 1950s and 1960s.”

The graphic design is …um, mixed.

I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.

It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.

It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.

The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.

There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.

Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.

Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…

I’d watch the heck out of that.

Beyond Smart Rocks

Claire L. Evans on computational slime molds and other forms of unconvential computing that look beyond silicon:

In moments of technological frustration, it helps to remember that a computer is basically a rock. That is its fundamental witchcraft, or ours: for all its processing power, the device that runs your life is just a complex arrangement of minerals animated by electricity and language. Smart rocks.

CSS folded poster effect

This is a very nifty use of CSS gradients!

Blot – A blogging platform with no interface

This looks like a nice way to get a blog up and running:

Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish. Images, text files, Word Documents, Markdown and more become blog posts automatically.

Paint Holding - reducing the flash of white on same-origin navigations  |  Web  |  Google Developers

This is an excellent UX improvement in Chrome. For sites like The Session, where page loads are blazingly fast, this really makes them feel like single page apps.

Our goal with this work was for navigations in Chrome between two pages that are of the same origin to be seamless and thus deliver a fast default navigation experience with no flashes of white/solid-color background between old and new content.

This is exactly the kind of area where browsers can innovate and compete on the UX of the browser itself, rather than trying to compete on proprietary additions to what’s being rendered.