W3C@30: W3C and me - YouTube
This is a lovely, lovely talk from Léonie!
Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.
Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.
A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.
Related links
MSEdgeExplainers/WebInstall/explainer_same_domain.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers
This proposal is exactly what I was asking for!
C’mon browsers, let’s make this happen!
Web Push on iOS - 1 year anniversary - Webventures
Web Push on iOS is nearing its one year anniversary. It’s still mostly useless.
Sad, but true. And here’s why:
On iOS, for a website to be able to ask the user to grant the push notification permission, it needs to be installed to the home screen.
No other browser on any of the other platforms requires you to install a website for it to be able to send push notifications.
Apple is within their rights to withhold Web Push to installed apps. One could argue it’s not even an unreasonable policy - if Apple made installing a web app at least moderately straightforward. As it is, they have buried it and hidden important functionality behind it.
I really, really hope that the Safari team are reading this.
Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit • Lea Verou
I love, love, love the deep thinking that Lea has put into this, really digging into the guts of what design does.
Overfitting happens when solutions don’t generalize sufficiently and is a hallmark of poor design. Eigensolutions are the opposite: solutions that generalize so much they expose links between seemingly unrelated use cases. Designing eigensolutions takes a mindset shift from linear design to composability.
Lea ties this into web standards too. It’s really helped clarify for me why I want more declarative options for common use cases (like a share button)—it’s about raising the ceiling without raising the floor.
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!
Related posts
Web App install API
It’s kind of ridiculous that this functionality doesn’t exist yet.
Browser history
From a browser bug this morning, back to the birth of hypertext in 1945, with a look forward to a possible future for web browsers.
SafarIE
Comparing browsers.
Safari 15
What’s coming in the next version of Safari …and what isn’t.
A curl in every port
Postel’s port numbers.