The Web Runs On Tolerance – Terence Eden’s Blog
Spot-on observations from Terence linking the fundamental nature of parsing in web browsers with the completely wrong-headed takes of some technologists who have built on top of the web.
Shirky: View Source… Lessons from the Web’s massively parallel development.
An oldie but a goodie: Clay Shirky looks at the design principles underlying HTML in order to figure out what made it so successful. Even though this is fourteen years old, there are plenty of still-relevant insights here.
Related links
Web Backstories: Shadow DOM | Igalia
Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell chat with Jay Hoffmann and Jeremy Keith about Shadow DOM’s backstory and long origins
I enjoyed this chat, and it wasn’t just about Shadow DOM; it was about the history of chasing the dream of encapsulation on the web.
Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker
A profile of Tim and the World World Web.
Item Flow, Part 1: A new unified concept for layout | WebKit
I really like the idea of unifying some layout values in CSS. If you’ve got any feedback, please chip in!
Untapped – Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Related posts
The web on mobile
Technically, websites can do just about anything that native apps can do. And yet the actual experience of using the web on mobile is worse than ever.
The datalist element on iOS
Some buggy behaviour has been fixed in iOS 18 but now there’s a new bit of weirdness.
My approach to HTML web components
Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
HTML web components
Don’t replace. Augment.
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.