Salty JavaScript analogy - HankChizlJaw
JavaScript is like salt. If you add just enough salt to a dish, it’ll help make the flavour awesome. Add too much though, and you’ll completely ruin it.
The Analog Web | Jim Nielsen’s Blog
This is wonderful meditation on the history of older technologies that degrade in varied conditions versus newer formats that fall of a “digital cliff”, all tied in to working on the web.
When digital TV fails, it fails completely. Analog TV, to use parlance of the web, degrades gracefully. The web could be similar, if we choose to make it so. It could be “the analog” web in contrast to “the digital” platforms. Perhaps in our hurry to replicate and mirror native platforms, we’re forgetting the killer strength of the web: universal accessibility.
Related links
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!
Rise of the Digital Fonts
A history of typesetting from movable type to variable fonts.
BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive
Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:
In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.
The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.
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.
Related posts
In between
Between the physical and the digital. Between native apps and the World Wide Web.
Web! What is it good for?
Not absolutely nothing, but not absolutely everything either.
The principle of most availability
Reframing the principle of least power.
Of the web
Baldur Bjarnason has written my mind.