We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.
Owning your own piece of the Internet (to borrow a recent phrase from Anil Dash) is itself a radical act. Linking to others at will is subversive all on its own. Or as Jeremy Keith once put it, “it sounds positively disruptive to even suggest that you should have your own website.” The web still exists for everyone. And beneath this increasingly desiccated surface, there is plenty of creators still simply creating.
People create these sites simply so that they exist. They are not fed to an algorithm, or informed by any trends. It is quieter and slower, meant to tether us to a more mechanical framework of the web.
This is the analog web.
This seems like a good analogy to me.
I love the analogies Matt uses to describe the vibes of different kinds of coding:
When I’m deep in multiple nested parentheses in a C-like language, even Python, I feel precarious, like I’m walking a high wire or balancing things in my hands and picking my way down steep stairs.
I haven’t done much Haskell but what I did felt like crawling underground through caves and tunnels.
Opening a terminal window to a distant server is like reaching through a hatch with my arm, but a long way; ssh tunnel is well named.
Writing code with GitHub Copilot and Typescript in full flight feels like, well, flying, or at least great bounding leaps like being on the Moon.
Time capsules on the moon, using NanoFiche as the storage medium.
I’ve personally never really seen frontend as an assembly job. Lego is admittedly awesome, but for me the mental model of assembling Lego bricks in the required order until a Jira ticket can be marked as “done” feels too linear and too rigid for how I like to work. And that’s not to mention the pain that comes when you have to partially dismantle your bricks to correct some earlier misstep.
I like the pottery analogy.
Progressive enhancement in meatspace:
IRL progressive enhancement is quite common when you think of it. You can board planes with paper boarding cards, but also with technology like QR codes and digital wallets. You can pay for a coffee with cash, card or phone. The variety serves diverse sets of people. Just like in web development, not dismissing the baseline lets us cover use cases we didn’t know existed. It is fragile, though: some manager somewhere probably has a fantasy about replacing everything with fancy tech and fancy tech only.
A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.
I keep coming back to this remarkable piece of writing by Cassie. Honest, resonant, and open, centred around a perfect analogy.
Lessons for web development from a home renovation project:
- Greenfield Projects Are Everyone’s Favorite
- The Last Person’s Work Is Always Bewildering
- It’s All About the Trade-Offs
- It ALWAYS Takes Longer Than You Think
- Communication, Communication, Communication!
And there’s this:
You know those old homes people love because they’re unique, have lasted for decades, and have all that character? In contrast, you have these modern subdivision homes that, while shiny and new, are often bland and identical (and sometimes shoddily built).
node_modulesis like the suburbia/subdivision of modern web development: it seems nice and fancy today, and most everyone is doing it, but in 30 years everyone will hate the idea. They’ll all need to be renovated or torn down. Meanwhile, the classical stuff that’s still standing from 100 years ago lives on but nobody seems to be building houses that way anymore for some reason. Similarly, the first website ever is still viewable in all modern web browsers. But many websites built last year on last year’s bleeding edge tech already won’t work in a browser.
HTML lets you create the structure of a website.
CSS lets you make the website look nice.
JavaScript lets you change HTML and CSS. Because it lets you change HTML and CSS, it can do tons of things.
A time capsule for the long now. Laser-etched ceramic tablets in an Austrian salt mine carry memories of our civilisation in three categories: news editorials, scientific works, and personal stories.
You can contribute a personal story, your favorite poem, or newspaper articles which describe our problems, visions or our daily life.
Tokens that mark the location of the site are also being distributed across the planet.
An online museum of sounds—the recordings of analogue machines.
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.
A nice analogy to help explain what it’s like to navigate with a screen reader—and how much well-structured markup can help make it easier.
This is a rather lovely idea—technical terms explained with analogies.
I just finished writing something about HTTPS and now I wish I had used this.
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.
Like cuneiform crossed with the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project.
He will laser-print a microscopic font onto 1-mm-thick ceramic sheets, encased in wafer-thin layers of glass. One 20 cm piece of this microfilm can store 5 million characters; whole libraries of information—readable with a 10x-magnifying lens—could be slotted next to each other and hardly take up any space.
As always with sci-fi interfaces, the important part is telling the story, not realism or accuracy. Personally, I liked the way that the World War II trappings of Rogue One extended to communications and networking technologies.
If you enjoyed reading Marcin’s serendipitous story on Twitter, here are the pictures to accompany it.
