Part three of this week’s epic bookmark dump.
"Nobody has complained about it yet." almost always means "It's broken but nobody cares enough to give us feedback."
— Joshua Porter (@bokardo) June 5, 2015
I dislike the Web the same way Stallman dislikes open source and Alan Kay dislikes today's OO– a dumbdown and betrayal of first principles.
— Theodor Holm Nelson (@TheTedNelson) March 28, 2015
Publishing industry be like a drunk guy at last call willing to sleep with anyone who will take him home.
— Johnny McDermott (@mcdermott) June 8, 2015
Web design isn't dead, but it does have an image problem. The industry is so self-absorbed, it'll collapse in on itself before long.
— Matt Hill (@matthillco) June 9, 2015
The biggest problem with the web industry is that we're really building stuff for each other and consider our customers as secondary.
— Matt Hill (@matthillco) June 9, 2015
I don’t know how that 1xN vertical stack of apps to pick from in Slide Over is going to scale to the 120+ apps I usually have on my iPad.
— Fraser Speirs (@fraserspeirs) June 9, 2015
One day we will escape from our proprietary silos and all that will be left will be the writing scrawled on the wall, “WHO KILLED THE WEB?”
— Jeremy Keith (@adactio) June 9, 2015
The recent publisher editorial at Tor is a textbook illustration of "principles" applied differentially to the less powerful.
— Athena Andreadis (@AthenaHelivoy) June 9, 2015
How many folks spend their careers trying to promote step-by-step recipes as solutions to complex problems?
— Bob Marshall (@flowchainsensei) June 11, 2015
Silicon Valley loves energetically replacing 10,000 middlemen making $1 million a year each with one making $1 billion.
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) June 11, 2015
One of the biggest challenges facing web practitioners is getting the web to perform well. We may not be able to beat native applications’ ability to leverage a device’s hardware, but we do need to compete with them in terms of experience. This means, at the most basic level, allowing users to get to content as quickly and efficiently as possible. If we waste the time, money and patience of our audiences, they will leave us behind for content that respects them. The Facebook News service—and now Apple’s own competitor in this space—is a damning indictment of the experiences we’ve been giving our audience.
Keep The Web Healthy by Stephen Caver (1340 words).
If someone says that X is bad, and you say "but X is very common!", then you've just explained why it's even worse, not why it's OK.
— Gary Bernhardt (@garybernhardt) June 12, 2015
Dear startups,
You are not nonprofits. You are not making any profits. You still have to pay for work, somehow.
Love,
Dr No— Christina Wodtke (@cwodtke) June 12, 2015
As soon as you realise that most people don't know what they are doing, the world makes a lot more sense. @trisha_gee #qconnewyork
— Charles Humble (@charleshumble) June 11, 2015
As of May, the average web page surpassed the 2 MB mark. This is almost twice the size of the average page just three years ago.
Page bloat update: The average web page is more than 2 MB in size by Tammy Everts (1011 words).
after seeing tweet-pics of #distractinglysexy women scientists in field, my 14 yo daughter thinks being a scientist seems cool & fun
#win— tracey depellegrin (@tracey_423) June 12, 2015
This reminds me of 90s Internet mystery meat navigation, except that there’s not even any mystery meat, and you’re just randomly dragging around and tapping on things to trigger actions that might or might not be supported by the application you’re actually trying to use. You could argue that split view is a power user feature, and power users can just go watch a YouTube movie that explains how the feature works, but I’ve now watched this section of the keynote twice, forgotten how it works once already, and I’m completely sure that I will have forgotten how it works again by tomorrow.
Window Management and Apple by Lukas Mathis (1941 words).
I used to read multiple nonfiction books a month. Now I hardly ever but I feel even better informed. This is why: https://t.co/a4b1jJEBHX
— Favorable Carry (@FavorableCarry) June 14, 2015
One might argue that with my strategy I lose the depth of arguments, but I would argue that I’m just cutting the fluff that exists because of an outdated economics.
When nonfiction books were sold in print on shelves in physical book stores, I believe there was a “minimum thickness requirement” that books needed to meet in order for customers to feel justified in spending $20 on a copy of a book. So authors and publishers were incentivized to create hundreds of pages of fluff (often in the form of extraneous and drawn out supporting example evidence cases) that did not meaningfully contribute to the thesis of the book.
Information Condensation (post now seems to have been deleted) by Andrew Kortina (515 words).
A huge percentage of my debugging time is "A setting we introduced to control a customization/etc didn't do what we thought it would do."
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) June 15, 2015
Today I discovered that Apple is introducing a new “pinned tab icon” feature, which unfortunately co-opts the existing HTML favicon syntax, and is causing compatibility issues in Firefox Nightly.
Apple’s new not-quite-favicon syntax causing problems in other browsers; needs standardization? by Daniel Holbert and others on a mailing list (429 words).
JSON-LD inside <script> tags is now a thing. It's an improvement on RDF/XML inside comment tags, but not much.
— Tom Morris (@tommorris) June 15, 2015
The interesting question for ebooks is how much the barrier to growth is discovery versus the reading UX. Neither work for me.
— Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) June 15, 2015