Category: State of the Web
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My website is 20 years old today.
MY WEBSITE is 20 years old today. I’m dictating these remarks into a tiny handheld device, not to prove a point, but because, with gorgeously ironic timing, my wired internet connection has gone out. It’s…
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20 Years Ago Today: Bill Gates Wakes Up And Smells The Internet.
TODAY marks the 20th anniversary of Bill Gates’s famous letter about the web, and my first website, batmanforever.com, created with Steve McCarron and Alec Pollak for Donald Buckley of Warner Bros and optimized for Netscape…
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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Medium?
Why are independent content creators afraid of Medium.com?
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Progressive Enhancement FTW with Aaron Gustafson
IN EPISODE ? 130 of The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”), I interview long-time web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson, author of Adaptive Web Design, on web design then and now; why Flipboard’s 60fps…
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1,000 nerds
THE MODERN SOCIAL WEB is a miracle of progress but also a status-driven guilt-spewing shit volcano. Back in the 1990s—this will sound insane—we paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or…
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Designing and Developing “The Web at 25” Website
IN BIG WEB SHOW ? 114 on Mule Radio, designer Mike Pick and front-end developer Tim Murtaugh talk to me about how they created The Web at 25 website for the W3C in just five…
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Evolving Responsive Web Design
In What We Mean When We Say “responsive” and Defining Responsiveness, Lyza Danger Gardner and Jason Grigsby cut to the heart of a disagreement I had three years ago with Ethan Marcotte, the creator of…
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Big Web Show ? 109: Bring Me The Head of Tim Berners-Lee
IN BIG WEB SHOW ? 109, Robin Berjon and I enjoy a calm, rational conversation about EME, DRM, the MPAA, and the W3C. Enjoy. The episode was sponsored by Squarespace. Links mentioned: “Please Bring Me…
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It’s 2014. Is Web Design Dead?
IN A RECENT article on his website, Web Standards Killed the HTML Star, designer Jeff Croft laments the passing of the “HTML and CSS ‘guru’” as a viable long-term professional position and urges his fellow…
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The Black Hole of The Valley
STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: Guy goes into a venture capital firm, borrows money. Uses money to turn neat idea into product. Gives away product (or sells well below cost) to build a…
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The Lords of Vendorbation
Vendorbatory product “design” decisions stem purely from contingencies and conveniences in the code framework, which itself is almost always an undocumented archipelago of spaghetti, spit, and duct tape started by one team and continued by…
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Chicago, Chicago
AN EVENT APART Chicago—a photo set on Flickr. Pictures of the city and the conference for people who make websites. Notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2013—Luke Wroblewski’s note-taking is legendary. Here are his notes…
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Deep Thoughts
Flat design is destroying the woodgrain background industry. — Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) August 6, 2013