"css" entries

It’s the end of the web as we knew it

You might feel fine.

For the past 15 years, Google has enforced the classic “HTML as foundation” architecture at the heart of the Web. Content creators and the developers who support them had to present content and link information as part of their pages’ HTML if they wanted Google’s spidering bots to see them. Google effectively punished developers who made links or content available only through JavaScript (or images, or CSS), giving them low or non-existent search results.

Google did this to keep their processing simple, not because of a deep fondness for HTML. Even as Google’s bots stuck to a simple diet of HTML, other parts of Google were developing JavaScript-centric approaches, like AngularJS: a “Superheroic JavaScript MVW Framework” that “is what HTML would have been, had it been designed for building web-apps.”

Angular is far from alone. As JavaScript grew, more and more programmers wanted to build their apps as programs, not as pages. Or, as Jen Simmons summarized it at Fluent, “Dang that stupid HTML, I’m just going to load an empty page… then I’ll run the real program, I’ll run the JavaScript.” Read more…

Four short links: 28 May 2013

Four short links: 28 May 2013

Geeky Primer, Visible CSS, Remote Working, and Raspberry Pi Sentiment Server

  1. My Little Geek — children’s primer with a geeky bent. A is for Android, B is for Binary, C is for Caffeine …. They have a Kickstarter for two sequels: numbers and shapes.
  2. Visible CSS RulesEnter a url to see how the css rules interact with that page.
  3. How to Work Remotely — none of this is rocket science, it’s all true and things we had to learn the hard way.
  4. Raspberry Pi Twitter Sentiment Server — step-by-step guide, and github repo for the lazy. (via Jason Bell)
Four short links: 5 February 2013

Four short links: 5 February 2013

Web Tooltips, Free Good Security Book, Netflix Economics, and Firewire Hackery

  1. toolbar — tooltips in jQuery, cf hint.css which is tooltips in CSS.
  2. Security Engineering — 2ed now available online for free. (via /r/netsec)
  3. Economics of Netflix’s $100M New Show (The Atlantic) — Up until now, Netflix’s strategy has involved paying content makers and distributors, like Disney and Epix, for streaming rights to their movies and TV shows. It turns out, however, the company is overpaying on a lot of those deals. […] [T]hese deals cost Netflix billions.
  4. Inceptiona FireWire physical memory manipulation and hacking tool exploiting IEEE 1394 SBP-2 DMA. The tool can unlock (any password accepted) and escalate privileges to Administrator/root on almost* any powered on machine you have physical access to. The tool can attack over FireWire, Thunderbolt, ExpressCard, PC Card and any other PCI/PCIe interfaces. (via BoingBoing)

O'Reilly Radar Show 5/10/12: The surprising rise of JavaScript

Peter Cooper examines JavaScript’s ascendance and Steve Souders discusses web performance tools.

Fluent Conference co-chair Peter Cooper explains why and how JavaScript rose to prominence. Also, Steve Souders points the way to web performance tools and techniques.

Permission to be horrible and other ways to generate creativity

Denise R. Jacobs advocates for new approaches to work and community.

Author and web design consultant Denise R. Jacobs reveals lessons she learned about creativity while writing her first book. She also discusses her efforts to give women and people of color more visibility in the tech world.

Four short links: 2 February 2012

Four short links: 2 February 2012

Build a Button, CMU iPad Course, Materials Conference, and Facebook IPO

  1. Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap — cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and “puffiness”.
  2. CMU iPad Course — iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming.
  3. Inspiring Matterthe conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with materials research and innovation to talk about how they work cross- or trans-disciplinarily, the challenges and tools they’ve found for working collaboratively, and the ways they find inspiration in their work with materials. London, April 2-3.
  4. Facebook’s S-1 Filing (SEC) — the Internets are now full of insights into Facebook’s business, for example Lance Wiggs’s observation that Facebook’s daily user growth is slowing. While 6-10% growth per quarter feels like a lot when annualized, it is getting close to being a normal company. Facebook is running out of target market, and especially target market with pockets deep enough to be monetised. But I think that’s the last piece of Facebook IPO analysis that I’ll link to. Tech Giant IPOs are like Royal Weddings: the people act nice but you know it’s a seething roiling pit of hate, greed, money, and desperation that goes on a bit too long so by the end you just want to put an angry chili-covered porcupine in everyone’s anus and set them all on fire. But perhaps I’m jaded.

Responsive design works for websites, why not for digital comic books?

Pablo Defendini on employing adaptive web design in comic books.

In a keynote address, Open Road Media's Pablo Defendini explored what HTML and CSS can offer to digital comic book design.

Four short links: 4 January 2012

Four short links: 4 January 2012

Android Source, Javascript Language, CSS3 Progress Bars, and Computational Science

  1. Compiling Android from Source (Jethro Carr) — not as easy as you might think. The documentation is minimal, and each device has its own binary blobs of not-open-source crap necessary to make them work. Open source is supposed to let users continue to do good things with the device, even if the vendor disapproves (cf Stallman’s Printer). Jethro’s experience is that with Android, not so much. Even the Google AOSP supported phones can’t run a pure open source stack, proprietary downloads are supplied by Google for specific hardware components for each model and for a specific OS release. Should Google decide to stop supporting a device with future Android versions (as has happened with earlier devices) you won’t easily be able to support the hardware. (via Don Christie)
  2. Javascript Objects, Functions, Scope, Prototypes, and Closures — an extremely readable yet concise guide to these topics in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
  3. CSS3 Progress Bars (GitHub) — gorgeous and useful. (via Juha Saarinen)
  4. To Know But Not Understand (David Weinberger) — excellent excerpt from his new book on big data and computational science. We can climb the ladder of complexity […] to phenomena with many more people with much more diverse and changing motivations, such as markets. We can model these and perhaps know how they work without understanding them. They are so complex that only our artificial brains can manage the amount of data and the number of interactions involved. Preordered his book! (via Alexis Madrigal)
Four short links: 2 January 2012

Four short links: 2 January 2012

Finland Schools, Open Source Prezi, Debit Cards for Hackers, and Sensor Startups

  1. What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (The Atlantic) — Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen)
  2. impress.js (github) — MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I’ve never been happy with the Prezi because I fear data lock-in. This might be a way forward. (via Hacker News)
  3. Facebook Offers Debit Cards to White Hat Hackers (CNet) — paying vulnerability bounties without handing out cash. I figure it’s the start of a loyalty program. Will Facebook learn what the hackers spent the money on? Interesting possibilities opened up here.
  4. Green Goose — interesting startup selling consumer sensor hardware. My intuition is that we’re platforming too soon: that we need a few individual great applications of the sensors to take off, then we can worry about rationalising hardware in our house. The biggest problem seems to me that we’re talking about “sticking sensors on milk cartons” rather than solving an actual problem someone has. (“There are no sensors on my milk cartons” is not an oft-heard lament)
Four short links: 17 October 2011

Four short links: 17 October 2011

From Reddit to Movie, Google Audited, Web Delays, and Sugared CSS

  1. Story Written in Reddit — historical scifi based on the question “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?” Movie rights were just acquired by Warners. (via BoingBoing)
  2. Auditing Google — the comically complex games played to move profits to jurisdictions beyond taxation is under scrutiny, at last. While you dodge taxes like this, you have no high moral ground for “do no evil”.
  3. Frontend SPOF Survey (Steve Souders) — a “frontend SPOF” is any crap whose mere presence can delay the display of your web page. We’ve been bitten by this on Radar: “ooh, let’s try this widget—wait, now it takes 12s to load a page, wtf?”
  4. Syntactically Awesome Stylesheetsan extension of CSS3, adding nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. It’;s translated to well-formatted, standard CSS using the command line tool or a web-framework plugin.