Web Directions
North
Denver Feb 2009
Postscript: feedback tagged #wdn09 in twitter, summary item in Raible Designs, Web Standards Gone Wild
How long will it be before China catches up to the E.U. in total economic might? Less than a generation, that much is pretty certain.
The End of an Age by David Wood, March 2006
image source: wikipedia
main() {
printf("hello, world");
}
Kyle and the new (to us) piano, Jan 2006
Sheet music in western music notation.
screenshot by Alphast
In 1991, some places would fire you for looking at code from the Net; not this group:
Tom Christiansen is one of the core perl developers; Martin Streicher went on to become editor of Linux Magazine.
Computer Science students and hackers learn BNF and parse
trees:
expression ::= atom | list
atom ::= number | symbol
number ::= [+-]?['0'-'9']+
symbol ::= ['A'-'Z''a'-'z'].*
list ::= '(' expression* '
At Hal in Austin in 1994, while adding HTML support in products:
Mark Gaither and I installed sgmls as a CGI serviceThe software world currently corresponds to the Pre-Director stage in movie-making (1893-1904).
During those years, when short films were already being shown in theaters, the job of making the movie was given to the cameraman—because he knew how to work the equipment.
That is how it is with software today. Today's software designers are those who only understand the technicalities, and not—with rare exceptions—those who understand how to integrate the presentation of ideas to the mind and heart.
The Future of Information by Ted Nelson, 1997
Worth watching:
Innovative use of W3C process invites hundreds of participants starting March 2007:
Some don't respond to annual renewal invitation.
co-chairs:
Chris Wilson (Microsoft), Sam Ruby (IBM)
with W3C staff support from Mike Smith, Dan Connolly
HTML 5 Receives Support for Authoring Materials
2009-02-02: Dan Connolly, an active member of the HTML community for many years, has received support from Adobe to work on HTML 5 materials for authors. The HTML Working Group Chairs have requested additional resources to ensure that HTML 5 meets the needs of authors and browser developers alike. As a provider of Web development and authoring tools, W3C Member Adobe is not only participating in the Working Group, they have also provided financial support for the open standards process.
Client who saves $5,000 buying cut-rate non-semantic HTML will later spend $25,000 on SEO consultant to compensate.
zeldman 4:14 PM Jan 21st
There's still something to the notion behind XHTML+CSS Web design.
p.s. Kudos to whoever designed the Kansas tax web site.
See also Valid sites work better(?) for discussion.
To a computer, then, the web is a flat, boring world devoid of meaning...This is a pity, as in fact documents on the web describe real objects and imaginary concepts, and give particular relationships between them.
Tim Berners-Lee at the 1st Web Conference in 1994
March 2006 Microformats panel at W3C Technical Plenary
April 2006 collaboration on microformats tests
What makes the Internet so valuable to everyday people is that you can reach anyone, on ANY email system, through it. There were many email systems before the Internet, but they didn't catch the broad public interest. If we continue the current process of anti-spam-driven Balkanization (I can send email to Joe, and he can send to Nancy, but I can't send to Nancy myself, because Nancy's ISP is filtering me), we will destroy the value that we created when we linked all these networks with a common email protocol. We might as well go back to having separate un-linked networks, like MCI Mail and Compuserve and AOL and UUCP and BITNET and FidoNet. You'd just have to become a customer of that provider, and use its idiosyncratic interface, if you want to send mail to its customers. Remember that world? If not, you're lucky.
John Gilmore, 2002
Web
comic went live July 16, and in a week and a half, he reached the $26K
goal.
Follow-up resources:
