Tag: internet

Baseline

Max Böck makes some really good points about the expense of modern websites in load times and bandwidth. There was one paragraph that especially stuck out in my mind because it’s similar to a thought I’ve been pondering:

“The only thing missing here might be a few sensible lines of CSS to set better typography rules. Those could still be inlined in the head though, easily coming in under the 14KB limit for the first connection roundtrip.” — Max Böck

Why bother increasing the exemplar 1.2kb NPR text site to 14kb? I wonder if there’s room in the world for a better baseline stylesheet. We could move that burden to the browser and save 12.8kb times infinity plus not burden developers to learn or source design for basic content.

Perhaps there could be a new doctype that declares “I am the plainest of HTML and have no style whatsoever. Do with me what you will.” It could be a well-agreed-upon set of minimal enhancements to the present-day browser default styles, the modern equivalent of “links are all blue” and such. Alternately, it could take the form of multiple themes for the user to choose from as their preferred default viewing experience.

Maybe this is a pie-in-the-sky, grade-A terrible idea, but I think even minimum viable experiences should be better.

Quirky

Turns out an array from a document rendered in IE’s Compatibility Mode doesn’t do Array.map(); … even when it’s used in a document that’s in normal IE 11 mode.

I found this out while integrating a legacy application with a modern application that opens in a second window and needs to be tossed a configuration object. Interestingly, we’re using ExtJS as our framework for the modern application in question, and the config handler uses Ext.Array.map(), which is meant to use a polyfill when Array.map() support is not there.

The problem? Ext.Array.map() tests an exemplar array of its own making, not the one it’s about to act on. Probably helpful for performance, but not what I needed in this case. Luckily, the array structure wasn’t super vital, as there was a deprecated way of specifying the same configs via several booleans instead. Lucky I didn’t clean those up yet.

Another fun day in legacy code…

Picturesque

I sometimes take for granted the experiences I have been graced with in my thirty years on this planet. In a fit of insomnia, one pair of experiences popped into my head.

Lately while working on a new puzzle game called Interst8, I’ve been delving into road geek forums and getting into all things highway. These topics reminded me of my own experience on one of the westernmost roads in the country, the Pacific Coast Highway. Traveling on the PCH is a goal of mine, but so farm I only had a taste of it; while in Los Angeles filming Superhuman, I used some free time to visit Santa Monica and crossed over the highway on a pedestrian walkway. Nothing but a means to get to the beach.

Fast forward a few months later and I’m back at my day job. Bugs are found. Our QA lead calls me to her desk. She opens Chrome, clicks the bookmark for our corporate email, and comments on the splash screen. Default Outlook splash screen with generic stock photos.

Then it hits me.

The bridge. The sandy coastline. The buildings in the background. It’s the pedestrian walkway I visited. Phones were taken out of pockets. Photos from Dropbox were loaded and compared with Google Street View and the Outlook splash screen. It was all a match, and it was all beautiful.

I know the novelty will fade as my insomnia wanes and I’ll finally be able to sleep, but for the moment I’m basking in the awe and satisfaction of having been somewhere so beautiful that its photo was used as a cheesy login screen background. There’s something special and amazing about it.

Banned

How do I feel about the new weekly taco at Velvet Taco? What are my feelings on a friend’s new relationship? What is my response to a question that I was just tagged in? Am I coming to the open mic tonight?

The answers to these questions and many more… were stuck in my head for 24 hours recently thanks to a ban from Facebook affecting my ability to comment, post, react, and message in their ecosystem.

The charge? Sarcastically saying “men are pigs” in a display of empathy toward a female friend. What I, a biological male who identifies as a man, thought was a joke was instead taken as damning evidence that I was out of compliance with Facebook’s “community code”.

The punishment? A twenty four hour ban. This ban included both Facebook and Messenger, the later of which is the meat of my gripe. No phone number to call or text friends? Shit outta luck. Not even the vague dismissive positivity of the thumbs up button will afford me any pity during my twenty four hours of lonely hell.

To nonaddicts it sounds like an inconsequential timeout. But to a generation raised on the belief that Facebook is the next email/telephone/telegram/mail, a ban of even as short as twenty four hours is a devastating shunning.

To those who think the above is hyperbole, think about how Facebook is posturing as a replacement ecosystem on Android devices and trying to usurp SMS and the various Google chat offerings. It feels reckless as hell trusting such a fickle master with this kind of pivotal role in my life. With the proximity of the net neutrality repeals and having learned from the misdeeds of AOL in this matter, I think more alarm bells need to be going off in regards to censorship.

Let me say “men are pigs”! Let me die on that cross, and let people block me if angry react face is not strong enough. Foster an environment where the average user has the strength to choose what to take on board instead of watering down every message for the masses.

Independence

I’m saddened by the decline of the independent blog, a fact which I felt but couldn’t put into words, until I was woken after some web-based wanderlust led to me stumbling upon some indie web movement activists. The other day, a reminder came in the form of the declaration of International Blog Remembrance Day by the folks at Motherboard.

I think I’m posting today out of guilt. That said, I should also ensure that my future lofty thoughts, rants, and ideas don’t get wasted in the deluge of Facebook and Twitter. So, in honor of blog remembrance, I’m not just going to remember blogs, I’m going to blog.

Nostalgia

Tim Carmody recently asked Kottke.org readers to give him their takes on the best of the web, and then curated the responses in something that feels like a cross between those awkward Top 5 list YouTube channels and a flip through my pocket notebooks from the best years of my life. My puzzle blog, The Griddle, and my response about Ed Pegg’s MathPuzzle made the cut, as well as some of my responses that echoed general public consensus. (RIP Geocities. Thanks, Wayback Machine. Etc.)

Aside from wanting to gush about how much I love the online puzzle community, I think this survey and article series spoke to me because I kind of haphazardly grew up on the Internet. Between lunch hunched over the desk in the newspaper classroom in middle school, frequent trips to the public library’s computer lab, and eventually getting a hand-me-down IBM box and firing up AOL, I constantly dug for content and people that spoke to me. Back then, finding content was more of a scavenger hunt than it is now. Searching and curated lists were the name of the game; today there’s a lot of subscribing and refreshing feeds hoping for a morsel of awesome between ads and whining.

So, at the risk of being pretentious or jumping on a bandwagon, I wanted to put together a list of some sites that have that vintage web feel and formed a vital part of my growing up on the web.

Continue reading Nostalgia