CSS Timeline
Here’s a remarkably in-depth timeline of the web’s finest programming language, from before it existed to today’s thriving ecosystem. And the timeline is repsonsive too—lovely!
We should think of our code, even our designs, as running for decades, and alter our work to match.
Here’s a remarkably in-depth timeline of the web’s finest programming language, from before it existed to today’s thriving ecosystem. And the timeline is repsonsive too—lovely!
A short video featuring Jason Scott and Brewster Kahle. The accompanying text has a shout-out to the line-mode browser hack event at CERN.
The video of my talk from Webstock, all about wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff like networks and memory.
The link rot is a symptom of the larger rot that is taking place on the web. This intentional hiding of our world’s past is intended to disorient us. If the big tech internet places are continuing to exert their control over us by making their online spaces more and more oppressive, by hiding history they can trick us into believing that what we’re experiencing now is Just How Things Have Always Been.
About halfway through this talk transcript, Aaron starts dropping a barrage of truth bombs:
I understand the web, whose distinguishing characteristic is asynchronous recall on a global scale, as the technology which makes revisiting possible in a way that has genuinely never existed before the web.
What the web has made possible are the economics of keeping something, something which has not enjoyed “hockey stick growth”, around long enough for people to warm up to it. Or to survive long past the moment when people may have grown tired of it.
If your goal is to build something which is designed to flip inside of ten years, like many things in the private sector, that may not seem like a very compelling argument.
If, however, your goal is to build something to match the longevity of the cultural heritage sector, to meet the goal of fostering revisiting, or for novel ideas to outlast the reluctance of the present and to do so at a global scale, or really any scale larger than shouting distance, then I will challenge you to find a better vehicle for doing so than the internet, and the web in particular.
Matt has accepted the challenge I threw down in my Webstock talk (which has now been transcribed).
Generating a static copy of The Session from the comfort of European trains.
Losing an eleven year bet.
Long-term thinking for digital storage.
Preserving the habitual, the banal.