99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete An excerpt from an upcoming book by Mr. Zeldman in which he continues to argue the practice of standards compliance - "Held up as a Holy Grail of professional development practice, backward compatibility sounds good in theory. But the cost is too high and the practice has always been based on a lie." I enjoy his writing but he seems to be repeating himself as usual. Still, it is a good argument: where do we focus our priorities for future development - pure standards compliant CSS models, backwards compatibility, or somewhere in between? I know this has been
discussed before but thought it postworthy due to the new book and all.
posted by poopy
on Sep 6, 2002 -
110 comments
The
WebPlayer is a Shockwave app that turns a web page into music by converting the HTML into numbers and then running that through formulas developed by
Arnold Schoenberg, who came to be known as the inventory of atonalism in music, and influential in
serialism, which aims to produce music by controlling aspects of the music with number series. Don't expect Beethoven, but sometimes the output is nice.
The Google front page produced a pretty soothing bit of background sound the first time I tried it, but the next, it sounded like several other pages I tried. Some explanation for this and the choice of a single sound can be found in the informative critique.
posted by Su
on Jul 18, 2002 -
9 comments
Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic Jakob Nielsen says "to take the Internet to the next level, users must begin posting their own material ...
the vast wasteland of Geocities confirms this. Giving users a home-page editing program does not turn them into good writers."
Meg takes Nielsen
to task: "his recommended approach is crazy ...Why bog kids down with HTML?" Blogs, of course, are her solution. But for
some folks this simply doesn't add up. Saying kids shouldn't learn HTML because Blogger exists is like saying they shouldn't learn to add because calculators exist.
posted by webchick
on Sep 30, 2000 -
122 comments
teens spin web of the future. great article re: the winners of a competition for teenagers maintaining useful, unique, nonprofit sites.
Emily Boyde, 17, of Newcastle, Australia, was the only female finalist. Her Web site,
MatMice, allows kids to create their own Web sites and view sites made by their friends.
She taught herself to write HTML, the language used to create Web sites.
"I don't know a lot of other females who do this sort of thing," she said. "But after I saw the Internet, I liked the look of it. So I decided to learn to use it myself."
Emily rocks my world.
What do you think of the winners?
posted by gusset
on Jun 25, 2000 -
2 comments
What hasn't been noted much on the DEN and boo.com closings is the high-bandwidth aspirations both sites trumpeted. No doubt this is why much of Metafilter's readership is privately reveling in these failures. They subtly reinforce the Web's "minimum" ideals -- keeping multimedia to a minimum, minimizing file sizes and download times, letting the minimalist purity of HTML reign supreme. Should this really make us happy, though? I'm a big supporter of fast browsing and markup-language standards, but aren't we missing the point when we secretly root for the bleeding edge to fail?
posted by werty
on May 19, 2000 -
16 comments
