Jeremy Keith gave a talk recently on hypertext that covers the history of the Internet and the Web. It’s a fascinating look at the strengths and weaknesses of the world’s largest system of knowledge.
Tag Archives: HTML
As We May Link
Jeremy Keith tells the story of hypertext and the power of the smallest HTML tag in As We May Link.
HTML5 is Official
A few days ago, HTML5 became official, receiving Recommendation status from the World Wide Web Consortium, the organization’s terminology for a final, complete spec. It took 15 years between HTML 4.01 and HTML5.
Feature Misuse
Karl Groves in a post about HTML5, Longdesc and accessibility:
For nearly a dozen years now, I’ve been employed in a capacity which gives me a day-to-day glimpse of how professional web developers are using markup. I see HTML abuse on a daily basis. Bad HTML permeates the web due to ignorant developers and is exacerbated by shitty UI frameworks and terrible “tutorials” by popular bloggers. In my years as an accessibility consultant I’ve reviewed work on Fortune 100 websites and many of the Alexa top 1000. I’ve reviewed web-based applications of the largest software companies in the world. The abuse of markup is ubiquitous.
You should read the whole thing.
Microsoft’s First Web Page
Christian Heilmann on Microsoft’s first web page and what it can teach us:
And this, to me, is the most interesting part here: one of the first web sites created by a large corporation makes the most basic mistake in web design – starting with a fixed design created in a graphical tool and trying to create the HTML to make it work. In other words: putting print on the web.
The web was meant to be consumed on any device capable of HTTP and text display (or voice, or whatever you want to turn the incoming text into). Text browsers like Lynx were not uncommon back then. And here is Microsoft creating a web page that is a big image with no text alternative. Also interesting to mention is that the image is 767px × 513px big. Back then I had a computer capable of 640 × 480 pixels resolution and browsers didn’t scale pictures automatically. This means that I would have had quite horrible scrollbars.
View the page or the readme explaining it. It’s neat to read. Neater is what Christian points out later in his post:
One thing, however, is very cool: this page is 20 years old, the technology it is recreated in is the same age. Yet I can consume the page right now on the newest technology, in browsers Microsoft never dreamed of existing…