Dispatches From The Internets

The intro to this awesome post sets the stage perfectly:

The web has changed immensely in the past 20 years. In 1996 there were roughly a million websites; now there are more than a billion. Back then there were roughly 50 million internet users; today there are more than 3 billion. We have more content than we ever dreamed was possible. People are enjoying it on 8.1 billion connected devices, including more than 24,000 distinct mobile device types.

We need progressive enhancement and we need to look beyond our technological bubble. It’s good for us and it’s good for the Web.

I love, love, love this collection of posters covering topics like research, access needs, accessibility, and design. Download them, print them up and hang them up all over your office!

Microsoft created a Code of Conduct (based on a template from the TODO Group) for all of their open source projects. Good stuff!

The Microsoft Edge team’s Jacob Rossi on Microsoft’s continued commitment to web-based apps and the future of Progressive Web Apps.

Jeremy on aggregating links for Progressive Web Apps. Sounds a lot like bringing back the Yahoo directory :-)

Yup. And they’re even bricking phones sent to them for repair and charging customers (like me) to replace them.

Riffing on a post in ReCode and research done by Quartz, Slashdot asked its readership if apps are done. The comments are especially telling. My personal favorite is this gem:

Everything has an “app” … that is a sad rehash of their website. I don’t need access to a diluted version of your content SO BAD that I’m going to store an icon for it on my phone. Maybe if people started releasing apps that were AT LEAST as fully functional as their webpages (hopefully more) people would actually download them.

Long live the Web!

Reading Jeremy’s history with the Web, I noticed a lot of parallels with mine. I think a lot of us old timers made our way to the Web in a very similar fashion and it’s surprising how many of us made our way here through music.

This! An excellent interview with Ben Terrett:

Apps are “very expensive to produce, and they’re very very expensive to maintain because you have to keep updating them when there are software changes”

But…

Sites can adapt to any screen size, work on all devices, and are open to everyone to use regardless of their device. “If you believe in the open internet that will always win,” he says. And they’re much cheaper to maintain, he adds, because when an upgrade is required, only one platform needs recoding.

Share this with your boss and your boss’ boss.v

Excellent advice (as usual) from Jonathan Snook. Although, based on the project—such as a limited-scope site with a tight size limit—you may want to define almost everything as base styles. As with everything on the Web, it depends.