Dispatches From The Internets

This is a wonderful celebration of the hyperlink and the beauty of the decentralized web in a world of social media sites vying to keep us in their walled gardens. Hossein Derakhshan’s perspective is an interesting one as he’d been in prison (for blogging) since 2008.

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.

Ad companies profit, users suffer. This is ridiculous.

Basically, his theory is, when a reader clicks to read a story, the page calls for bids from advertisers on the ad space available. This bidding is supposed to take place in a few milliseconds. But, my correspondent says, ad tech companies hold open the bids much, much longer, so more bids come in, driving up the price. Publishers hate this because it makes pages load really slowly, giving readers a terrible experience. But it’s hard to stop because everyone — publisher included — is taking a cut of the winning bid. So publishers and ad tech companies actually have an incentive to make pages load slowly.

CSS columns, ES6 computed property names, Web Audio API updates, and more!

Maybe browsers should focus on intro before forging ahead with new tech. You gotta clean your room before you go outside and play.

The sad reality of vendor prefixes.

We have reached the point where browser vendors have to start implementing or aliasing these WebKit prefixes just to allow their users to browse the Web, see Mozilla in Gecko and Microsoft in Edge.

I’m so excited to see this land in Firefox. Chrome and Safari: Your move.

This is fantastic talk was given by Maciej Cegłowski at HOW Interactive in 2014. In it, he elegantly frames what makes the web so awesome and so special. He the identifies three distinct visions for the web and the threat two of those visions pose to it.

Well done, sir!