The World Wide Web
It leaves no sign of its past self behind
The problem with trees
The business case for craft
Growing in the correct way
We are working against the grain of the wood
Shortlist of interesting spaces
The internet grew by breaking
Your new electronic microscope
More that can be done
Web trails
Microcosm
Dame Wendy Hall, at the University of Southhampton, sought to extend the life of the link further in her own program, Microcosm. Each link made by the user was stored in a linkbase, a database apart from the main text specifically designed to store metadata about connections. In Microcosm, links could never die, never rot away. If their connection was severed they could point elsewhere since links weren’t directly tied to text. You could even write a bit of text alongside links, expanding a bit on why the link was important, or add to a document separate layers of links, one, for instance, a tailored set of carefully curated references for experts on a given topic, the other a more laid back set of links for the casual audience.
On Technology
As we look back 10 years from now, the web is going to be the defining technology, the defining social moment for our generation.
I think it’s going to be huge.
A web of books
A proof of concept for an RSS-like books feed
Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.
I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.
If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves
Eggs, Easter and poached
When a site is done with care and excitement you can tell. You feel it as you visit, the hum of intention. The craft, the cohesiveness, the attention to detail is obvious. And in turn, you meet them halfway. These are the sites with the low bounce rates, the best engagement metrics, the ones where they get questions like “can I contribute?” No gimmicks needed.
What if you don’t have the time? Of course, we all have to get things over the line. Perhaps a challenge: what small thing can you incorporate that someone might notice? Can you start with a single detail? I didn’t start with a poached egg in my breakfast, one day I made a goofy scrambled one. It went on from there. Can you challenge yourself to learn one small new technique? Can you outsource one graphic? Can you introduce a tiny easter egg? Say something just a little differently from the typical corporate lingo?
The vast open seas
We didn't have Google in the early days. Other search engines like Lycos, Excite and Northern Lights did exist but were nowhere near as efficient as modern search engines. Finding something you were interested in was not as simple as typing a few words and getting to that information in one click.
No, the web was much more of an adventure. It was a place that you wandered to discover new areas, like exploring the vast open seas. A new virtual space that lead to all kinds of strange, interesting, exciting places. This is what the web was like, at least, in our collective imagination.
It can also be art
It is worth remembering a website does not have to be a product; it can also be art. The web is also a creative and cultural space that need not confine itself to the conventions defined by commercial product design and marketing.
If you run a website
If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users.
What do we want the web to be?
Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERN’s decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance society—what do we want?
gridless.design
A Website by Donnie D'Amatoget rid of the grid
Blasphemy, I need structure and order!"
The web is good at these things, just not in the ways that designers have been accustomed to working. We'll take a look at how we got here and how we might change our perspective. Let's think outside of the grid and allow other guidelines to provide a comprehensive layout.
The Website Obesity Crisis
A Talk by Maciej CegłowskiWeb Design - The First 100 Years
A Talk by Maciej CegłowskiA Brief Rant
An Essay by Bret VictorAgainst an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
An Article by Parimal SatyalWe are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
Web Design is 95% Typography
An Article by Oliver Reichenstein95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
Why Do All Websites Look the Same?
An Article by Boris MüllerOn the visual weariness of the web.
Rediscovering the Small Web
An Article by Parimal SatyalDesign Links & Learning
A Blog by Nick TrombleyCollections of articles, links, and other material from around the web, relevant to software design and engineering.
Snipping the dead blooms
A Quote by Robin SloanI recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it.
But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.
What shape is the internet?
A Gallery by Noah VeltmanAccording to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.
Downsides of the internet
An EssayThe type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following:
- The writer stops publishing their work.
- The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business.
- The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour.
The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly.
Make Free Stuff
At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.
…Resource Scarcity doesn’t make sense on the web. Artificially creating it here serves no other purpose than to charge money for things that could easily have been free for all. Why anyone would consider that better is beyond me.
Thoughts On Shitpost Diplomacy
An Article by Tanner GreerThat our diplomat’s first impulse is to resort to a self-defeating meme speaks to a broader problem—the sort of cultural problem instinctual reactions to crisis make most clear. This is a problem of an entire generation—my generation. We are a people that retweets when we could be reading. The minds of best and our brightest have been poisoned by ratios, “god tweets,” and memes. We came of age on Twitter, Tumblr, and 4chan, and still see the world through their frames. We find it harder and harder to distinguish the actual from the image; we struggle to disentangle perception management from problem management. This is what it looks like when the terminally online ascend to positions of real responsibility. Welcome to the age of shitpost diplomacy.
Spatial Web Browsing
An Article by Maggie AppletonThere are some new apps appearing that offer alternative ways of browsing the web...This canvas-based approach adds spatial dimension to the web browsing experience; they allow us to arrange browser windows above, below, to the left, and right of other browser windows.
The same way we're able to put an open book next to a piece of paper and below a row of sticky notes in meatspace. Arranging objects in space to create groupings, indicate relationships, and build hierarchies is one of those classical human skills that never goes out of style.
drawing.garden
A Website by Ben MorenGardening, but with emojis and less time.
Plain old webpages still matter
An Article by Felix PleşoianuIt's empowering to see just how far you can go with a website you can, in a pinch, create or modify with nothing more than Notepad. Not to mention all the new people it can reach without the overhead of bloated server software slowing it down and inflating the code.
Don't let others speak for you on the web. You deserve better.
Million Short
A WebsiteMillion Short makes it easy to discover sites that just don't make it to the top of the search engine results for whatever reason – whether it be poor SEO, new site, small marketing budget, or competitive keywords. The Million Short technology gives users access to the wealth of untapped information on the web.
Menus, Metaphors and Materials: Milestones of User Interface Design
An Article by Boris MüllerStudents traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.
In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.
Metaphors We Web By
An Essay by Maggie AppletonAs George Lakoff and Mark Johnson made clear in their touchstone book Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are the basis of all human thought and reasoning. The metaphors we use to speak about the web are not simply linguistic trivia – they determine how we understand it on a fundamental level. It determines what we think the web is capable of, what risks, opportunities, and challenges it poses. Which means the metaphors we use to think about the web profoundly influence what we think the web is, what we think we can do with it, and how we might change or evolve it.
…Out of all of these metaphors [for the web], the two most enduring are paper and physical space.
scribe.rip
An ApplicationI hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added.
But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid.
Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content.
Why Would I Want to Use This?
- You believe in an open web
- You believe more in the author than the platform
- You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides
- You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics
- You're concerned about how Medium uses your data
- Other reasons
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization
An Article by Brad FrostI’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right.
In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked.
Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work?
How I experience the web today
A WebsiteMake Frontend Shit Again
A Website by Sara VieiraWe used to make websites because it was fun but at some point, we lost the way.
We need to make dumb shit!
Make useless stuff;
make the web fun again!Things that don't scale
An Article by Benedict EvansMaybe the internet is due for a wave of things that don’t scale at all. In that light, I’ve been fascinated by ‘Morioka Shoten’ in Tokyo - a bookshop that sells only one book at a time. This is retail as anti-logistics - as a reaction against the firehose, and the infinite replication of Amazon. Before the internet that would only work in a very dense city, but, again, the internet is the densest city on earth, so how far do we scale the unscalable?
Locus. (Appwalls)
An Article by Ethan MarcotteI’ve noticed a recent trend on the web — or at least, on the parts of it I’ve visited. Maybe you’ve noticed it too.
Here’s what happens: you’re on a website, and one of these little prompts pops up...[to] let you know that there’s an app, and that the website you’re on...well, it’s not quite the app, is it?
...Sometimes, the website wants me to install the app — no, it needs me to install the app. It’s like a paywall, but for apps. An appwall.
In recent years, these prompts have gotten more prominent, and occasionally impassable. And I think that trend’s interesting. Why would a company promote a native app over their perfectly usable website?
It feels like a glimpse into that company’s design priorities. And it’s possibly providing us with insight into the business value they place on the open web — a medium that’s meant to be accessible everywhere, on any screen, on any device.
And it really does feel like these glimpses are becoming more common.
Jacob Leech, Digital Craftsman
A Profile by Jacob LeechI'm Jacob — a designer and coder who creates things with computers (Fig 1) 'Digital Craftsman' best describes my skill set.
Digital projects thrive when designers understand how they will be built. Just as an architect understands how a structure is created, the same should be true on the web.
Exit pages
An Idea by Brad EnslenToday I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before.
The indie web manifesto
A DefinitionWhile commercial websites display more and more agressive messages, target and track their users, the indie web respects the individuals, their intelligence and their privacy; it’s an open forum for thoughts and debate. While purely commercial websites turn into information and entertainment magazines, while tycoons of media, telecom, computing and military agencies fight for the control of the Internet, the indie web offers a free vision of the world, bypasses the economic censorship of news, its confusion with advertising and infommercial, its reduction to a dazing and manipulating entertainment.
136 things every web developer should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling
An Article by Baldur Bjarnason- The best way to improve software UX is regular direct observation, by everybody on the team, of the work done.
- Have some personality.
- Minimalism is garbage.
- Metaphors are fantastic.
- Naming things is fantastic.
- Try to write HTML that would make sense and be usable without the CSS.
- The buyer is quite often wrong. That fact never changes their mind.
- Working on a functioning app’s codebase does more to increase its quality than adding features.
- A good manager will debate you, and that’s awesome.
- The term ‘project’ is a poor metaphor for the horticultural activity that is software development.
All websites are just digital movie theaters now
An Article by Ryan BroderickIf I had to guess where this is all going, I’d say that what an internet platform is actually has already permanently shifted. Instead of apps trying to dominate specific features — a platform for video, a platform for expiring content, a platform for connecting social networking, a platform for livestreaming, a platform for resumes — we’ve already entered a new era of online networks where they all will essentially offer the same services and instead, focus increasingly on specific demographics.
The web in decay is the web by design
An Essay by Chia AmisolaWhen will there be a guide to best practices for archiving the web?
Will the giants responsible for the platformization of the web make the act of digital archival any easier for us?
Is it foolish for platforms like Snapchat or Instagram Stories to brand themselves as “temporary” when temporariness is impossible on our internet?
Should the web exist as something organic, malleable, and destructible –– or as an eternal timekeeper?
Is link rot more of a technological issue or a human one?
Do humans want to know themselves forever?
The Internet Is Rotting
An Essay by Jonathan ZittrainToo much has been lost already.
The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Links work seamlessly until they don’t.
And as tangible counterparts to online work fade,
these gaps represent actual holes in humanity’s knowledge—
they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts.The amorality of Web 2.0
An Essay by Nicholas CarrThe Internet is changing the economics of creative work – or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture – and it’s doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it’s created by amateurs rather than professionals, it’s free. And free trumps quality all the time.
Project Xanadu
An Idea by Ted NelsonProject Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents."
Discourse in web design
An Essay by Jason Santa MariaA website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.
It was then I wondered if the problem wasn’t that web design lacked its own Emigré. What if we actually lacked a shared language to critically discuss web design? Art, architecture, and even graphic design, have critics and historians that give context to new work through the lenses of culture and important work from the past.
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design
An Article by David Bryant Copeland- Content is readable on all reasonable screens and devices.
- Only hyperlinks and buttons respond to clicks.
- Hyperlinks are underlined and buttons look like buttons.
- The back button works as expected.
- View content by scrolling.
- Decoration when needed and no unrelated content.
- Performance is a feature.
Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was
An Article by Claire L. EvansHuman-scale digital spaces
An Article by Alexis LloydThe open web is much like emergent, unplanned cities — it happens at the scale of the individual, it allows for unexpected creativity, it gives agency to anyone (well, anyone with sufficient technical knowledge) to shape their own spaces. On the other hand, the platforms that now dominate much of the web experience are more evocative of Moses’s planned cities—they often occur at the scale of the corporation, and have rigid, predictable constraints for how individuals can behave and express themselves.
Tokenize This
An Artwork by Benjamin GrosserDifferent from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.
Bo Burnham: Inside
A Film by Bo BurnhamOn onion cutting
An Article by Ana RodriguesIn the television show Masterchef there was an episode where the judges did a test on what they call “basic skills”. One of the judges often says that in order to be a “true chef”, you must know how to quickly and finely cut onions.
...This was really bothering me and I am stubborn so I wanted to win this fake argument really badly so I looked up why the way one cuts onions is important: as it turns out, the shape and even the surface area affect the end flavour. I thought the whole “chop chop chop” was about performance in the kitchen. Cut quickly to serve quickly! I was wrong.
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence
An Article by Matt WebbMy take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home.
The Value of a Personal Site
An ArticleA personal site offers a dedicated place to experiment across the entire tech-stack; not a deliverable for a client that is handed over and then never touched by me again. A personal site is a place to try out that new API, see what can be done with CSS, truly discover what the Web can be.
The small web is beautiful
An Essay by Ben HoytI believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it.
This used to be our playground
An Essay by Simon CollisonThere was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.
A shifting house next to a river of knowledge
An Essay by Laurel SchwulstMy website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
Simon Collison's timeline
A Website by Simon CollisonI’ve shaped this timeline over five months. It might look simple, but it most definitely was not. I liken it to chipping away at a block of marble, or the slow process of evolving a painting, or constructing a poem; endless edits, questions, doubling back, doubts. It was so good to have something meaty to get stuck into, but sometimes it was awful, and many times I considered throwing it away. Overall it was challenging, fun, and worth the effort.
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development
An Article by Brad FrostA succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a
button
, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when thatbutton
is clicked.Do We Need This?
An ArticleUltimately this redesign has been a study in less, trying to dig deep and find out what it is I actually want for this site. A momentary visual “wow”, or quality content that is worthy of your attention? I decided on the latter, with less visual clutter it is far harder to try obscure bad or shallow writing behind a veneer of pretty images and effects. Posts may take longer to write but I hope this new design will push towards content that is worthy of your time.
The User Interface of URLs
A Research PaperURLs (Uniform Resource Locators) have rapidly become the standard method for specifying how to access information on the Internet. Although mostly used on the World Wide Web, URLs are also becoming more common for specifying locations for other distributed Internet services such as Gopher and anonymous FTP. Internet users see URLs both online and in print, and therefore URLs have visual interfaces. This paper gives an overview of many of the issues that concern the visual and user interfaces of URLs.
Cool URIs don't change
An Essay by Tim Berners-LeeWhat makes a cool URI?
A cool URI is one which does not change.
What sorts of URI change?
URIs don't change: people change them.Web History Chapter 6: Web Design
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannAfter the first websites demonstrate the commercial and aesthetic potential of the web, the media industry floods the web with a surge of new content. Amateur webzines — which define and voice and tone unique to the web — are soon joined by traditional publishers. By the mid to late 90’s, most major companies will have a website, and the popularity of the web will begin to explore. Search engines emerge as one solution to cataloging the expanding universe of websites, but even they struggle to keep up. Brands soon begin to look for a way to stand out.
A Dao of Web Design
An Essay by John AllsoppWhat I sense is a real tension between the web as we know it, and the web as it would be. It’s the tension between an existing medium, the printed page, and its child, the web. And it’s time to really understand the relationship between the parent and the child, and to let the child go its own way in the world.
Web History Chapter 1: Birth
A Chapter by Jay HoffmannWhat On Earth is a Brutalist Website?
An ArticleSome of the web’s early richness has gradually been getting lost in a sea of landing pages, hero images, sans-serifs, and calls-to-action. “Web brutalism” is a valid reminder that there is still a world of possibilities out there, if we are bold enough to break free of our UI kits and stock photos.
Web Brutalism, seamfulness, and notion
An Essay by Brandon DornHow a tool for sensemaking reconciles two distinct software design ideologies.
- Seamful vs. seamless
- Reveling in infrastructure
- The brilliance of notion
- How our understanding is working
The split personality of brutalist web development
An ArticleWhen brutalist web design isn’t going all in on rationalism and functionality, it’s laughing in the face of rationalism and functionality. All clear?
The term has grown to encompass approaches that are in many senses at odds with each other. Indeed, Pascal Deville, who founded the Brutalist Websites directory after coining the term in 2014, thinks the style has splintered into three micro-stylistics:
- Purists,
- UX minimalists,
- Anti-ists (or artists).
Of Note: Better Text Annotations for the Web
An Article by Brandon DornGenerally speaking (and ignoring questions of styling, API availability, etc.), an ideal Web annotation pattern follows these principles:
- Annotations appear in close visual proximity to the primary content.
- Their design neither distracts from nor hides the primary content.
- The preceding principles are followed regardless of screen width.
The only pattern I’ve found that meets these criteria is FiveThirtyEight’s.
...As it turns out, FiveThirtyEight didn't invent this pattern. It likely originated in medieval illuminated manuscripts which contain “interleave notes” — comments written literally between the lines.
Painting With the Web
An Article by Matthias OttSo much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.
The design systems between us
A Talk by Ethan MarcotteIn the early days, design systems promised us more consistent interfaces, more collaborative teams, and improved shipping times. While they’ve certainly delivered on some of those fronts, they’ve introduced new challenges too. Let’s talk through what’s working well—and what could be working better—as we take a closer look at the systems between us and our work.
The Web is Industrialized and I Helped Industrialize It
An Article by Dave RupertIn our cultural obsession with billionaire entrepreneurs we laud new features more than the maintenance and incrementalism work of making old features better and more accessible. Maintenance looks like red minus signs in the spreadsheet. New features look like green plus signs. New features look better on our LinkedIn profiles. New features have that pizzazz, baby.
When gardening, the building of planters and initial planting is a very short process. The majority of your time is spent nurturing and monitoring growth. I personally feel the struggle between maintainer work and new shiny feature work. I enjoy that new feature smell but I know that my day-to-day is more like a janitor on a boat mopping up someone else’s barf. In terms of metaphors, the gardening metaphor is certainly better, and it acknowledges that design and development still tend to be more creative endeavors.
The Taft Test
A Tool by Maciej CegłowskiDoes your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?
The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
XXIIVV Webring
A WebsiteThis webring is an attempt to inspire artists & developers to build their own website and share traffic among each other.
How the Blog Broke the Web
An Article by Amy HoyOn the "Building" of Software and Websites
An Essay by Dorian TaylorI’m beginning to suspect that software, and more conspicuously the Web, is fundamentally the wrong shape for the archetype of the construction project.
Every Website is an Essay
An Article by Robin Rendle"Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in a way that makes me sit up and listen.
And I think that framing our work in this way lets us web designers explore exciting new possibilities. Instead of throwing a big carousel on the page and being done with it, thinking about making a website like an essay encourages us to focus on the tough questions. We need an introduction, we need to provide evidence for our statements, we need a conclusion, etc. This way we don’t have to get so caught up in the same old patterns that we’ve tried again and again in our work.
And by treating web design like an essay, we can be weird with the design. We can establish a distinct voice and make it sound like an honest-to-goodness human being wrote it, too."
Quotebacks
A Tool by Tom Critchlow & Toby ShorinQuotebacks brings structured discourse to blogs and personal websites.
Quotebacks makes it easy to reference content and create dialogue with other sites by turning snippets of text into elegant, self-contained blockquote components.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web
A Book by David Weinberger
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Dead cities
If you can understand a city, then that city is dead.
The dishonest mask of pretended order
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
The plan must anticipate all that is needed
Ebenezer Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: He conceived that the way to deal with the city’s functions was to sort and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in relative self-containment.
And he conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes.
The city's most vital organs
Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs.
They serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities.
Eyes on the street
You can’t make people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets they do not want to watch. Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.
The Great Blight of Dullness
Equipped to handle strangers
A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
- First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space.
- Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.
- And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously.
The sight of people attracts still other people
This last point, that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true—People’s love of watching activity and other people is constantly evident in cities everywhere.
This trait reaches an almost ludicrous extreme on upper Broadway in New York, where the street is divided by a narrow central mall, right in the middle of traffic. At the cross-street intersections of this long north-south mall, benches have been placed behind big concrete buffers and on any day when the weather is even barely tolerable these benches are filled with people at block after block after block, watching the pedestrians who cross the mall in front of them, watching the traffic, watching the people on the busy sidewalks, watching each other. Eventually Broadway reaches Columbia University and Barnard College, one to the right, the other to the left. Here all is obvious order and quiet, no more stores, no more activity generated by the stores, almost no more pedestrians crossing—and no more watchers. The benches are there but they go empty in even the finest weather. I have tried them and can see why. No place could be more boring. Even the students of these institutions shun the solitude. They are doing their outdoor loitering, outdoor homework and general street watching on the steps overlooking the busiest campus crossing.
Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light?
Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for practical purposes.
I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best
This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.
Togetherness
“Togetherness” is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart.
When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of “togetherness,” in which more is shared with one another than in the life of the sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results.
City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors, on personal sharing of this sort, and that cultivates it, often does work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class people. It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I have been able to discover, it fails to work, however, even on its own terms, with any other kind of population.
Self-appointed public characters
The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his function—although he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest.
If children are transferred from a lively city street
In real life, what significant change does occur if children are transferred from a lively city street to the usual park or to the usual public or project playground?
In most cases (not all, fortunately), the most significant change is this: The children have moved from under the eyes of a high numerical ratio of adults, into a place where the ratio of adults is low or even nil. To think this represents an improvement in city child rearing is pure daydreaming.
They act on their environment
Little tots are decorative and relatively docile, but older children are noisy and energetic, and they act on their environment instead of just letting it act on them. Since the environment is already “perfect” this will not do.
Men are not an abstraction
Placing work and commerce near residences, but buffering it off, in the tradition set by Garden City theory, is fully as matriarchal an arrangement as if the residences were miles away from work and from men. Men are not an abstraction. They are either around, in person, or they are not. Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life—men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.
Wide sidewalks
The narrower the sidewalks, the more sedentary incidental play becomes.
Sidewalks thirty or thirty-five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them—along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering. Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings.
The boon of life and appreciation
Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them.
Indeterminate land oozes
City people would have to devote themselves to park use as if it were a business (or as the leisured indigent do) to justify, for example, the plethora of malls, promenades, playgrounds, parks and indeterminate land oozes afforded in typical Radiant Garden City schemes.
City districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park, like Morningside Heights or Harlem, seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it.
Intricacy, centering, sun, enclosure
Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion tend to have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure.
Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions
Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, “neighborhood” is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.
We shall have something solid to chew on if we think of city neighborhoods as mundane organs of self-government. Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government. And our successes are successes at localized self-government.
The doctrine of salvation by bricks
When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves. Reinhold Niebuhr has called this particular self-deception, “The doctrine of salvation by bricks.”
City neighborhoods cannot be self-contained
Whatever city neighborhoods may be, or may not be, and whatever usefulness they may have, or may be coaxed into having, their qualities cannot work at cross-purposes to thoroughgoing city mobility and fluidity of use, without economically weakening the city of which they are a part. The lack of either economic or social self-containment is natural and necessary to city neighborhoods—simply because they are parts of cities. Isaacs is right when he implies that the conception of neighborhood in cities is meaningless—so long as we think of neighborhoods as being self-contained units to any significant degree, modeled upon town neighborhoods.
City districts
Districts have to help bring the resources of a city down to where they are needed by street neighborhoods, and they have to help translate the experiences of real life, in street neighborhoods, into policies and purposes of their city as a whole. And they have to help maintain an area that is usable, in a civilized way, not only for its own residents but for other users—workers, customers, visitors—from the city as a whole.
To accomplish these functions, an effective district has to be large enough to count as a force in the life of the city as a whole. The “ideal” neighborhood of planning theory is useless for such a role. A district has to be big and powerful enough to fight city hall. Nothing less is to any purpose.
The "ideal" neighborhood
The “ideal” neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding.
Such places are forever way stations
Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability. The people in them, as statistics, may stay the same. But the people in them, as people, do not. Such places are forever way stations.
The blind men who felt the elephant
It is so easy to fall into the trap of contemplating a city’s uses one at a time, by categories. Indeed, just this—analysis of cities, use by use—has become a customary planning tactic. The findings on various categories of use are then put together into “broad, overall pictures.”
The overall pictures such methods yield are about as useful as the picture assembled by the blind men who felt the elephant and pooled their findings. The elephant lumbered on, oblivious to the notion that he was a leaf, a snake, a wall, tree trunks and a rope all somehow stuck together.
Half as many people will not support half as many enterprises
In a given geographical territory, half as many people will not support half as many such enterprises spaced at twice the distance. When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Exuberant diversity in a city's streets
To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable:
- The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
- Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
- The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
- There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.
Primary uses
Any primary use whatever, by itself is relatively ineffectual as a creator of city diversity. If it is combined with another primary use that brings people in and out and puts them on the street at the same time, nothing has been accomplished. In practical terms, we cannot even call these differing primary uses.
Secondary diversity
Secondary diversity is a name for the enterprises that grow in response to the presence of primary uses, to serve the people the primary uses draw.
If secondary diversity flourishes sufficiently and contains enough that is unusual or unique, it seemingly can and does become, in its accumulation, a primary use itself. People come specifically for it. This is what happens in good shopping districts or even, to a humble extent, on Hudson Street.
A city's chessmen
One land-use economist, Larry Smith, has aptly called office buildings chess pieces. “You have used up those chess pieces already,” he is said to have told a planner who was trying to revitalize an unrealistic number of spots with dreamy plans for new office buildings. All primary uses, whether offices, dwellings or concert halls, are a city’s chessmen. Those that move differently from one another must be employed in concert to accomplish much. And as in chess, a pawn can be converted to a queen. But city building has this difference from chess: The number of pieces is not fixed by the rules. If well deployed, the pieces multiply.
Frequent streets are not an end in themselves
Frequent streets are not an end in themselves. They are a means toward an end. If that end—generating diversity and catalyzing the plans of many people besides planners—is thwarted by too repressive zoning, or by regimented construction that precludes the flexible growth of diversity, nothing significant can be accomplished by short blocks.
New ideas must use old buildings
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
The economic value of old buildings
But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time. This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years.
highdensityandovercrowding
They hated both equally, in any case, and coupled them like ham and eggs, so that to this day housers and planners pop out the phrase as if it were one word, “highdensityandovercrowding.”
Dwelling densities and diversity
The reason dwelling densities can begin repressing diversity if they get too high is this: At some point, to accommodate so many dwellings on the land, standardization of the buildings must set in. This is fatal, because great diversity in age and types of buildings has a direct, explicit connection with diversity of population, diversity of enterprises and diversity of scenes.
Among all the various kinds of buildings (old or new) in a city, some kinds are always less efficient than others in adding dwellings to the land. A three-story building will get fewer dwellings onto a given number of square feet of land than a five-story building; a five-story building, fewer than a ten-story building. If you want to go up far enough, the number of dwellings that can go onto a given plot of land is stupendous—as Le Corbusier demonstrated with his schemes for a city of repetitive skyscrapers in a park.
But in this process of packing dwellings on given acreages of land, it does not do to get too efficient, and it never did. There must be leeway for variety among buildings. All those variations that are of less than maximum efficiency get crowded out. Maximum efficiency, or anything approaching it, means standardization.
Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness
In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere.
North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented.
Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos.
Googie architecture
Where uses are in actual fact homogeneous, we often find that deliberate distinctions and differences are contrived among the buildings. But these contrived differences give rise to esthetic difficulties too. Because inherent differences—those that come from genuinely differing uses—are lacking among the buildings and their settings, the contrivances represent the desire merely to appear different.
Some of the more blatant manifestations of this phenomenon were well described, back in 1952, by Douglas Haskell, editor of Architectural Forum, under the term “googie architecture.” Googie architecture could then be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. These are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors. Mr. Haskell pointed out that the same impulses to look special (in spite of not being special) were at work also in more sophisticated construction: weird roofs, weird stairs, weird colors, weird signs, weird anything.
Art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully
When we build, say, a business area in which all (or practically all) are engaged in earning their livings, or a residential area in which everyone is deep in the demands of domesticity, or a shopping area dedicated to the exchange of cash and commodities—in short, where the pattern of human activity contains only one element, it is impossible for the architecture to achieve a convincing variety—convincing of the known facts of human variation. The designer may vary color, texture and form until his drawing instruments buckle under the strain, proving once more that art is the one medium in which one cannot lie successfully.
The air doesn't know about zoning boundaries
Work uses suggest another bugaboo: reeking smokestacks and flying ash. Of course reeking smokestacks and flying ash are harmful, but it does not follow that intensive city manufacturing (most of which produces no such nasty by-products) or other work uses must be segregated from dwellings. Indeed, the notion that reek or fumes are to be combated by zoning and land-sorting classifications at all is ridiculous. The air doesn’t know about zoning boundaries. Regulations specifically aimed at the smoke or the reek itself are to the point.
The greatest flaw in city zoning
Raskin, in his essay on variety, suggested that the greatest flaw in city zoning is that it permits monotony. I think this is correct. Perhaps the next greatest flaw is that it ignores scale of use, where this is an important consideration, or confuses it with kind of use.
But then the knoll was gone
These banks were making the same mistake as a family I know who bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.
So many tactics, so well entrenched
I am going to deal with several subjects that, in themselves, are already well recognized as within the province of city planning: subsidized dwellings, traffic, city visual design, analytical methods. These are all matters for which conventional modern planning does have objectives and therefore does possess tactics—so many tactics, so well entrenched, that when their purposes are questioned they are generally justified in terms of the conditions laid down by still other tactics (e.g., We must do this for the purpose of getting the federal loan guarantees). We become the prisoners of our tactics, seldom looking behind them at the strategies.
A warning against the limitations of my own prescriptions
It is always necessary to check tactics against the specific needs that become evident in specific places. We should always be asking, “Does this device do the job needed here? And if not, what would?” Deliberate, periodic changes in tactics of subsidy would afford opportunity to meet new needs that become apparent over time, but that nobody can foresee in advance. This observation is, obliquely, a warning against the limitations of my own prescriptions in this book. I think they make sense for things as they are, which is the only place ever possible to begin. But that does not mean that they would make the best sense, or even good sense, after our cities had undergone substantial improvement and great increase in vitality.
Choked by their own redundancy
We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse on the crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses. The mechanical vehicles, in their overabundance, work slothfully and idle much. As one consequence of such low efficiency, the powerful and speedy vehicles, choked by their own redundancy, don’t move much faster than horses.
A city cannot be a work of art
There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.
The order of life
Like the housers who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides income-sorting projects, or the highwaymen who face a blank if they try to think what to do besides accommodate more cars, just so, architects who venture into city design often face a blank in trying to create visual order in cities except by substituting the order of art for the very different order of life.
Complex systems of functional order
To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.
Think better of it
This is, of course, the best way to salvage any kind of sorted-out project, up to the time it is actually built: Think better of it.
Places, services, techniques
It is not enough for administrators in most fields to understand specific services and techniques. They must understand, and understand thoroughly, specific places.
Nature, sentimentalized
Nature, sentimentalized and considered as the antithesis of cities, is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air and little else, and this ludicrous disrespect results in the devastation of nature even formally and publicly preserved in the form of a pet.
The kind of problem a city is
Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity.
The history of modern thought about cities is unfortunately very different from the history of modern thought about the life sciences. The theorists of conventional modern city planning have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus.