Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?
Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.
This is so cool—Ariel was on BBC World TV News live during the Artemis launch!
Decades before fiber optic cable spanned the bottom of the ocean to link continents, the airborne voice of a spring songbird did.
Mario Popova writes of an interspecies broadcast:
Those were the early days of broadcasting and recorded music, when the technology was both too primitive and too expensive to make the joy of music as ambient as air; the days before we made our Faustian deal with the technocrats who made music cheap and musicians poor so that we could stream it anytime anywhere with no recompense or thought of the souls from which the stream pours.
chef’s kiss!
(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries
)
James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:
It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.
Here’s a BBC adaption of that J.G. Ballard short story I recorded. It certainly feels like a story for our time.
The minimum dependency for a web site should be an internet connection and the ability to parse HTML.
The best podcast of last year is back for another season, this time on the Apollo 13 mission.
I’ve been huffduffing every episode of this terrific podcast from Kevin Fong. It features plenty of my favourite Apollo people: Mike Collins, Margaret Hamilton, and Charlie Duke.
I wish I were here for this (I’m going to be over in Ireland that week)—an evening with James Burke, Britain’s voice of Apollo 11.
Here is your chance to find out what went on behind the scenes as James revisits the final moments of the Apollo mission. He’ll recreate the drama, struggling to make sense of flickering images from NASA and working with the limitations of 1960s technology. We’ll hear what went wrong as well as what went right on the night! Illustrated with amazing archive material from both the BBC and NASA, this will be the story of the moon landings brought to you by the man who became a broadcasting legend.
As part of the BBC’s ongoing series on deep time, Alexander Rose describes the research he’s been doing for the clock of the long now—materials, locations, ideas …all the pieces that have historically combined to allow artifacts to survive.
James has a new four part series on Radio 4. Episodes will be available for huffduffing shortly after broadcast.
New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.
BBC News has switched to HTTPS—hurrah!
Here, one of the engineers writes on Ev’s blog about the challenges involved. Personally, I think this is far more valuable and inspiring to read than the unempathetic posts claiming that switching to HTTPS is easy.
Update: Paul found the original URL for this …weird that they don’t link to it from the syndicated version.
Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:
In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.
The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
Following on from Charlie’s experiment last year, Chris Ashton has been assessing which sites rely on JavaScript, and which sites use it in a more defensive, resilient way. Some interesting results in here.
A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Progressive enhancement means more robust experiences, with fewer bugs in production and fewer individual browser quirks, because we’re letting the platform do the job rather than trying to write it all from scratch.
A lovely profile of the lovely In Our Time.
In part because “In Our Time” is unconnected to things that are coming out, things happening right this minute, things being promoted, it feels aligned with the eternal rather than the temporal, and is therefore escapist without being junk.
Anyone remember the site After Our Time?
Two decades redesigning/realigning the BBC News home page.
The BBC has been experimenting with some alternative layouts for some articles on mobile devices. Read on for the details, but especially for the philosophical musings towards the end—this is gold dust:
Even the subtext of Google’s marketing push around Progressive Web Apps is that mobile websites must aspire to be more like native apps. While I’m as excited about getting access to previously native-only features such as offline support and push notifications as the next web dev, I’m not sure that the mobile web should only try to imitate the kind of user interfaces that we see on native.
Do mobile websites really dream of being native apps, any more than they dreamt of being magazines?
Time for another video from Patterns Day. Here’s Sareh Heidari walking us through Grandstand, the CSS framework at the BBC.