Link tags: internet

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The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog

After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.

The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat

A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:

The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.

Snook’s Law:

It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

Powerful metaphors in this piece by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on the Waldsterben of the internet:

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

Deplatforming Myself: A Tech Manifesto – Haste Makes Waste

The modern web is constantly, endlessly hoovering up massive amounts of data about you, only some of which is correct, and then feeding you its best guess of what will glue your eyeballs to the screen just a little bit longer, no matter what that is, whether it’s actually good for you or not.

Internet Artifacts

I love this timeline of internet firsts. Best of all:

You may touch the artifacts

The websites on display work—even the ones that used Flash!

How to fix the internet | MIT Technology Review

We’re in a rare moment when a shift just may be possible; the previously intractable and permanent-­seeming systems and platforms are showing that they can be changed and moved, and something new could actually grow.

The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.

Undersea Cables by Rishi Sunak [PDF]

Years before becoming Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak wrote this report, Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure.

A history of metaphors for the internet - The Verge

No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”

What I Want From The Internet - Christopher Butler

You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide. It’s not perfect. It leaves an enormous amount of signal unheard. It requires more work to find things, and to be found.

But you can do it. And I hope you do, in some way.

A year of new avenues

All along, from the frothy 1990s to the per­co­lat­ing 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been grow­ing and maturing, sprout­ing new capabilities. From my van­tage point, that growth has seemed to accel­er­ate in the past five years; CSS, in par­tic­u­lar, has become incred­i­bly flex­i­ble and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.

For peo­ple who care about cre­at­ing worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, per­mis­sion­less sys­tem claimed a posi­tion at the heart of the inter­net, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; some­times maddening. But that’s every cre­ative medium. That’s life.

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time | The New Yorker

This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:

Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET

Setting the scene:

The Washington Hilton stands near the top of a small rise about a mile and a half northeast of the National Mall. Its two white-painted modern facades sweep out in broad semicircles like the wings of a bird. The New York Times, reporting on the hotel’s completion in 1965, remarked that the building looks “like a sea gull perched on a hilltop nest.”

The hotel hides its most famous feature below ground. Underneath the driveway roundabout is an enormous ovoid event space known as the International Ballroom, which was for many years the largest pillar-less ballroom in DC. In 1967, the Doors played a concert there. In 1968, Jimi Hendrix also played a concert there. In 1972, a somewhat more sedate act took over the ballroom to put on the inaugural International Conference on Computing Communication, where a promising research project known as the ARPANET was demonstrated publicly for the first time.

It turns out that the most important innovation of the ARPANET isn’t obvious in hindsight:

So what I’m trying to drive home here is that there is an important distinction between statement A, “the ARPANET connected people in different locations via computers for the first time,” and statement B, “the ARPANET connected computer systems to each other for the first time.” That might seem like splitting hairs, but statement A elides some illuminating history in a way that statement B does not.

Stop supporting Internet Explorer!

The headline is clickbaity, but the advice is solid. Use progressive enhancement and don’t worry about polyfilling.

When I say ‘Stop supporting IE’ it means to me that I won’t go the extra mile to get unsupported features working in Internet Explorer, but still make sure Internet Explorer users get the basics, and can use the site.

A Long Bet on Link Rot is Resolved, but Questions About the Durability of the Web Still Remain - Long Now

The Long Now foundation has a write-up on my recently-lost long bet:

On February 22, 02011, Jeremy Keith made a prediction that he hoped would be proven wrong.

A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs

The bet was been won (not by me, thankfully) and Jason has some thoughts.

Google Search no longer supports Internet Explorer 11 - 9to5Google

Keep this link handy to share with your boss or client. It is almost certainly not worth your while optimising for Internet Explorer.

Note: Google aren’t turning IE users away. Instead they’ll get a reduced scriptless experience. That’s the way to do it. Remember: module and nomodule are your friends for cutting the mustard.

Importantly, Google has not simply cut off Internet Explorer 11 from using Google Search, leaving people unable to search the web. Instead, Internet Explorer customers are now shown a rudimentary “fallback experience” for Google Search, which can perform basic searches but isn’t as fully featured as Google is on modern browsers.

Wayforward Machine • Visit the future of the internet

This speculative version of the internet archive invites you to see how websites will look in 2046.