Everything old seems to be new (and hip?) again. And I’m not too sure I’m happy about it.
Short URLs
Shorter URLs are all the rage these days because of Twitter and its 140-character limit. If you’re one of the top sites on the web is practically mandatory for you to roll out your own URL shortening system. Ars Technica, for example, whose official URL is arstechnica.com, also has arst.ch. If you’re on a CMS like WordPress, you’re advised to give out the post ID permalink instead of the keyword-rich permalink of your blog post for the same reason.
Not too long ago, SEO and usability experts were on the same side and recommended readable URLs. Now that Twitter is the new internet marketing (I think they call it social media now) battlefield, the rules changed. When the next killer Web 3.0 app comes out, will we compromise and adjust once again?
But then again, has the Web ever stood still? Maybe I just thought it was beginning to.
WebKit’s CSS animations and scrollbars
You can now style scrollbars and perform animations using CSS in WebKit browsers.
I remember when Internet Explorer started to support scrollbar styling and almost every personal site took advantage of it. But then they grew out of it and were told by the gurus not to mess with the browser chrome.
I also remember <blink> and <marquee>.
But then again, “styling scrollbars isn’t messing with the chrome anymore than styling a button is.” Would the world be a saner place if browsers behaved the same way and all looked alike?
DiggBars
Digg has come out with its own version of the external page framing mechanism which they call the DiggBar.
Said mechanism is nothing new, and never really died out even to be considered a comeback, but Digg has a powerful following by all that which is noisy in the blogosphere to build a considerable amount of buzz. And no matter how you look at it, framing external pages is still framing, reminiscent of the era when HTML framesets were considered cool.
But then again, perhaps in this new era listening to the clamor of the crowd is no longer a fluke, but a very real way to improve one’s business.
The World Wide Web created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee is 20 years old today. Even though I’m not the most qualified person to say this, its seems like several eternities have passed when you take a look at all that’s been accomplished.
And yet at the same time, it also feels like things have only started falling in place—ubiquitous and high-speed connections, uncompromised content delivery on mobile devices, live streaming and other real-time services, data portability and APIs, and so on. Some feel that the Web can be better, but it has to be rebuilt from the ground up:
Instead of merely jury-rigging fixes into the existing Internet, Peterson and Rexford believe much can be learned about possible improvements by designing a new network from the ground up — one that parallels the existing Internet, on which researchers can run their most innovative experiments.
If we have to revamp the Web it’s better to do so now, or sooner rather than later.
Maybe the infrastructure itself doesn’t need the overhaul, but only certain features. Thomas Baekdal considers a new domain system. Internet Explorer is reportedly getting a brand new browser rendering engine, taking a cue from Google Chrome. And dare I include the Web 2.0 phenomenon, which to its credit wasn’t a complete fad: we got YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter from it, after all. All address different aspects of the Web, but each one’s a game-changer in its own right.
The key here is people are rethinking rather than building on top of things. But will it come full circle, only for people to realize too late that starting from scratch was a much better way? The endeavor feels so large and drastic that it’s too daunting to even consider.
When Obama Wins scours and displays tweets containing the phrase 'when Obama wins'
I’m fascinated by the single-purpose websites that have been cropping up for the past year. I’m not much of an internet historian to track down exactly when the first of their kind came out, but they officially entered meme status when Jason Kottke wrote about it back in February.
In the era of 140-character microblogging and 10-inch subnotebook computing, brevity is king. But these straight-to-the-point sites aren’t exactly the iPhone-friendly versions of our increasingly bloated, self-centered homepages and bookmarks. (That’s a different phenomenon altogether and worth discussing in a separate article.)
They’re in a different group themselves, in a peanut gallery of sorts, poking fun at the rest of the all-too serious internet population. Stop worrying whether websites need to look exactly the same in every browser, you should use tables for layout (give up?), Diet Coke will kills us, graphic design is art, Barack Obama is Muslim or muslin or President, or it’s Tuesday, April Fool’s, Christmas, or a leap year yet.
The color of the Empire State Building on November 11. On November 11 it was Purple, Purple, White. As of writing it's White, White, White.
Of course some of these one-trick ponies are web apps and mashups that do exactly one thing really well, whether it’s helping you look forward to the day when Obama wins, decide if you should bring an umbrella today, bitch and moan about our dear Adobe, or figure out whether Twitter, Gmail, the Apple Store, or some other site is down or it’s just you.
Not to mention spell definitely and other words correctly, insert angled quotes », «, ›, ‹, discover your IP address, and play a instant rimshot.
Visit A List Of Sites for more of the madness! Or go through them randomly ala StumbleUpon.
Ben Terrett of Noisy Decent Graphics has written a list of things that describe what “his Internet” is like. From an encounter with a technologically-challenged executive comes an inspiring exercise to get everyone on the same page first.
…I thought it might be a nice idea to get everyone to describe ‘their internet’ at the first meeting of any new client. Like they do at school when the new kids arrive mid term. Get everyone up to the same level. That way, everyone would know the ‘level’ of everyone else and there would be no clangers later on.
The list is not only informative, it’s also prescriptive (in a sort of passive-agressive way!). It addresses the little things clients don’t really take into consideration when they describe what they want for their websites. But the thing is, you’re the expert, so grab the opportunity to teach what thoughtful and usable design is. Some of my personal favorites from the list:
- Not using Flash for anything other than videos
- Giving simplicty and clarity top priority
- Not reinventing the wheel
You may not agree with everything on Ben’s list, but the idea is not just to yell at your client for “not getting it”, but to explain why you’re doing “it” that way. It strengthens the relationship you have with your client, and ensures clear communication pathways in between.
