Features
Main stories, part of the timeline
How to Use the Web To Show the Truth
Ushahidi is a platform that uses the democratizing power of the web to open access to citizen journalists on the ground and shine a light where the truth is hidden. Continue reading
Comparing the “Why” of Single Page App Frameworks
The web is filled with rundowns of this JavaScript framework versus that one. But we don’t often take the time to understand why they were built in the first place. Continue reading
An Early History of Web Accessibility
Accessibility is one of the foundational principles of the World Wide Web. Fighting to preserve that principle are the creators behind the most powerful tools, some of which still exist today. Continue reading
Finding Our Digital Identities: A History of Social Media
Benjamin Sun and Omar Wasow met for the first time in 1999. They had both recently struck out on the web as passionate early adopters. Wasow had just recently made a shift from running a pre-web Internet provider called New York Online to developing and designing websites for magazines like Vibe and Essence. Sun, on… Continue reading
The Books That Shaped How We Learn About the Web
It might seem strange to talk about books on the web, but when designers first turned to books for a way to learn about the web, Lynda Weinman and Jennifer Robbins showed them the way. Continue reading
Dreaming Big on the Open Web
The web has always belonged to all of us. That is to say its protocols and underlying technology are products of the public domain and can be used by everyone, everywhere. By design, and with prescribed purpose, the web is open. Some of the first voyagers on the web’s shifting shores believed almost unblinkingly in… Continue reading
The Online World of High Taste and Rock Music
This is a small chunk of history of rock music on the web. It begins in Santa Cruz. Michael Goldberg left Rolling Stone magazine sometime in 1993. He did so because over 20 years of experience as an editor and writer in the music business was telling him that the digital world, and specifically the Internet, was… Continue reading
Your Privacy Policy Doesn’t Mean A Thing; Regulating Privacy on the Web
In the beginning, the web had no memory. When you followed a link to a new page, everything you did on the last page was erased. There was a fresh start with every click. It was Netscape that gave the web a memory. Pretty early on, actually, when they realized there were a few issues… Continue reading
Getting to the Picture Element
The story of how responsive images made its way into the browser doubles as an inside look at the standards making process itself. For some of us on the web, myself counted among them, it was our very first look behind the curtain. Web standards, the rules of CSS and HTML and Javascript that govern… Continue reading
Salon, Slate, and a History of the Tricky Business of Publishing Online
In the first few years of the web’s spread to ubiquity, traditional news publishers moved online. But a new kind of publisher was also born, one that was native to the web, with a whole new set of rules. Continue reading
Pixel Art Finds Its Home on the Web
The design community in particular has been a rather dynamic part of the fabric of the web from its earliest days. Designing for the web means understanding the constraints of the screen while simultaneously accounting for a whole host of variables, like hover states and animation and screen resolutions and network connections. It requires a… Continue reading
A Mini Browser for the Masses
If you don’t know much about the Opera browser, that’s probably because their market share in the United States has never been particularly high (right now, it stands at around 1.5%). Opera’s competitive advantage is that they deal with the real world. They solve problems that other browsers don’t, and they do it globally and… Continue reading
