I am not saying Apple’s approach is wrong. What Apple is doing is important too, and I applaud the work Apple has been doing in improving privacy on the web.
But it can’t be the only priority. Just imagine what the web would look like if every browser would have taken that approach 20 years ago.
Actually, no, don’t imagine it all. Just think back at Internet Explorer 6; that is what the web looked like 20 years ago.
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There can only be one proper solution: Apple needs to open up their App Store to browsers with other rendering engines. Scrap rule 2.5.6 and allow other browsers on iOS and let them genuinely compete.
As a reminder, Safari is the only web browser on iOS. You might have been fooled to think otherwise by the appearance of other browsers in the App Store or perhaps by last year’s update that made it possible at long last to change the default browser, but it’s all an illusion. Beneath the mask, all browsers on iOS are powered by Safari’s WebKit, or else they’re booted from the App Store.
Neils’ comparison to Internet Explorer 6 is a good one, but as I’ve long pointed out, there’s a big and important difference between Microsoft’s story during the First Browser War and Apple’s today:
Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, raising the barrier to using a different web browser, which a court ruled as monopolistic and recommended that Microsoft be broken into smaller companies (this recommendation was scaled back on appeal).
Apple bundle Safari with iOS and prohibit the use of any other browser’s rendering engine on that platform, preventing the use of a different web browser. Third-party applications have been available for iOS – except, specifically, other browser rendering engines and a handful of other things – for 13 years now, but it still seems unlikely we’ll see an antitrust case anytime soon.
Apple are holding the Web back… and getting away with it.
I was chatting with a fellow web developer recently and made a joke about the HTML <blink> and <marquee> tags, only to discover that he had no idea what I was talking about. They’re a part of web history that’s fallen off the radar and younger developers are unlikely to have ever come across them. But for a little while, back in the 90s, they were a big deal.
Even Macromedia Dreamweaver, which embodied the essence of 1990s web design, seemed to treat wrapping <blink> in <marquee> as an antipattern.
Invention of the <blink> element is often credited to Lou Montulli, who wrote pioneering web browser Lynx before being joining Netscape in 1994. He insists that he didn’t write any of the code that eventually became the first implementation of <blink>. Instead, he claims: while out at a bar (on the evening he’d first meet his wife!), he pointed out that many of the fancy new stylistic elements the other Netscape engineers were proposing wouldn’t work in Lynx, which is a text-only browser. The fanciest conceivable effect that would work across both browsers would be making the text flash on and off, he joked. Then another engineer – who he doesn’t identify – pulled a late night hack session and added it.
And so it was that when Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released in 1995 it added support for the <blink> tag. Also animated GIFs and the first inklings of JavaScript, which collectively would go on to define the “personal website” experience for years to come. Here’s how you’d use it:
<BLINK>This is my blinking text!</BLINK>
With no attributes, it was clear from the outset that this tag was supposed to be a joke. By the time HTML4 was published as a a recommendation two years later, it was documented as being a joke. But the Web of the late 1990s saw it used a lot. If you wanted somebody to notice the “latest updates” section on your personal home page, you’d wrap a <blink> tag around the title (or, if you were a sadist, the entire block).
If you missed this particular chapter of the Web’s history, you can simulate it at Cameron’s World.
In the same year as Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0. At this point, Internet Explorer was still very-much playing catch-up with the features the Netscape team had implemented, but clearly some senior Microsoft engineer took a look at the <blink> tag, refused to play along with the joke, but had an innovation of their own: the <marquee> tag! It had a whole suite of attributes to control the scroll direction, speed, and whether it looped or bounced backwards and forwards. While <blink> encouraged disgusting and inaccessible design as a joke, <marquee> did it on purpose.
<MARQUEE>Oh my god this still works in most modern browsers!</MARQUEE>
But here’s the interesting bit: for a while in the late 1990s, it became a somewhat common practice to wrap content that you wanted to emphasise with animation in both a <blink> and a <marquee> tag. That way, the Netscape users would see it flash, the IE users would see it scroll or bounce. Like this:
<MARQUEE><BLINK>This is my really important message!</BLINK></MARQUEE>
Wrap a <blink> inside a <marquee> and IE users will see the marquee. Delightful.
The web has always been built on Postel’s Law: a web browser should assume that it won’t understand everything it reads, but it should provide a best-effort rendering for the benefit of its user anyway. Ever wondered why the modern <video> element is a block rather than a self-closing tag? It’s so you can embed within it code that an earlier browser – one that doesn’t understand <video> – can read (a browser’s default state when seeing a new element it doesn’t understand is to ignore it and carry on). So embedding a <blink> in a <marquee> gave you the best of both worlds, right? (welll…)
Wrap a <blink> inside a <marquee> and Netscape users will see the blink. Joy.
Better yet, you were safe in the knowledge that anybody using a browser that didn’t understand either of these tags could still read your content. Used properly, the web is about progressive enhancement. Implement for everybody, enhance for those who support the shiny features. JavaScript and CSS can be applied with the same rules, and doing so pays dividends in maintainability and accessibility (though, sadly, that doesn’t stop people writing sites that needlessly require these technologies).
Personally, I was a (paying! – back when people used to pay for web browsers!) Opera user so I mostly saw neither <blink> nor <marquee> elements. I don’t feel like I missed out.
I remember, though, the first time I tried Netscape 7, in 2002. Netscape 7 and its close descendent are, as far as I can tell, the only web browsers to support both<blink> and <marquee>. Even then, it was picky about the order in which they were presented and the elements wrapped-within them. But support was good enough that some people’s personal web pages suddenly began to exhibit the most ugly effect imaginable: the combination of both scrolling and flashing text.
If Netscape 7’s UI didn’t already make your eyes bleed (I’ve toned it down here by installing the “classic skin”), its simultaneous rendering of <blink> and <marquee> would.
The <blink> tag is very-definitely dead (hurrah!), but you can bring it back with pure CSS if you must. <marquee>, amazingly, still survives, not only in polyfills but natively, as you might be able to see above. However, if you’re in any doubt as to whether or not you should use it: you shouldn’t. If you’re looking for digital nostalgia, there’s a whole rabbit hole to dive down, but you don’t need to inflict <marquee> on the rest of us.
This is part of a series of posts on computer terminology whose popular meaning – determined by surveying my friends – has significantly diverged from its original/technical one. Read more evolving words…
The language we use is always changing, like how the word “cute” was originally a truncation of the word “acute”, which you’d use to describe somebody who was sharp-witted, as in “don’t get cute with me”. Nowadays, we use it when describing adorable things, like the subject of this GIF:
Cute, but not acute.But hang on a minute: that’s another word that’s changed meaning: GIF. Want to see how?
GIF
What people think it means
File format (or the files themselves) designed for animations and transparency. Or: any animation without sound.
What it originally meant
File format designed for efficient colour images. Animation was secondary; transparency was an afterthought.
The Past
Back in the 1980s cyberspace was in its infancy. Sir Tim hadn’t yet dreamed up the Web, and the Internet wasn’t something that most people could connect to, and bulletin board systems (BBSes) – dial-up services, often local or regional, sometimes connected to one another in one of a variety of ways – dominated the scene. Larger services like CompuServe acted a little like huge BBSes but with dial-up nodes in multiple countries, helping to bridge the international gaps and provide a lower learning curve than the smaller boards (albeit for a hefty monthly fee in addition to the costs of the calls). These services would later go on to double as, and eventually become exclusively, Internet Service Providers, but for the time being they were a force unto themselves.
My favourite bit of this 1983 magazine ad for CompuServe is the fact that it claims a trademark on the word “email”. They didn’t try very hard to cling on to that claim, unlike their controversial patent on the GIF format…
In 1987, CompuServe were about to start rolling out colour graphics as a new feature, but needed a new graphics format to support that. Their engineer Steve Wilhite had the idea for a bitmap image format backed by LZW compression and called it GIF, for Graphics Interchange Format. Each image could be composed of multiple frames each having up to 256 distinct colours (hence the common mistaken belief that a GIF can only have 256 colours). The nature of the palette system and compression algorithm made GIF a particularly efficient format for (still) images with solid contiguous blocks of colour, like logos and diagrams, but generally underperformed against cosine-transfer-based algorithms like JPEG/JFIF for images with gradients (like most photos).
This animated GIF (of course) shows how it’s possible to have more than 256 colours in a GIF by separating it into multiple non-temporal frames.
GIF would go on to become most famous for two things, neither of which it was capable of upon its initial release: binary transparency (having “see through” bits, which made it an excellent choice for use on Web pages with background images or non-static background colours; these would become popular in the mid-1990s) and animation. Animation involves adding a series of frames which overlay one another in sequence: extensions to the format in 1989 allowed the creator to specify the duration of each frame, making the feature useful (prior to this, they would be displayed as fast as they could be downloaded and interpreted!). In 1995, Netscape added a custom extension to GIF to allow them to loop (either a specified number of times or indefinitely) and this proved so popular that virtually all other software followed suit, but it’s worth noting that “looping” GIFs have never been part of the official standard!
Open almost any animated GIF file in a hex editor and you’ll see the word NETSCAPE2.0; evidence of Netscape’s role in making animated GIFs what they are today.
Compatibility was an issue. For a period during the mid-nineties it was quite possible that among the visitors to your website there would be a mixture of:
people who wouldn’t see your GIFs at all, owing to browser, bandwidth, preference, or accessibility limitations,
people who would only see the first frame of your animated GIFs, because their browser didn’t support animation,
people who would see your animation play once, because their browser didn’t support looping, and
people who would see your GIFs as you intended, fully looping
This made it hard to depend upon GIFs without carefully considering their use. But people still did, and they just stuck a button on to warn people, as if that made up for it. All of this has happened before, etc.
In any case: as better, newer standards like PNG came to dominate the Web’s need for lossless static (optionally transparent) image transmission, the only thing GIFs remained good for was animation. Standards like APNG/MNG failed to get off the ground, and so GIFs remained the dominant animated-image standard. As Internet connections became faster and faster in the 2000s, they experienced a resurgence in popularity. The Web didn’t yet have the <video> element and so embedding videos on pages required a mixture of at least two of <object>, <embed>, Flash, and black magic… but animated GIFs just worked and soon appeared everywhere.
How animation online really works.
The Future
Nowadays, when people talk about GIFs, they often don’t actually mean GIFs! If you see a GIF on Giphy or WhatsApp, you’re probably actually seeing an MPEG-4 video file with no audio track! Now that Web video is widely-supported, service providers know that they can save on bandwidth by delivering you actual videos even when you expect a GIF. More than ever before, GIF has become a byword for short, often-looping Internet animations without sound… even though that’s got little to do with the underlying file format that the name implies.
What’s a web page? What’s anything?
Verdict: We still can’t agree on whether to pronounce it with a soft-G (“jif”), as Wilhite intended, or with a hard-G, as any sane person would, but it seems that GIFs are here to stay in name even if not in form. And that’s okay. I guess.
As I’ve previously mentioned (sadly), Microsoft Edge is to drop its own rendering engine EdgeHTML and replace it with Blink, Google’s one (more of my and others related sadness here, here, here, and here). Earlier this month, Microsoft made available the first prerelease versions of the browser, and I gave it a go.
At a glance, it looks exactly like you’d expect a Microsoft reskin of Chrome to look, right down to the harmonised version numbers.
All of the Chrome-like features you’d expect are there, including support for Chrome plugins, but Microsoft have also clearly worked to try to integrate as much as possible of the important features that they felt were distinct to Edge in there, too. For example, Edge Blink supports SmartScreen filtering and uses Microsoft accounts for sync, and Incognito is of course rebranded InPrivate.
But what really interested me was the approach that Edge Dev has taken with Progressive Web Apps.
NonStopHammerTi.me might not be the best PWA in the world, but it’s the best one linked from this blog post.
Edge Dev may go further than any other mainstream browser in its efforts to make Progressive Web Apps visible to the user, putting a plus sign (and sometimes an extended install prompt) right in the address bar, rather than burying it deep in a menu. Once installed, Edge PWAs “just work” in exactly the way that PWAs ought to, providing a simple and powerful user experience. Unlike some browsers, which make installing PWAs on mobile devices far easier than on desktops, presumably in a misguided belief in the importance of mobile “app culture”, it doesn’t discriminate against desktop users. It’s a slick and simple user experience all over.
Once installed, Edge immediately runs your new app (closing the tab it formerly occupied) and adds shortcut icons.
Feature support is stronger than it is for Progressive Web Apps delivered as standalone apps via the Windows Store, too, with the engine not falling over at the first sign of a modal dialog for example. Hopefully (as I support one of these hybrid apps!) these too will begin to be handled properly when Edge Dev eventually achieves mainstream availability.
If you’ve got the “app” version installed, Edge provides a menu option to switch to that from any page on the conventional site (and cookies/state is retained across both).
But perhaps most-impressive is Edge Dev’s respect for the importance of URLs. If, having installed the progressive “app” version of a site you subsequently revisit any address within its scope, you can switch to the app version via a link in the menu. I’d rather have seen a nudge in the address bar, where the user might expect to see such things (based on that being where the original install icon was), but this is still a great feature… especially given that cookies and other state maintainers are shared between the browser, meaning that performing such a switch in a properly-made application will result in the user carrying on from almost exactly where they left off.
Unlike virtually every other PWA engine, Edge Dev’s provides a “Copy URL” feature even to apps without address bars, which is a killer feature for sharability.
Similarly, and also uncommonly forward-thinking, Progressive Web Apps installed as standalone applications from Edge Dev enjoy a “copy URL” option in their menu, even if the app runs without an address bar (e.g. as a result of a "display": "standalone" directive in the manifest.json). This is a huge boost to sharability and is enormously (and unusually) respectful of the fact that addresses are the Web’s killer feature! Furthermore, it respects the users’ choice to operate their “apps” in whatever way suits them best: in a browser (even a competing browser!), on their mobile device, or wherever. Well done, Microsoft!
I’m still very sad overall that Edge is becoming part of the Chromium family of browsers. But if the silver lining is that we get a pioneering and powerful new Progressive Web App engine then it can’t be all bad, can it?
Debate: Does Mozilla have more influence as a Chrome rival or ally?
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“Thought: It’s time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really *cared* about the web they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that’s used by less than 5%?” He made it clear the viewpoint was his personal opinion, not Microsoft’s position.
Mozilla is indeed in a sticky situation, trying to improve the web when it comes to things like openness, privacy and new standards. That mission is harder with declining influence, though, and Firefox now accounts for 5 percent of web usage, according to analytics firm StatCounter. But without independent efforts like Firefox, and to an extent Apple’s Safari, the web will stop being an independent software foundation and become whatever Google says it is.
And plenty of people don’t like that one bit. Indeed, Mozilla defenders see the nonprofit’s mission as even more important with Chrome’s dominance.
“I couldn’t disagree with you more. It precisely *because* Chromium has such a large marketshare that is vital for Mozilla (or anyone else) to battle for diversity,” tweeted web developer Jeremy Keith in a response. “‘Building a parallel universe’? That *is* the contribution.”
We need a movement of developers and enthusiasts who loudly, proudly, use @mozilla@firefox as their primary browser. On our desktops and our laptops. We test in it, extend it, contribute to it. But we never, ever, take it for granted.
I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.
We need a new movement: a movement of developers, influencers, and tech enthusiasts who loudly, proudly, use Firefox as their primary web browser. We use it on our desktops. We use it on our laptops. We use it on our phones. All of us test sites in it. Some of us write plugins for it. The bravest of us write code for it. But none of us, not one, takes it for granted.
Will Microsoft’s decision make it harder for Firefox to prosper? It could. Making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts. […] If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.
Before you lament the return to a Microsoft-like monopoly, remember what happened to Microsoft’s monopoly. In fact, remember what happened to the lineal descendant of that monopoly just last week. Near-monopolies do not necessarily mean the end of the web.
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Yet more in the “EdgeHTML to be replaced by Chromium” story, on which I already shared my opinions. Peter-Paul does a good job of illustrating the differences between the reduction of diversity in/increasing monopolisation of the browser space this time around and last time (when Internet Explorer 6 became the de facto standard way to surf the Web), using it to provide a slightly less-pessimistic outlook (albeit one not without its warnings).
Even if you love Chrome, adore Gmail, and live in Google Docs or Analytics, no single company, let alone a user-tracking advertising giant, should control the internet.
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Diversity is as good for the web as it is for society. And it starts with us.
Yet more fallout from the Microsoft announcement that Edge will switch to Chromium, which I discussed earlier. This one’s pretty inspirational, and gives a good reminder about what our responsibilities are to the Web, as its developers.
Microsoft engineers have been spotted committing code to Chromium, the backend of Google Chrome and many other web browsers. This, among other things, has lead to speculation that Microsoft’s browser, Edge, might be planned to switch from its current rendering engine (EdgeHTML) to Blink (Chromium’s). This is bad news.
This post, as it would appear if you were looking at it in Edge. Which you might be, I suppose.
The younger generation of web developers are likely to hail this as good news: one fewer engine to develop for and test in, they’re all already using Chrome or something similar (and certainly not Edge) for development and debugging anyway, etc. The problem comes perhaps because they’re too young to remember the First Browser War and its aftermath. Let me summarise:
Once upon a time – let’s call it the mid-1990s – there were several web browsers: Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. They all used different rendering engines and so development was sometimes a bit of a pain, but only if you wanted to use the latest most cutting-edge features: if you were happy with the standard, established features of the Web then your site would work anywhere, as has always been the case.
Then, everybody starting using just one browser: following some shady dealings and monopoly abuse, 90%+ of Web users started using just one web browser, Internet Explorer. By the time anybody took notice, their rivals had been economically crippled beyond any reasonable chance of recovery, but the worst had yet to come…
Developers started targeting only that one browser: instead of making websites, developers started making “Internet Explorer sites” which were only tested in that one browser or, worse yet, only worked at all in that browser, actively undermining the Web’s position as an open platform. As the grip of the monopoly grew tighter, technological innovation was centred around this single platform, leading to decade-long knock-on effects.
The Web ceased to grow new features: from the release of Internet Explorer 6 there were no significant developments in the technology of the Web for many years. The lack of competition pushed us into a period of stagnation. A decade and a half later, we’re only just (finally) finishing shaking off this unpleasant bit of our history.
History looks set to repeat itself. Substitute Chrome in place of Internet Explorer and update the references to other web browsers and the steps above could be our future history, too. Right now, we’re somewhere in or around step #2 – Chrome is the dominant browser – and we’re starting to see the beginnings of step #3: more and more “Chrome only” sites. More-alarmingly this time around, Google’s position in providing many major Web services allows them to “push” even harder for this kind of change, even just subtly: if you make the switch from Chrome to e.g. Firefox (and you absolutely should) you might find that YouTube runs slower for you because YouTube’s (Google) engineers favour Google’s web browser.
So these are the three browser engines we have: WebKit/Blink, Gecko, and EdgeHTML. We are unlikely to get any brand new bloodlines in the foreseeable future. This is it.
If we lose one of those browser engines, we lose its lineage, every permutation of that engine that would follow, and the unique takes on the Web it could allow for.
And it’s not likely to be replaced.
Imagine a planet populated only by hummingbirds, dolphins, and horses. Say all the dolphins died out. In the far, far future, hummingbirds or horses could evolve into something that could swim in the ocean like a dolphin. Indeed, ichthyosaurs in the era of dinosaurs looked much like dolphins. But that creature would be very different from a true dolphin: even ichthyosaurs never developed echolocation. We would wait a very long time (possibly forever) for a bloodline to evolve the traits we already have present in other bloodlines today. So, why is it ok to stand by or even encourage the extinction of one of these valuable, unique lineages?
We have already lost one.
We used to have four major rendering engines, but Opera halted development of its own rendering engine Presto before adopting Blink.
Three left. Spend them wisely.
As much as I don’t like having to work-around the quirks in all of the different browsers I test in, daily, it’s way preferable to a return to the dark days of the Web circa most of the first decade of this century. Please help keep browsers diverse: nobody wants to start seeing this shit –
Warp and Weft by Paul Robert Lloyd (paulrobertlloyd.com)
Earlier this month I had the good fortune to attend Material, a conference that explores the concept of the web as a material and all the intrinsic characteristics that entails. The variety of talks provided new perspectives on what it means to build for – and with – the web, and prompted me to …
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What it means for something to be of the web has been discussed many times before. While the technical test can be reasonably objective – is it addressable, accessible and available – culturally it remains harder to judge. But I don’t know about you, I’ve found that certain websites feel more ‘webby’ than others.
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Despite being nonspecific on the nature of the feeling he describes, Paul hits the nail on the head. Your favourite (non-Medium) blog or guru site almost certainly has that feel of being “of the web”. Your favourite API-less single-page app (with the growing “please use in Chrome” banner) almost certainly does not.
As of next week, I’ll have been blogging for 20 years, or about 54% of my life. How did that happen?
I’d been “blogging” – not that we called it that, yet – since late 1998, but my original collection of content-mangling Perl scripts wasn’t all that. More history…
The mid-1990s were a very different time for the World Wide Web (yes, we still called it that, and sometimes we even described its use as “surfing”). Going “on the Internet” was a calculated and deliberate action requiring tying up your phone line, minutes of “connecting” along with all of the associated screeching sounds if you hadn’t turned off your modem’s loudspeaker, and you’d typically be paying twice for the experience: both a monthly fee to your ISP for the service and a per-minute charge to your phone company for the call.
It was into this environment that in 1994 I published my first web pages: as far as I know, nothing remains of them now. It wasn’t until 1998 that I signed up an account with UserActive (whose website looks almost the same today as it did then) who offered economical subdomain hosting with shell and CGI support and launched “Castle of the Four Winds”, a set of vanity pages that included my first blog.
Except I didn’t call it a “blog”, of course, because it wasn’t until the following year that Peter Merholz invented the word (he also commemorated 20 years of blogging, this year). I didn’t even call it a “weblog”, because that word was still relatively new and I wasn’t hip enough to be around people who said it, yet. It was self-described as an “online diary”, a name which only served to reinforce the notion that I was writing principally for myself. In fact, it wasn’t until mid-1999 that I discovered that it was being more-widely read than just by me and my circle of friends when I attracted a stalker who travelled across the UK to try to “surprise” me by turning up at places she expected to find me, based on what I’d written online… which was exactly as creepy as it sounds.
AvAngel.com
While the world began to panic that the coming millennium was going to break all of the computers, I migrated Castle of the Four Winds’ content into AvAngel.com, a joint vanity site venture with my friend Andy. Aside from its additional content (purity tests, funny stuff, risqué e-cards), what we hosted was mostly the same old stuff, and I continued to write snippets about my life in what was now quite-clearly a “blog-like” format, with the most-recent posts at the top and separate pages for content too old for the front page. Looking back, there’s still a certain naivety to these posts which exemplify the youth of the Web. For example, posts routinely referenced my friends by their email addresses, because spam was yet to become a big enough problem that people didn’t much mind if you put their email address on a public webpage somewhere, and because email addresses still carried with them a feeling of anonymity that ceased to be the case when we started using them for important things.
Technologically-speaking, too, this was a simpler time. Neither Javascript nor CSS support was widespread (nor consistently-standardised) enough to rely upon for anything other than the simplest progressive enhancement unless you were willing to “pick a side” in what we’d subsequently call the first browser war and put one of those apalling “best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” banners on your site. I’ve always been a believer in a universal web (and my primary browser at the time was Opera, anyway, as it mostly-remained until Opera went wrong in 2013), and I didn’t have the energy to write everything twice, so our cool/dynamic functionality came mostly from back-end (e.g. Perl, PHP) technologies.
Meanwhile, during my initial months as a student in Aberystwyth, I wrote a series of emails to friends back home entitled “Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth”, and put copies of each onto my student webspace; I’ve since recovered these and integrated them into my unified blog.
Scatmania.org
In 2002 I’d bought the domain name scatmania.org – a reference to my university halls of residence nickname “Scatman Dan”; I genuinely didn’t consider the possibility that the name might be considered scatalogical until later on. As I wanted to continue my blogging at an address that felt like it was solely mine (AvAngel.com having been originally shared with a friend, although in practice over time it became associated only with me), this seemed like a good domain upon which to relaunch. And so, in mid-2003 and powered by a short-lived and ill-fated blogging engine called Flip I did exactly that. WordPress, to which I’d subsequently migrate, hadn’t been invented yet and it wasn’t clear whether its predecessor, b2/cafelog, would survive the troubles its author was experiencing.
From this point on, any web address for any post made to my blog still works to this day, despite multiple technological and infrastructural changes to my blog (and some domain name shenanigans!) in the meantime. I’d come to be a big believer in the mantra that cool URIs don’t change: something that as far as possible I’ve committed to trying to upload in my blogging, my archiving, and my paid work since then. I’m moderately confident that all extant links on the web that point to earlier posts are all under my control so they can (and in most cases have) been fixed already, so I’m pretty close to having all my permalink URIs be “cool”, for now. You might hit a short chain of redirects, but you’ll get to where you’re going.
And everything was fine, until one day in 2004 when it wasn’t. The server hosting scatmania.org died in a very bad way, and because my backup strategy was woefully inadequate, I lost a lot of content. I’ve recovered quite a lot of it and put it back in-place, but some is probably gone forever.
One of the longest-lived web designs for scatmania.org paid homage to the original, but with more “blue” and a WordPress backing.
The resurrected site was powered by WordPress, and this was the first time that live database queries had been used to power my blog. Occasionally, these days, when talking to younger, cooler developers, I’m tempted to follow the hip trend of reimplementing my blog as a static site, compiling a stack of host-anywhere HTML files based upon whatever-structure-I-like at the “backend”… but then I remember that I basically did that already for six years and I’m far happier with my web presence today. I’ve nothing against static site systems (I’m quite partial to Middleman, myself, although I’m also fond of Hugo) but they’re not right for this site, right now.
IndieAuth hadn’t been invented yet, but I was quite keen on the ideals of OpenID (I still am, really), and so I implemented what was probably the first viable “install-anywhere” implementation of OpenID for WordPress – you can see part of it functioning in the top-right of the screenshot above, where my (copious, at that time) LiveJournal-using friends were encouraged to sign in to my blog using their LiveJournal identity. Nowadays, the majority of the WordPress plugins I use are ones I’ve written myself: my blog is powered by a CMS that’s more “mine” than not!
I no longer have the images that made my 2006 redesign look even remotely attractive, so here it is mocked-up with block colours instead.
Over the course of the first decade of my blogging, a few trends had become apparent in my technical choices. For example:
I’ve always self-hosted my blog, rather than relying on a “blog as a service” or siloed social media platform like WordPress.com, Blogger, or LiveJournal.
I’ve preferred an approach of storing the “master” copy of my content on my own site and then (sometimes) syndicating it elsewhere: for example, for the benefit of my friends who during their University years maintained a LiveJournal, for many years I had my blog cross-post to a LiveJournal account (and backfeed copies of comments back to my site).
I’ve favoured web standards that provided maximum interoperability (e.g. RSS with full content) and longevity (serving HTML pages from permanent URLs, adding “extra” functionality via progressive enhancement so as to ensure that content functioned e.g. without Javascript, with CSS disabled or the specification evolved, etc.).
These were deliberate choices, but they didn’t require much consideration: growing up with a Web far less-sophisticated than today’s (e.g. truly stateless prior to the advent of HTTP cookies) and seeing the chaos caused during the first browser war and the period of stagnation that followed, these choices seemed intuitive.
That body font is plain old Verdana, you know: I’ve always felt that it (plus full justification) was the right choice for this particular design, even though I regret other parts of it (like the brightness!).
As you’d expect from a blog covering a period from somebody’s teen years through to their late thirties, there’ve been significant changes in the kinds of content I’ve posted (and the tone with which I’ve done so) over the years, too. If you dip into 2003, for example, you’ll see the results of quiz memes and unqualified daily minutiae alongside actual considered content. Go back further, to early 1999, and it is (at best) meaningless wittering about the day-to-day life of a teenage student. It took until around 2009/2010 before I actually started focussing on writing content that specifically might be enjoyable for others to read (even where that content was frankly silly) and only far more-recently-still that I’ve committed to the “mostly technical stuff, ocassional bits of ‘life’ stuff” focus that I have today.
I say “committed”, but of course I’m fully aware that whatever this blog is now, it’ll doubtless be something somewhat different if I’m still writing it in another two decades…
2014 may have included my most-prolific month of blogging, but 2003-2005 saw the most-consistent high-volume of content.
Once I reached the 2010s I started actually taking the time to think about the design of my blog and its meaning. Conceptually, all of my content is data-driven: database tables full of different “kinds” of content and associated metadata, and that’s pretty-much ideal – it provides a strong separation between content and presentation and makes it possible to make significant design changes with less work than might otherwise be expected. I’ve also always generally favoured a separation of concerns in web development and so I’m not a fan of CSS design methodologies that encourage class names describing how things should appear, like Atomic CSS. Even where it results in a performance hit, I’d far rather use CSS classes to describe what things are or represent. The single biggest problem with this approach, to my mind, is that it violates the DRY principle… but that’s something that your CSS preprocessor’s there to fix for you, isn’t it?
But despite this philosophical outlook on the appropriate gap between content and presentation, it took until about 2010 before I actually attached any real significance to the presentation at all! Until this point, I’d considered myself to have been more of a back-end than a front-end engineer, and felt that the most-important thing was to get the content out there via an appropriate medium. After all, a site without content isn’t a site at all, but a site without design is (or at least should be) still intelligible thanks to browser defaults! Remember, again, that I started web development at a time when stylesheets didn’t exist at all.
My previous implementations of my blog design had used simple designs, often adapted from open-source templates, in an effort to get them deployed as quickly as possible and move on to the next task, but now, I felt, it was time to do a little more.
My 2010 relaunch put far more focus on the graphical design elements of my blog as well as providing a fully responsive design based on (then-new) CSS media queries. Alongside my focus on separation of concerns in web development, I’m also quite opinionated on the idea that a responsive design has almost always been a superior solution to having a separate “mobile site”.
For a few years, I was producing a new theme once per year. I experimented with different colours, fonts, and layouts, and decided (after some ad-hoc A/B testing) that my audience was better-served by a “front” page than by being dropped directly into my blog archives as had previously been the case. Highlighting the latest few – and especially the very-latest – post and other recent content increased the number of posts that a visitor would be likely to engage with in a single visit. I’ve always presumed that the reason for this is that regular (but non-subscribing) readers are more-likely to be able to work out what they have and haven’t read already from summary text than from trying to decipher an entire post: possibly because my blogging had (has!) become rather verbose.
My 2011 design, in hindsight, said more about my mood and state-of-mind at the time than it did about artistic choices: what’s with all the black backgrounds and seriffed fonts? Is this a funeral parlour?
I went through a bit of a lull in blogging: I’ve joked that I spent more time on my 2010 and 2011 designs than I did on the sum total of the content that was published in between the pair of them (which isn’t true… at least, not quite!). In the month I left Aberystwyth for Oxford, for example, I was doing all kinds of exciting and new things… and yet I only wrote a total of two blog posts.
With RSS waning in popularity – which I can’t understand: RSS is amazing! – I began to crosspost to social networks like Twitter and Google+ (although no longer to Google+, following the news of its imminent demise) to help those readers who prefer to get their content via these media, but because I wasn’t producing much content, it probably didn’t make a significant difference anyway: the chance of a regular reader “missing” something must have been remarkably slim.
The 2012 design featured “CSS peekaboo”: a transformation that caused my head to “hide” from you behind the search bar if your cursor got too close. Ruth, I hear, spent far too long playing with just this feature.
Nobody calls me “Scatman Dan” any more, and hadn’t for a long, long time. Given that my name is already awesome and unique all by itself (having changed to be so during the era in which scatmania.org was my primary personal domain name), it felt like I had the opportunity to rebrand.
I moved my blog to a new domain, DanQ.me (which is nice and short, too) and came up with a new collection of colours, fonts, and layout choices that I felt better-reflected my identity… and the fact that my blog was becoming less a place to record the mundane details of my daily life and more a place where I talk about (principally-web) technology, security, and GPS games… and just occasionally about other topics like breadmaking and books. Also, it gave me a chance to get on top of the current trend in web design for big, clean, empty spaces, square corners, and using pictures as the hook to a story.
The second design of my blog after moving to DanQ.me showed-off posts with big pictures, framed by lots of white-space.
I’ve been working harder this last year or two to re-integrate (in a PESOS-like way) into my blog content that I’ve published elsewhere, mostly geocaching logs and geohashing expedition records, and I’ve also done so retroactively, so in addition to my first blog article on the subject of geocaching, you can read my first ever cache log without switching to a different site nor relying upon the continued existence and accessibility of that site. I’ve been working at being increasingly mindful of where my content is siloed outside of my control and reclaiming it by hosting it here, on my blog.
Particular areas in which I produce content elsewhere but would like to at-least maintain a copy here, and would ideally publish here first and syndicate elsewhere, although I appreciate that this is difficult, are:
Reddit, where I’ve written tens of thousands of words under a variety of accounts, but I don’t really pay attention to the site any more
I left Facebook in 2011 but I still have a backup of what was on my “Wall” at that point, which I could look into reintegrating into my blog
I share a lot of the source code I write via my GitHub account, but I’m painfully aware that this is yet-another-silo that I ought to learn not to depend upon (and it ought to be simple enough to mirror my repos on my own site!)
I’ve got a reasonable number of videos on two YouTube channels which are online by Google’s good graces (and potential for advertising revenue); for a handful of technical reasons they’re a bit of a pain to self-host, but perhaps my blog could act as a secondary source to my own video content
I write business reviews on Google Maps which I should probably look into recovering from the hivemind and hosting here… in fact, I’ve probably written plenty of reviews on other sites, too, like Amazon for example…
On two previous occasions I’ve maintained an online photo gallery; I might someday resurrect the concept, at least for the photos that used to be published on them
I’ve dabbled on a handful of other, often weirder, social networks before like Scuttlebutt (which has a genius concept, by the way) and Ello, and ought to check if there’s anything “original” on there I should reintegrate
Going way, way back, there are a good number of usenet postings I’ve made over the last twenty-something years that I could reclaim, if I can find them…
(if you’re asking why I’m inclined to do all of these things: here’s why)
This looks familiar.
20 years and around 717,000 words worth of blogging down, it’s interesting to look back and see how things have changed: in my life, on the Web, and in the world in general. I’ve seen many friends’ blogs come and go: they move into a new phase of their life and don’t feel like what they wrote before reflects them today, most often, and so they delete them… which is fine, of course: it’s their content! But for me it’s always felt wrong to do so, for two reasons: firstly, it feels false to do so given that once something’s been put on the Web, it might well be online forever – you can’t put the genie back in the bottle! And secondly: for me, it’s valuable to own everything I wrote before. Even the cringeworthy things I wrote as a teenager who thought they knew everything and the antagonistic stuff I wrote in my early 20s but that I clearly wouldn’t stand by today is part of my history, and hiding that would be a disservice to myself.
The 17-year-old who wrote my first blog posts two decades ago this month fully expected that the things he wrote would be online forever, and I don’t intend to take that away from him. I’m sure that when I write a post in October 2038 looking back on the next two decades, I’ll roll my eyes at myself today, too, but for me: that’s part of the joy of a long-running personal blog. It’s like a diary, but with a sense of accountability. It’s a space on the web that’s “mine” into which I can dump pretty-much whatever I like.
I love it: I’ve been blogging for over half of my life, and if I can get back to you in 2031 and tell you that I’ve by-then been doing so for two-thirds of my life, that would be a win.
I’ve generally been pretty defensive of Microsoft Edge, the default web browser in Windows 10. Unlike its much-mocked predecessor Internet Explorer, Edge is fast, clean, modern, and boasts good standards-compliance: all of the things that Internet Explorer infamously failed at! I was genuinely surprised to see Edge fail to gain a significant market share in its first few years: it seemed to me that everyday Windows users installed other browsers (mostly Chrome, which is causing its own problems) specifically because Internet Explorer was so terrible, and that once their default browser was replaced with something moderately-good this would no longer be the case. But that’s not what’s happened. Maybe it’s because Edge’s branding is too-remiscient of its terrible predecessor or maybe just because Windows users have grown culturally-used to the idea that the first thing they should do on a new PC is download a different browser, but whatever the reason, Edge is neglected. And for the most part, I’ve argued, that’s a shame.
I ranted at an Edge developer I met at a conference, once, about Edge’s weak TLS debugging tools that couldn’t identify an OCSP stapling issue that only affected Edge, but I thought that was the worse of its bugs… until now…
But I’ve changed my tune this week after doing some research that demonstrates that a long-standing security issue of Internet Explorer is alive and well in Edge. This particular issue, billed as a “feature” by Microsoft, is deliberately absent from virtually every other web browser.
About 5 years ago, Steve Gibson observed a special feature of EV (Extended Validation) SSL certificates used on HTTPS websites: that their extra-special “green bar”/company name feature only appears if the root CA (certificate authority) is among the browser’s default trust store for EV certificate signing. That’s a pretty-cool feature! It means that if you’re on a website where you’d expect to see a “green bar”, like Three Rings, PayPal, or HSBC, then if you don’t see the green bar one day it most-likely means that your connection is being intercepted in the kind of way I described earlier this year, and everything you see or send including passwords and credit card numbers could be at risk. This could be malicious software (or nonmalicious software: some antivirus software breaks EV certificates!) or it could be your friendly local network admin’s middlebox (you trust your IT team, right?), but either way: at least you have a chance of noticing, right?
Firefox, like most browsers, shows the company name in the address bar when valid EV certificates are presented, and hides it when the validity of that certificate is put into question by e.g. network sniffing tools set up by your IT department.
Browsers requiring that the EV certificate be signed by a one of a trusted list of CAs and not allowing that list to be manipulated (short of recompiling the browser from scratch) is a great feature that – were it properly publicised and supported by good user interface design, which it isn’t – would go a long way to protecting web users from unwanted surveillance by network administrators working for their employers, Internet service providers, and governments. Great! Except Internet Explorer went and fucked it up. As Gibson reported, not only does Internet Explorer ignore the rule of not allowing administrators to override the contents of the trusted list but Microsoft even provides a tool to help them do it!
From top to bottom: Internet Explorer 11, Edge 17, Firefox 61, Chrome 68. Only Internet Explorer and Edge show the (illegitimate) certificate for “Barclays PLC”. Sorry, Barclays; I had to spoof somebody.
I decided to replicate Gibson’s experiment to confirm his results with today’s browsers: I was also interested to see whether Edge had resolved this problem in Internet Explorer. My full code and configuration can be found here. As is doubtless clear from the title of this post and the screenshot above, Edge failed the test: it exhibits exactly the same troubling behaviour as Internet Explorer.
Thanks, Microsoft.
I also tried Safari (both on MacOS, above, and iOS, below) and it behaved as the other non-Microsoft browsers do (i.e. arguably more-correctly than IE or Edge).
I shan’t for a moment pretend that our current certification model isn’t without it’s problems – it’s deeply flawed; more on that in a future post – but that doesn’t give anybody an excuse to get away with making it worse. When it became apparent that Internet Explorer was affected by the “feature” described above, we all collectively rolled our eyes because we didn’t expect better of everybody’s least-favourite web browser. But for Edge to inherit this deliberate-fault, despite every other browser (even those that share its certificate store) going in the opposite direction, is just insulting.
Maybe it’s because I was at Render Conf at the end of last month or perhaps it’s because Three Rings DevCamp – which always gets me inspired – was earlier this month, but I’ve been particularly excited lately to get the chance to play with some of the more “cutting edge” (or at least, relatively-new) web technologies that are appearing on the horizon. It feels like the Web is having a bit of a renaissance of development, spearheaded by the fact that it’s no longer Microsoft that are holding development back (but increasingly Apple) and, perhaps for the first time, the fact that the W3C are churning out standards “ahead” of where the browser vendors are managing to implement technical features, rather than simply reflecting what’s already happening in the world.
Ben Foxall at Render Conf 2017 discusses the accompanying JSOxford Hackathon. Hey, who’s that near the top-right?
It seems to me that HTML5 may well be the final version of HTML. Rather than making grand new releases to the core technology, we’re now – at last! – in a position where it’s possible to iteratively add new techniques in a resilient, progressive manner. We don’t need “HTML6” to deliver us any particular new feature, because the modern web is more-modular and is capable of having additional features bolted on. We’re in a world where browser detection has been replaced with feature detection, to the extent that you can even do non-hacky feature detection in pure CSS, now, and this (thanks to the nature of the Web as a loosely-coupled, resilient platform) means that it’s genuinely possible to progressively-enhance content and get on board with each hot new technology that comes along, if you want, while still delivering content to users on older browsers.
And that’s the dream! A web of progressive-enhancement stays true to Sir Tim’s dream of universal interoperability while still moving forward technologically. I’ve no doubt that there’ll always be people who want to break the Web – even Google do it, sometimes – with single-page Javascript-only web apps, “app shell” websites, mobile-only or desktop-only experiences and “apps” that really ought to have been websites (and perhaps PWAs) to begin with… but the fact that the tools to make a genuinely “progressively-enhanced” web, and those tools are mainstream, is a big deal. If you don’t think we’re at that point yet, I invite you to watch Rachel Andrews‘ fantastic presentation, “Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today”.
Three Rings’ developers hard at work at this year’s DevCamp.
Some of the things I’ve been playing with recently include:
Intersection Observers
Only really supported in Chrome, but there’s a great polyfill, the Intersection Observer API is one of those technologies that make you say “why didn’t we have that already?” It’s very simple: all an Intersection Observer does is to provide event hooks for target objects entering or leaving the viewport, without resorting to polling or hacky code on scroll event captures.
What’s it for? Well the single most-obvious use case is lazy-loading images, a-la Medium or Google Image Search: delivering users a placeholder image or a low-resolution copy until they scroll far enough for the image to come into view (or almost into view) and then downloading the full-resolution version and dynamically replacing it. My first foray into Intersection Observers was to take Medium’s approach and then improve it with a Service Worker in order to make it behave nicely even if the user’s Internet connection was unreliable, but I’ve since applied it to my Reddit browser plugin MegaMegaMonitor: rather than hammering the browser with Javascript the plugin now waits until relevant content enters the viewport before performing resource-intensive tasks.
Web Workers
I’d briefly played with Service Workers before and indeed we’re adding a Service Worker to the next version of Three Rings, which, in conjunction with a manifest.json and the service’s (ongoing) delivery over HTTPS (over H2, where available, since last year), technically makes it a Progressive Web App… and I’ve been looking for opportunities to make use of Service Workers elsewhere in my work, too… but my first dive in to Web Workers was in introducing one to the next upcoming version of MegaMegaMonitor.
MegaMegaMonitor’s processor-intensive “Lists” feature sees the most benefit from Web Workers
Web Workers add true multithreading to Javascript, and in the case of MegaMegaMonitor this means the possibility of pushing the more-intensive work that the plugin has to do out of the main thread and into the background, allowing the user to enjoy an uninterrupted browsing experience while the heavy-lifting goes on in the background. Because I don’t control the domain on which this Web Worker runs (it’s reddit.com, of course!), I’ve also had the opportunity to play with Blobs, which provided a convenient way for me to inject Worker code onto somebody else’s website from within a userscript. This has also lead me to the discovery that it ought to be possible to implement userscripts that inject Service Workers onto websites, which could be used to mashup additional functionality into websites far in advance of that which is typically possible with a userscript… more on that if I get around to implementing such a thing.
Fetch
The final of the new technologies I’ve been playing with this month is the Fetch API. I’m not pulling any punches when I say that the Fetch API is exactly what XMLHttpRequests should have been from the very beginning. Understanding them properly has finally given me the confidence to stop using jQuery for the one thing for which I always seemed to have had to depend on it for – that is, simplifying Ajax requests! I mean, look at this elegant code:
Whether or not you’re a fan of Javascript, you’ve got to admit that that’s infinitely more readable than XMLHttpRequest hackery (at least, without the help of a heavyweight library like jQuery).
Other things I’ve been up to include Laser Duck Hunt, but that’s another story.
So that’s some of the stuff I’ve been playing with lately: Intersection Observers, Web Workers, Blobs, and the Fetch API. And I feel all full of optimism on behalf of the Web.
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing…
Have you ever wondered why every major web browser identifies itself as “Mozilla”? Wonder no longer…
![[Animated GIF] Puppy flumps onto a human.](https://danq.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/cute-puppy.gif)
button on to warn people, as if that made up for it. 
