Tag: web

Just a list of safe fonts to use in the web. I always believed the least amount of fonts on a website the better. I have personally not been importing any external fonts for years.

Very interesting post on how to make long lasting web pages. The 7 most important points are:

1. Return to vanilla HTML/CSS
2. Don’t minimize HTML
3. Prefer one long page over several
4. Do not hotlink
5. Stick with native fonts
6. Compress, compress, compress (images)!
7. Eliminate broken URL risk

Similarly to his last article, Jim dives into the concept of website fidelity, which is a way of reducing the amount of resources a website consumes by lowering its fidelity to the original visuals and features. I quite like this idea.

Website owners aren’t necessarily incentivized to start stripping stuff out of their websites in order to support lower fidelities (including a fidelity of zero JavaScript). What you need is like an agent: somebody who works on your behalf as a user and can do for you what site owners won’t — a user agent if you will 🥁.

Note that “fidelity” in this case is not solely a control over the appearance and functionality of the website, but the actual content of the site itself. For example, at full fidelity on a news site you might have an image, title, byline, and short description for each article whereas at low fidelity you might only have the title for each.

I want to stress this point: I see the promise of website “fidelity” not just as a preference for less JavaScript and CSS but content itself. Providing users this kind of control would require website owners be involved, as I’m not sure you could do that well solely as a browser feature or extension.

We (the computing community) did this to ourselves. We created a situation where a HTML attachment received in email could plausibly look, to ordinary people, like something that would appear from trying to look at an ordinary PDF. There are a whole bunch of individual pieces and steps that got us here, each sensible on their own in some view, but the collective result is that we did this to ourselves. We have no one else to blame when ordinary people fill in their password and hit ‘Sign in’.

A preserved version of a website that has been running since 1986. It is one of the oldest, still-running, websites.

A preserved version of a website with old Internet files, such as zone files, hosts information and domains information.

A very random website with very random things and screenshots from old software.

A preserved website that was nominated Cool Site of the Year in 1997, which explains what is the World Wide Web.