Of Time And The Web
summary
A call to measure progress in decades not minutes claims eradication milestones (smallpox killed 2 million and scarred 8 million in a year) and dramatic social gains (literacy and a fall in extreme poverty—130,000 people escape extreme poverty today), links those shifts to concrete web advances—SVG becomes universally supported by 2011, variable fonts enabling 999 weight steps, new image formats and srcset/loading, native audio/video, Flexbox Grid and container queries—and argues rebuilds like SPAs bloat payloads and hurt users, so prefer built‑in browser features.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:16Eradicating smallpox awe
- 3:39Change blindness and attention
- 7:32Web evolution past decade
- 8:34First website to modern design
- 10:06Color explosion on the web
- 10:47Typography from limitation to abundance
- 13:22Variable fonts breakthrough
- 16:31Image element and early media
- 18:23SVG rise and vector graphics
- 19:55Native audio and video in HTML
- 21:46Flash legacy and web standards
- 22:10CSS layout hacks
- 23:59Mobile revolution and responsive design
- 25:32Modern layout tools and queries
- 26:39Web technical progress and challenges
- 27:23Web privacy and tracking problem
- 29:18Cookies and JavaScript tracking
- 30:45Web apps vs websites and SPAs
- 31:52Working with web grain
- 33:42User expectations and performance
- 35:08Stop solving problems you don't have yet
- 36:34User needs over developer convenience
- 36:59Defending web magic
