Rube Goldberg HTML form
Ahhh, this makes me nostalgic for the 90s World Wide Web. Designer Sebastian Serena has built a Rube Goldberg machine out of HTML form elements. Once you start, you’ll watch the whole thing. (via @Colossal)
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kottke.org posts about HTML
Star Wars opening crawl done with HTML/CSS
Tim Pietrusky made an HTML/CSS version of the opening text crawl from Star Wars.
All HTML
This page, built by Evan Roth, consists of “One sentence contained within every HTML tag in alphabetical order.” It would be fun to build a randomized version to see how the tag order changes the look.
Update: At least three people took me up on my suggestion: one, two, three.
HTML5 version of The Game of Life
So, every time I post one of these HTML5 games or apps (like The Game of Life), I got tons of email from people who say that it could be done much easier or better in Flash. Which is probably true. But I post these experiments because I’ve been using HTML since 1994 and I love it. It’s simple (or can be), open, can be edited with any old text editor, and increasingly capable. Oh sure, HTML can be maddening at times, but I’m fascinated and happy to see it maturing into something that has so much functionality.
IMG is everything
Mark Pilgrim explores the question: why do we have an IMG element in HTML?
Why not an
element? Or an element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an element?
What Pilgrim doesn’t touch on was how that IMG tag drove adoption of Mosaic. Having images embedded right into web pages was like Dorothy stepping out of her house and into the lush color of Oz. (via waxy)
My embarrassing web past
Late last week Jason Santa Maria posted the first web site that he’d ever made and asked others to do the same. The earliest web page of mine still online is a parody of Suck that I did in March 1996 called Suck for Dummies. (It’s now called Suck for Dimwits because I received a C&D from the X for Dummies people threatening to sue.) In June of 96, I made this over-the-top home page, Jason’s Awesome WWW Home Page. (Warning,
My earlier sites are lost, I think. (I have a few Zip and Jaz disks that might have some older stuff on them but I don’t have the capability to read them anymore.) Before 0sil8, there were three or four efforts that I must have deleted from my hard drive at some point, including some embarrassing efforts involving fractals. The very first thing I did in HTML was a personal home page around Nov/Dec 1994 that lived on a 3.5” floppy. I coded it on the computer in my dorm room (using an early version of HTML Assistant and Aldus PhotoStyler) and then put it on a floppy to use on the computer in the physics lab, the only computer I had access to on campus that had internet access. The page was little more than a gussied up list of links that I liked to visit online, but I loved building, rebuilding, and redesigning it over and over, even though I was the only one who ever saw it. The handcrafted/DIY nature of building that page hooked me on web design. I would give almost anything to see that little page again.
HTML rendering visualizations
Video visualizations of how the HTML rendering engine underneath Firefox’s hood renders mozilla.org, a Wikipedia page, and Google Japan.
Quick quiz: how many HTML tags can
Quick quiz: how many HTML tags can you name in 5 minutes? I found this to be pretty difficult out of the context of actually needed to code something. That and I’m kinda rusty with any non-
/ HTML.
WindMaker adds motion to a web site
WindMaker adds motion to a web site based on the current wind conditions at a place of your choosing. Here’s kottke.org with NYC wind and with Chicago wind. (thx, jim)
David Galbraith notes that several of the
David Galbraith notes that several of the top sites on the web don’t validate: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, and even “Web 2.0” newcomers Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us. “Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?”
A museum of pull-down menus, for US
A museum of pull-down menus, for US states, currency, colors, etc. (via do)
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