An excellent and in-depth look at how Yahoo! ruined Flickr and completely failed to anticipate the social web.

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal, allowing Berners-Lee to continue.

Full text of the proposal in html.

Foresight.js gives webpages the ability to tell if the user's device is capable of viewing high-resolution images (such as the 3rd generation iPad) before the image has been requested from the server.

Last year we proposed the Web Intents API to help web applications integrate with one another with minimal effort. We've now enabled an experimental version of the API in the most recent stable version of Chrome, to gather feedback from the web community and shape the future of the Web Intents API.



This prototype version of Web Intents makes it easier for developers to try out the API and experience its benefits first hand:
Developers who build client apps will be able to easily include functionality from other web services (e.g., photo editing). 
Developers creating those services will no longer need to invest time and resources to negotiate and build hardcoded integrations - they can just focus on offering a great quality product with the integration facilitated by the API. 
In addition, this implementation of Web Intents can help the design discussions in the W3C web intents open standards list.

useful util for time conversion w/ invites, etc

“I remember thinking that this would be a pretty harmless easter egg, that no one would really use it, but I was very wrong.” 

A very nice looking set of buttons for "Pay with Paypal", "Sign in with Gmail" sorts of things.


The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear.

The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity. A consistent button set could reduce a lot of that visual noise and inconsistency. Furthermore, having it in CSS format means that changing the text for certain actions would be a breeze for developers, and it also allows administrators of non-English websites to translate labels into their native languages.

The button set was designed from the beginning to require no extra markup, and the elements used are entirely the choice of the (semantically considerate) designer. All buttons are fully scalable and customizable, and they degrade gracefully on older browsers, although the aesthetics in IE 6 and 7 are admittedly inferior to image-based alternatives.

No raster images or sprites were used. Instead, vector icons were inserted using a custom font file, an @font-face rule and pseudo elements. For more information, John Hicks has an informative write-up on this technique.

<FONT SIZE= + n or -n FACE="arial"> text </FONT>