x-mas

Recently the web erupted in short-form statements that soon made it clear that buttons had been pushed, sides taken, and feelings felt. How many feels? All the feels. Some rash words may have been said.

"True. You didn't say that."

we're all actually in the same side

O excerto que se segue, é, como não podia deixar de ser, P+ style, retirado de contexto. E ao fazê-lo permite-se a uma leitura mais abrangente do que a original.

Além das habituais camadas de intenções e sentidos que gostamos nOS POSITIVOS, acrescido daquilo das coincidências -estamos justamente a escrever um capítulo sobre "história e repetição", a publicar amanhã ou depois, e abraçamos o método do "makin' it up as we go along", com alguma ciência por detrás mas faz de conta que não-, o excerto aborda desenvolvimento web, de um longo debate simultaneamente técnico e conceptual -um contexto que será estranho a boa parte de quem nos lê e, admitimos, prematuro no ambito das nossas teses ou até a ignorar totalmente destas já que até hoje nunca vincámos essa dimensão aos nossos textos, mesmo se, desde que publicámos online alguns exemplos das nossas aulas boa parte dos nossos artesãos locais já desconta porque somos tão pró-digitais e nos exaspera a sua inabilidade nesses domínios.

Yet, considerando essas mesmas teses que aqui estamos a desenvolver, não podemos deixar de notar como a sua leitura atravessa a direito os nossos desígnios quando o lês num plano mais abstracto. Por partes, e sem entrar em nada de técnico, discutem-se técnicas, e vamos arrumar essas para canto desde já:

On the Extensible Web side, we can see the people who think JavaScript is the way forward for the web. (... ) On the other side of things, in the progressive enhancement camp, we get folks that are worried these approaches will leave some users in the dust.
in "The Future of the Web" ^{21 junho 2016}

Segue-se um recap da web a título de exemplo:

History and repetition

To better understand the bigger picture about the future of the web, it’s useful (as usual) to look back at its past. Since the very beginning of the web, there have been disagreements about how best to proceed. Marc Andreessen and Tim Berners-Lee famously disagreed about the IMG tag. Tim didn’t get his way, Marc implemented IMG in Mosaic as he saw fit, and we all know how things spun out from there. It wasn’t perfect, but a choice had to be made and it did the job. History suggests that IMG did its job fairly well.

A pattern of hacking our way to the better solution becomes evident when you follow the trajectory of the web’s development.

In the 1990’s, webmasters and designers wanted layout like they were used to in print. They wanted columns, dammit. David Siegel formalized the whole tables-and-spacer-GIFs approach in his wildly popular book Creating Killer Web Sites. And thus, the web was flooded with both design innovation and loads of un-semantic markup. Which we now know is bad. But those were the tools that were available, and they allowed us to express our needs at the time. Life, as they say…finds a way.

And when CSS layout came along, guess what it used as a model for the kinds of layout techniques we needed? That’s right: tables.

While we’re at it, how about Flash? As with tables, I’m imagining resounding “boos” from the audience. “Boo, Flash!” But if Flash was so terrible, why did we end up with a web full of Flash sites? I’ll tell you why: video, audio, animation, and cross-browser consistency.

In 1999? Damn straight I want a Flash site. Once authors got their hands on a tool that let them do all those incredible things, they brought the world of web design into a new era of innovation and experimentation.

But again with the lack of semantics, linkability, and interoperability. And while we were at it, with the tossing out of an open, copyright-free platform. Whoops.

It wasn’t long, though, before the native web had to sit up and take notice. Largely because of what authors expressed through Flash, we ended up with things like HTML5, Ajax, SVGs, and CSS3 animations. We knew the outcomes we wanted, and the web just needed to evolve to give us a better solution than Flash.

In short: to get where we need to go, we have to do it wrong first.
in "The Future of the Web" ^{21 junho 2016}

O destaque é nosso. Recupera as nossas diatribes aos agarrados do papel e os nossos call-to-action para que estes fanzinem em rede aberta independente, e compreendes porque esta nos parece a melhor mensagem de natal a deixar aqui neste momento. Abstrai-te sem te distraires, retém o sentimento geral, -

The idea is to make standards-making a more rapid, iterative, bottom-up process; if authors have the tools to prototype their own solutions or features, then the best of these solutions will ultimately rise to the top and make their way into the native browser environments.

This sounds empowering, collaborative—very much in the spirit of the web.

And, in fact, everything seemed well on the World Wide Web until this string of tweets.

Doomsday scenarios were proclaimed; shadowy plots implied; curt, sweeping ideological statements made. In short, it was the kind of shit-show you might expect from a touchy, nuanced subject being introduced on Twitter.

- e recontextualiza sobre os últimos meses:

Context, as usual, is everything. There needs to be realistic assessment of the risk of exclusion against the potential gains of trying new technologies and approaches. When a new approach we’re trying might have aspects that are harmful to some users, it’s good to raise a red flag. So when we see issues with one another’s approaches, let’s talk about how we can fix those problems without throwing out the progress that’s been made. Let’s see how we can bring greater experiences to the web without leaving users in the dust.

If we can continue to work together and consciously balance these dual impulses—pushing the boundaries of the web while keeping it open and accessible to everyone—we’ll know we’re on the right track, even if it’s sometimes a circuitous or befuddling one. Even if sometimes it’s kind of bad. Because that’s the only way I know to get to good.
in "The Future of the Web" ^{21 junho 2016}

keep talkin'