Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
From the DF Archive, a Decade Ago: ‘The Industry Is Fucked Up’
Here’s a post from 2015, linking to Rene Ritchie, then still at iMore, explaining how iMore found itself serving ever worse (and more reader hostile) ads. Not much has changed regarding the state of web advertising in a decade, and iMore — once a truly great site — is defunct.
The HTML Review: Issue 05
What a lovely thing to drop amidst my recent consternation over the state of web design.
To paraphrase Richard III: A horse, a horse! My kingdom for native app developers with the conviction of the artist-developers in The HTML Review.
Mux — Video API for Developers
My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to watch; it’s a boatload of context and data. Mux makes it easy to ship and scale video into anything from websites to platforms to AI workflows. Unlock what’s inside: transcripts, clips, and storyboards to build summarization, translation, content moderation, tagging, and more.
Mux stewards Video.js, the web’s most popular open source video player. Video.js v10 is a complete architectural rebuild, with the beta now available at videojs.org.
Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Synthesia. Get started free, no credit card required. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.
‘Good, I’m Glad He’s Dead.’
The sitting president of the United States, on his blog:
Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP
As the elderly descend further into dementia, they lose their sense of propriety and simply speak their mind. (They also get confused and think they need to “sign” their text messages and social media posts.) Say what you want about Trump’s truthfulness generally, but here, he’s just being brutally honest. Let’s keep his “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” post bookmarked for when Trump himself finally keels over — after he chokes on a hamburger or whatever it’ll be that finally does him in — and the good people of the world rejoice and celebrate.
Half a Gigabyte of Ads
Stuart Breckenridge, examining a web page at PC Gamer:
Third, this is a whopping 37MB webpage on initial load. But that’s not the worst part. In the five minutes since I started writing this post the website has downloaded almost half a gigabyte of new ads.
This is so irresponsible and unprofessional it beggars belief. Web browsers ought to defend against this. Why not cap page loads by default at, I don’t know, 5 MB? And require explicit consent to download any additional content?