...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Mark Pilgrim explores the question: why do we have an IMG element in HTML?
Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> 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)
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, <blink> tag usage!! Sign my guestbook! Top 5% of All Web Sites!!) I posted a bunch of old kottke.org designs back in March but missed that the first few months of posts are still live in their original design.
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.
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 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-<blockquote>/<a> HTML.
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 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?"
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives.
web development (74) • kottke.org (115) • www (140)
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Many posts on kottke.org have been "tagged" with keywords, which activity results in collections of related posts like sports, infoviz, or best of.
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