Linked List: November 24, 2014

Monday, 24 November 2014

Paul Ford on HTML5 and the World of Web Standards ★

Paul Ford, writing for The New Yorker:

You might have read that, on October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5. And you might know that this has something to do with apps and the Web. The question is: Does this concern you?

The answer, at least for citizens of the Internet, is yes: it is worth understanding both what HTML5 is and who controls the W3C. And it is worth knowing a little bit about the mysterious, conflict-driven cultural process whereby HTML5 became a “recommendation.” Billions of humans will use the Web over the next decade, yet not many of those people are in a position to define what is “the Web” and what isn’t. The W3C is in that position. So who is in this cabal? What is it up to? Who writes the checks?

Ford achieves something extraordinary with this piece — it works well as an introduction to the world of web standards for the uninitiated, but works also as a cogent overview for those of us who are intimately familiar with the W3C (idealistic) / WHATWG (practical) political saga.

Ford is on a roll. It’s amazing how many of my favorite pieces of the last few months have his byline.

iPhone 6 Pixels ★

Bryan Jones put the iPhone 6 (regular) display under a microscope:

When the iPhone 5 came out, Apple bonded the display to the glass in an effort to get the pixels closer to the surface and Apple has appeared to make the pixels in the 6 even closer still. Some of what we are seeing with the iPhone 6 may be a polarizing filter underneath the glass, but even so, the glass appears thinner and required less focus distance adjustment to get from the surface of the glass to the pixel on another microscope. I don’t know what that precise distance is in microns between the surface of the glass and the pixels, but it was a shorter distance as judged by rotation of the focus knob in the iPhone 6 vs. the iPhone 5. What this accomplishes is making the display appear to be higher resolution. The blacks are blacker, contrast is higher and colors are more vibrant, even with the same OS.

Retina OS X on the Original Macintosh ★

Mike Solomon, writing at The Cleverest:

I saw this great post about how tiny the original Macintosh screen was compared with the current (and enormous) Retina 5K iMac screen.

So I thought I’d take the opposite approach. Below are 1-to-1 pixel mockups of how Mac OSX Yosemite would have appeared on the original Macintosh’s 512×342 pixel screen.