Writing for the Web

How fast is your internet?

Via Net Index: Household Download Index. the introduction:

Based on millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net, this index compares and ranks consumer download speeds around the globe. The value is the rolling mean throughput in Mbps over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles.

And we learn that Hong Kong, at 70.16 Mbps, whips the rest of us to shreds.Canada ranks #36 at 18.96 Mbps, barely ahead of Malta and Slovakia, and trailing Uruguay (19.34). The US: #30 at 20.33, but even tiny Andorra (#17) beats the Americans with 29.82. This does not bode well.

Nielsen on HD computer screens and their typographical implications

Back in July, Jakob Nielsen posted a good item in his Alertbox about Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens. Before he actually got into the discussion about fonts, he wrote:

Not only are computer screens getting bigger, they're also finally getting better — which might be more important. In June 2012, Apple introduced the first mainstream computer with a high-definition screen: the MacBook Pro with a resolution of 2880×1800 on a 15-inch display. This screen delivers a pixel density of 220 PPI (pixels per inch, corresponding to the DPI — dots per inch — that measure laser printer quality.) 

Apple uses the propaganda term "Retina display" for screen qualities above approximately 200 PPI, under the theory that this is as much as the human eye can resolve. Of course, this is not true: we need around 900 PPI for a screen so good that adding pixels wouldn't make it look any better. 

Although Apple's screen quality isn't perfect, it's dramatically better than anything on offer from other computer vendors. It's a disgrace that the PC industry hasn't recognizably improved screen quality over the last decade — despite the fact that we have known for decades that 300 PPI screens offer dramatically faster reading speed than low-density monitors.

By all means read his whole post. I'm bringing up the subject now because last week I bought myself a MacBook Pro 15"—and it's been a revelation. No doubt 300 PPI would be even better, but until it comes along I'm more than content.

Composing text on screen has become a pleasure, and reading is too—whether or not I'm reading any faster. Most strikingly, this machine has made me realize how god-awful tiring it's been, for years, to read and write on a low-res screen. 

So we finally have something like the resolution that Nielsen has been demanding for decades. As HD screens become the norm, they're going to oblige web designers and writers to reconsider content and display issues: Can we write longer sentences in longer paragraphs? I suspect we can and will. Should we prefer serif to sans serif? Nielsen thinks it's now a personal call, based on branding or the "mood" of a given type style. I agree.

A Literary History of Word Processing

Via The New York Times, a reminder of how quickly we forget the machines and programs that changed our lives: A Literary History of Word Processing. Excerpt:

The literary history of the typewriter has its well-established milestones, from Mark Twain producing the first typewritten manuscript with “Life on the Mississippi” to Truman Capote famously dismissing Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” pounded out on a 120-foot scroll, with the quip “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” 

The literary history of word processing is far murkier, but that isn’t stopping Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, from trying to recover it, one casual deletion and trashed document at a time. 

Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen King’s Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelist’s first computer, bought in the early 1980s. 

“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that would have littered Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said, before asking a question he hopes he can answer: “Who were the early adopters, the first mainstream authors to trade in their typewriters for WordStar and WordPerfect?”

It's an exquisite irony that documents created on such machines, with such programs, had lifetimes far shorter than that of, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face

Via the blog NeuroTribes, a wonderful article: The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face. Now I know whose universe I've been living in for almost thirty years. Excerpt (but read the whole post):

Kare’s first assignment was developing fonts for the Mac OS. At the time, digital typefaces were monospaced, meaning that both a narrow I and a broad M were wedged into the same bitmapped real estate — a vestigial legacy of the way that a typewriter platen advances, one space at a time. 

Jobs was determined to come up with something better for his sleek new machine, having been impressed by the grace of finely wrought letterforms in calligraphy classes he audited at Reed College, taught by the Trappist monk Robert Palladino, a disciple of master calligrapher Lloyd Reynolds. (The lasting impact of Reynolds’ instruction can also be seen in the playful cursive of the seminal West Coast Beat poets Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, making Reynolds and Palladino the human hyperlinks between desktop publishing and Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.) 

For the Mac, Kare designed the first proportionally spaced digital font family that allowed text to breathe as naturally on the Mac’s white screen as it does in the pages of a book. The distinctive Jobs touch was upgrading the original monikers of these elegant typefaces from the names of train stations near Philadelphia — like Rosemont and Ardmore — to those of world-class cities like Geneva, Chicago, and New York.

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse

Via The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes a fascinating account of Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Creation of the Mouse. Excerpt:

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs. 

Xerox parc was the innovation arm of the Xerox Corporation. It was, and remains, on Coyote Hill Road, in Palo Alto, nestled in the foothills on the edge of town, in a long, low concrete building, with enormous terraces looking out over the jewels of Silicon Valley. 

To the northwest was Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. To the north was Hewlett-Packard’s sprawling campus. All around were scores of the other chip designers, software firms, venture capitalists, and hardware-makers. 

A visitor to parc, taking in that view, could easily imagine that it was the computer world’s castle, lording over the valley below—and, at the time, this wasn’t far from the truth. In 1970, Xerox had assembled the world’s greatest computer engineers and programmers, and for the next ten years they had an unparalleled run of innovation and invention. 

If you were obsessed with the future in the seventies, you were obsessed with Xerox parc—which was why the young Steve Jobs had driven to Coyote Hill Road.

The impact of one online op-ed

Back on January 25, my friend and colleague Dave Beers published an online op-ed in The Globe and Mail. Next day it appeared in The Tyee: Canadians Just Became World's Biggest Internet Losers. Excerpt:

YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, iPad. . . and whatever else is about to take the world by storm, making all of those digital breakthroughs seem old news. Surely it's obvious by now that Canadians are going to be better off if we foster digital media creativity, rather than leaving it to people in other countries. 

But tell that to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the body supposedly responsible for regulating electronic media for our well-being. The CRTC has decided to allow Bell and other big telecom companies to change the way Canadians are billed for Internet access. Metering, or usage-based billing (UBB), will mean that service providers can charge per byte in addition to their basic access charges. The move is sure to stifle digital creativity in Canada while the rest of the world looks on and snickers.

A week later, the Conservative government, and all the other political parties, are scrambling to demand that the CRTC reverse its decision. As Hosni Mubarak has learned to his cost this week, you'll have better luck metering oxygen than metering online access.

Wikileaks Iraq: How to visualise the text

Via The Guardian, an article that all webwriters should read: Wikileaks Iraq: how to visualise the text. Excerpt:

In October, WikiLeaks released 391,832 reports from the Iraq War, the most comprehensive set of documents about the conflict to date. Each is a report of a specific incident in the Iraq war. 

At the rate of one document per minute, it would take 272 days non-stop to read every report -- and you still might miss the big picture. This is exactly the sort of problem where visualization can help, by turning patterns in the documents into patterns in a picture. 

The Guardian and others had already created visualizations by plotting the incident locations on a map of Iraq, and by graphing monthly casualties. 

My Associated Press colleague Julian Burgess and I wanted to go a step further, by designing a visualization based on the richest part of the report: the summary text, a human-readable description of what actually happened. But how? 

We pulled out our data mining textbooks and started experimenting, eventually settling on a technique that extracts the key words from each document. A document's key words appear frequently in that document, but rarely in all others.

The graphics in the article are worth a lot more than a thousand words each.