Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
Wildly successful sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Facebook offer genuinely portable social experiences, on and off the desktop. You don't even have to go to Facebook or Twitter to experience Facebook and Twitter content or to share third-party web content with your Twitter and Facebook friends.
With consumers buying two smartphones for every desktop computer they purchase, the demands, challenges and opportunities of the mobile space are reshaping our assumptions about design and user behaviour.
The code core of the 2001 browser upgrade campaign was the first instance of capability detection in place of browser detection.
Many thought it was a fool's errand - that the browser companies were never going to listen to us. Others argued that, 'Users don't care if you use Web standards.' Well, of course they don't. They just know that your site works better.
I was in love with HTML and certain that the whole world was about to learn it, ushering in a new era of DIY media, free expression, peace and democracy and human rights worldwide. That part didn't work out so well, although the kids prefer YouTube to TV, so that's something.
To my way of thinking, passive management of file assets is okay for screwing around with iPads, where we're mainly watching TV on Netflix or obsessive-compulsively checking the popularity of our Instagram uploads.
I'd like to be able to design as easily as if I was using Photoshop. I'd like to be able to create a multicolumn layout and control source order without having to do advanced mathematics or hire Eric Meyer or Dan Cederholm to figure out the CSS, because I can't.
Dropbox, with its emphasis on good old-fashioned hierarchies, is superb at automatically saving one original of each photo I take, whether shot with a phone or a fancy camera. No loops, no duplicates, no confusion.
Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.
We at The Web Standards Project turned everything on its head. We said browsers should support the same standards instead of competing to invent new tags and scripting languages. We said designers, developers, and content folks should create one site that was accessible to everyone.
I could open a thousand Excel documents and still never think to scroll past a wall of empty rows to see if, hidden beneath them, there is a tab I need to click. Just doesn't occur to me. Because, design.
A good designer has technical knowledge - don't treat her like someone who's there to decide whether something should be pink or orange.
I know and have worked alongside some of the designers, developers, and editors at Vox Media; you'd be proud to work with any of them.
