web apps

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

Answer in Progress investigates why Japanese websites look different from those elsewhere, using an AI clustering approach to test the 2013 claim. It then looks at possible explanations.

WeberAuto explains how the Honda E-Drive (i-MMD) hybrid transaxle works in the CR-V, Accord, Insight and Clarity hybrids. It walks through the system's three modes of operation.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Tom Scott visits the British Library, a UK legal deposit library that receives a copy of everything published, and discusses storing so much material, including the web archive.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains why general aviation has failed to replace leaded avgas, blaming industry inertia, bureaucratic delay and an exemption that removes the incentive. This is part one of two.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli explains in part two of a series why general aviation has not replaced leaded avgas. He covers industry inertia, bureaucratic delays and the exemption that lets the industry keep using lead.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.

Jen Simmons explains the difference between CSS Flexbox and CSS Grid, and when to use each. She makes the case that Grid does not replace Flexbox and most sites use both.

Aaron Francis walks through how PHP has changed from 2012 to 2023, covering traits, array destructuring, generators, typed properties and more. It is a quick chaptered tour of modern PHP features.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Breaking Taps explains how the cryogenic mirror actuators on the James Webb Space Telescope achieve nanometer precision using flexures. It shows a 3D-printed replica and how one motor handles both coarse and fine motion.

Matt Cutts of Google explains what cloaking is: serving different content to search engine crawlers than to users. He covers why it violates Google's webmaster guidelines.