jwz: They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.

The Story of CSS Grid, from Its Creators · An A List Apart Article

It must be the day for documenting the history of CSS. Here’s an article by Aaron on the extraordinary success story of CSS Grid. A lot of the credit for that quite rightly goes to Rachel and Jen:

Starting with Rachel Andrew coming in and creating a ton of demos and excitement around CSS Grid with Grid by Example and starting to really champion it and show it to web developers and what it was capable of and the problems that it solves.

Then, a little bit later, Jen Simmons created something called Labs where she put a lot of demos that she created for CSS Grid up on the web and, again, continued that momentum and that wave of enthusiasm for CSS Grid with web developers in the community.

Lou Montulli and the invention of cookie | Hidden Heroes

Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:

Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.

The irregular musings of Lou Montulli: The reasoning behind Web Cookies

A fascinating look at the history of cookies …from the inventor of cookies.

Tim Berners-Lee Invented the World Wide Web. Now He Wants to Save It | The New Yorker

A profile of Tim and the World World Web.