Richard MacManus

In the latest post in my web design history series, I look at Batman Forever, an influential 1995 website by @zeldman@front-end.social and friends. Also, later in the year HTML tables arrive, along with early visual design tools FrontPage and PageMill. https://cybercultural.com/p/1995-web-design/ #WebDesignHistory

Awesome! https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/03/a-new-share-button/

No surprises on which company is the focus of this article (the current owner of ReadWrite). Sadly, this cynical strategy of replacing human writers with AI will likely start happening to other well-known media publications too. Yet another reason to get behind indie web publishers and ethically aligned *human-centered* open social protocols like ActivityPub. https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/staff-journalists-sacked-and-misleadingly-replaced-with-ai-writers/

In 1993, web design didn't really exist — you couldn't even change the background color of your web page from grey. But Mosaic launched the first era of visual web design with the IMG tag, and soon after an MTV VJ (@adam@podcastindex.social) improbably created one of the first commercial websites. https://cybercultural.com/p/1993-mtv-internet/ #WebDesignHistory

Humour me with this poll. If you're a LinkedIn user, do you habitually put your hyperlinks in the first comment?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@blu256/115887329279999236 If you're also a journalist on Mastodon, please help @blu256@mastodon.social out and fill in this questionaire. I just did it and only took 5 or so minutes. I'm looking forward to seeing the results. #journalism

This guy arrived at Cybercultural HQ this morning. His home will soon be on my Zoom background bookshelf :) #Plushtodon

My final post for the year on @TheNewStack@hachyderm.io is a wrapup of the leading #webdev trends of 2024:

“The year in web development was characterized by a return to simpler ways of building a website or web application. Partly this was a reaction against the increasing complexity of JavaScript frameworks — especially React-based frameworks. Simpler options like Astro and Eleventy became more popular over 2024 […]” https://thenewstack.io/web-development-trends-in-2024-a-shift-back-to-simplicity/