Comment by Foomandoonian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Foomandoonian | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a nice web technologies demo, and there is good information in here ( I especially like the browser screenshots), but the thing I find most striking about this is how useless it is at visually illustrating the 'evolution' of the web.

I wrote a blog post about this when it first appeared last September: http://halfblog.net/2011/09/01/the-evolution-of-the-web/

Now it has become even flashier, and even more cluttered and confusing. The swooping colourful lines mean absolutely nothing. I realise they arc through the different browsers to (roughly) the point at which those browsers adopted the technology, but the swoops themselves only serve to confuse the information.

Very much a case of style over substance. This is a horrible infographic, and I'm confused why it seems to be so popular.

I agree.

The swirling lines begin to tell an interesting story: from 1994-1997, and then again from 2008-2012, lots of technologies enter the picture, so we get some sense of when the bursts of innovation happen.

The clutter of the lines - and their tending to vertical rather than more horizontally slanted - suggests that browser adoption of technologies is quicker from 2008 on.

But this is impressionistic at best, and vertical vs. horizontal in the technology adoption lines is mostly a side effect of how close the lines representing the browsers adopting the tech are to one another.

I'm also wondering about when the tech lines are introduced. E.g. web fonts (in purple, swooping in from the bottom) shows up around 2000 but doesn't hit a browser version till 2008.

CSS2D transforms (purple, from the top) starts in 2009, swooping backwards in time to hit Safari 3.1 in 2008.

If these two swoops correspond to the real story that web fonts were designed much earlier than they were adopted, and CSS2D transforms were implemented before they were formally designed (perhaps by W3C), then that would be very cool. But I fear it's just as likely that the introduction points are arbitrary.

If anyone knows the stories of the design and adoption of CSS2D transforms or webfonts, I'd be grateful for a little enlightenment.

I was staring at it a long time, trying to make sense of the swirling color lines.

I knew somebody had to be a party pooper. Congratulations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com