Happy Birthday, World Wide Web

On W3C, The Web, Information

The great dragon Obrfynar climbed the side of the mountain; reaching the podium, she turned to face the audience. There was polite applause, curtailed because everyone wanted to listen. She was, after all, one of the most famous dragons on the conference circuit. Mountain birds flew hastily away in case she cleared her throat, but she just took a drink of sheep’s blood from the glass on the podium and began to speak.

“We are Dragon-kind! All look to us in awe! We are the mightiest! And from the beginning of time we have known what we want, what we need, what we must have, what we will have! And what is it?”

There was a predictable roar from the crowd. Any birds foolish enough to be watching had long fled or were roasted in the excitement. The roar said one word:

“GOLD!”

“We must seek gold. Wherever it is, we must find it and hoard it!”

Some typographic history

I recently encountered “Bablestone”, a blog with some carefully researched articles about typographic history. Rules for the long s (the ſ symbol, if you have it in a font) was the first one i read, but the site is worth exploring. Probably it would have been better to have talked about Conventions rather than Rules.

mentalfloss has a less scholarly and rather more popularist article that introduces the long s and several old letters Latin scribal abbreviations, although it’s probably worth reminding readers that æ and œ at least are still in use in British English, although less widely than thirty years ago.

Update: the Babelstone blog went away so i now link to archive.org for this page.