👍 to a comment on pull request 183 to GitHub project “AB-public”

❤️ to a comment on pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

↳ In reply to pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters” I tend to agree with @github.com/manton’s comment and analysis.

As Manton points out, there are many of us now, many implementers and publishers that are implementing and supporting multiple protocols, and thus it matters to us that we at least maintain the level of compatibility and interoperability that we achieved in the initial Recommendations of these specifications.

I think we can continue to do that, especially if we scope the Working Group to being a maintenance WG for the existing specs. This is something that Evan has convinced me of, while previously I saw a renewed Social Web WG to work on new features. Given the progress with use of extensions, and the Fed ID CG/WG stages process (or something like it), that seems like a better way to pursue new features, in parallel in the Social CG.

Another benefit of one Social Web working group is that its scope is easier to determine and explain, both to prior participants, and to W3C Members who will be voting on its creation.

A renewal of a working group to do maintenance on all of its prior specs, both editorial and bug fixes, makes a lot of sense to W3C and to Members, who like seeing working groups that take up the responsibility of maintaining specs. This especially makes more sense when all those specifications have far more implementations now than when they were shipped by the prior working group!

As I saw in another blog post about the social web, we are all here on “team open”, and I think we suffer, collectively, by attempting to draw lines with any “ActivityPub-only” approach. Both because it unnecessarily divides a very diverse, mixed, and broader “ActivtyPub supporting” community, and because it’s much fuzzier, to the point of overlapping with adjacent and aligned efforts.

The rel=me specification is a good example of this overlap. Would that be included in an “ActivityPub-only” approach? Because it’s certainly used by communities beyond that.

We have a whole task force on HTML Discovery in the CG where some of us (myself included) is working on improving rel=author support when interacting between HTML representations of profiles, yes, often with microformats, and retrieving the JSON(-LD) Activity Streams 2 versions of those profiles. That sort of interoperability benefits from a more inclusive approach.

We have bridges (https://fed.brid.gy/) that have helped the “ActvityPub-verse” grow that we could only dream about during the prior Social Web WG, because that group put in the hard work of figuring out interoperability across protocols and formats. We already did that hard work so why squander it? A maintenance group for all our specs provides a venue for any marginal bits of small work we may (or may not) need to maintain the positive outcomes of all that prior hard work.

Lastly, @github.com/gobengo brings up important concerns that I think merit explicitly addressing, regarding “experience in the SocialWG from 2013-2017” (actually 2014-2018 per https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg)

First, in summary I will say as the saying goes “Don't fight the last war”, or I prefer a non-violent expression instead: “Don’t argue the prior debates”.

We were in a very different situation at the start of the first Social Web Working Group, having emerged from an incredibly diverse “W3C Workshop on Social Standards: The Future of Business” (AKA osfw3c) in 2013.

The first Social Web WG had to evaluate numerous prior group efforts (17+) and different approaches (~15) that were proposed by members of the group for consideration before narrowing down to ~3 approaches. Lots of time was spent doing this, which we would obviously avoid by sticking to maintenance of existing specs.

We also found so much in common that we were able to leverage as building blocks and points of compatibility. HTTP & link rel discovery. URLs for profiles. Etc. the list goes on.

All of that is pointing out how the first Social Web WG was very different than what a similarly scoped Social Web WG could be like today.

Second, the other strong point of more recent evidence that we should use instead of fearing “the last war”, is how the Social CG has been conducted for the past 5-6 years, especially the past few years mostly chaired by Dmitri.

Every Social CG meeting I have been to has been incredibly positive & productive. Even when we disagree, we do so in very civil, polite, informed ways that consider each other’s use-cases, perspectives, opinions, with folks working on different projects and protocols! It has been an incredible experience and I am grateful to be a part of it, and especially grateful for Dmitri’s stewardship. I mentioned this briefly in a post after a recent meeting https://tantek.com/2024/216/t1/socialcg-telcon.

With the Social CG, under Dmitri’s chairing, we have found a new more harmonious rhythm, and frankly, broader inclusiveness of different efforts and communities than we ever had previously. We have proven we can have regular meetings that “continue[s] the work of the W3C Social Web Working Group” where agenda items are curated and prioritized in a manner that respects the time and interests of the participants.

I would expect the harmony of the Social Web CG to continue in a similar renewed Social Web WG, and would support Dmitri as a co-chair of that working group to keep our momentum going. In addition, I would ask anyone else wanting to co-chair to learn from and adopt Dmitri’s chairing workmode accordingly. I believe that is our best path to success for this community, and for all our collective goals.

References:
* https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG
* https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialWG
* https://indieweb.org/2013/osfw3c

👍 to a comment on pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

Happy October!

For some reason this month has a plethora of daily blogging or other creativity prompts. Here’s a list of the ones I found so far:

* #Blogtober (consider this post my first for this, retroactively day 1)
* Inktober — https://inktober.com/
* LOLtober - https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/10/loltober-2024
* Looptober — https://looptober.com/
* Mathober - https://mathober.com/
* Viztober — https://www.instagram.com/evalottchen/p/DAiNm3ZtuTj/

Having found so many for the month I created an “October” page on the #IndieWeb wiki to document them all (and in case folks find others to add):
* https://indieweb.org/October

October is also a very popular month for seasonal blog styling:
* https://indieweb.org/Halloween

Do you have a custom Halloween theme for your personal site? Add it to the wiki!

This is post 23 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts

← https://tantek.com/2024/247/t4/w3c-link-checker-before-federating
→ 🔮

Last week I participated in #w3cTPAC 2024¹ in Anaheim, California. It was quite packed, and often started early, from 8am informal breakfast meetings at a nearby IHOP, to Working Group, Community Group, and other small group meetings every day (but Wednesday) til 18:00.

Midweek at TPAC was the usual Breakouts Day where a record 87 breakouts² were proposed³ and run by members of the community, deftly organized into rooms, timeslots, and a handful of themes⁴ by the W3C Team. In the evening there was an open Plenary Session⁵ open to all instead of an Advisory Committee (AC) meeting, where the result of the recent W3C Board Election⁶ was announced. Congratulations to the newly elected W3C Board of Directors!

I’m still compiling my own notes and observations. For now, the minutes of (nearly?) all the meetings and breakouts are available if you know how to find them.

Hint: W3C minutes URLs have the form (without spaces):

https:// www . w3 . org / YYYY / MM / DD-IRCNAME-minutes . html

E.g. to find the second day (2024-09-24) of CSS Working Group (which just uses "css", all lower case, as their IRC channel name) minutes, you would go to:
* https://www.w3.org/2024/09/24-css-minutes.html

Every Working Group and Community Group links to its IRC Channel (all lowercase), and breakout proposals link to the channel used for each breakout. Thus the minutes links to specific groups on specific days are left as a web discovery exercise for the reader.

Last year: https://tantek.com/2023/262/b1/w3c-technical-plenary-tpac

¹ https://www.w3.org/wiki/TPAC/2024
² https://www.w3.org/2024/09/TPAC/breakouts.html#grid
³ https://github.com/w3c/tpac2024-breakouts/
⁴ https://github.com/orgs/w3c/projects/57/views/1
⁵ https://www.w3.org/2024/09/26-tpac-minutes.html
⁶ https://www.w3.org/2024/09/26-tpac-minutes.html#x215

❤️ to issue 13 of GitHub project “hacienda”

👍 to issue 13 of GitHub project “hacienda”

↳ In reply to a comment on issue 163 of GitHub project “AB-public” > Should we just close this issue then?

No, because this issue as named is to “integrate” which is still a pending task separate from the Team task of “updated proposal”.

> just a reminder to the Team to keep things in sync as needed

No, that is missing half the point of this issue. By “in both directions” (per issue description) I believe it means that the chair/editor of the Vision have explicit work to do in the direction of incorporating content into the Vision document.

I disagree with “Candidate to Close” and do not think it needs AB time to discuss closing at this time, thus am removing that label.

If you believe this issue needs explicit sync-discussion by the AB at this time, please add “Agenda+” instead with your goals for discussion.

👍 to a comment on pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

👍 to a comment on pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

👍 to a comment on pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

👍 to pull request 3 to GitHub project “potential-charters”

👍 to a comment on issue 113 of GitHub project “AB-public”

↳ In reply to issue 64 of GitHub project “AB-public” Closing with editorial change (https://github.com/w3c/AB-public/pull/175) merged to include "and the Vision Task Force" per Vision Task Force resolution: https://www.w3.org/2024/09/25-vision-minutes.html#r03

↳ In reply to issue 13 of GitHub project “AB-public” Removing "needed for Statement" label but leave issue open for further iterative improvements per Vision Task Force resolution:
https://www.w3.org/2024/09/25-vision-minutes.html#r04

↳ In reply to issue 126 of GitHub project “AB-public” It has been a while since the most recent discussions on this issue.

Since then, I will note that I have heard anecdotal experience from the Team and others regarding using the W3C Vision Note in their decision-making and they have found it quite useful, in everything from chartering, to resolving objections (often amciably), to recruiting.

Thus I propose that we close this issue as complete or complete enough to proceed to Statement.

If we get new information or new experiences (where people tried to use the Vision to make hard decisions and found it lacking), then we should open new issue(s) for those specific opportunities for improvement.

↳ In reply to issue 163 of GitHub project “AB-public” The editor and chair of the Vision Task Force met with W3C team members working on a proposed update to the W3C mission statement and we (VisionTF) are currently waiting on an updated proposal for presentation to the Task Force. We hope to see this proposed update sometime this month or next month.

↳ In reply to a comment on issue 87 of GitHub project “tpac2024-breakouts” @github.com/plehegar regarding: “Will the Social Web charter part of the scope of this breakout?”

I support discussing next steps on a Social Web WG charter in this breakout, in particular, using the discussion and links in https://github.com/w3c/strategy/issues/435 to help us make forward progress.

↳ In reply to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy” @github.com/plehegar regarding:
> Can we turn the proposal (https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/WG_Charter_Discussion) into a charter?

I think that proposal made good progress on some sections of a potential future Social Web WG charter as of meetings and discussions 6-12 months ago.

However, given the CG/WG Proposal Stages you linked us to above, I think it would be worth splitting the large table of Deliverables into two tables for consideration:
* Specs published by the prior Social Web WG — for necessary maintenance
* New proposals or draft specs - for working through stages

Without objection, I can do the wiki-table editing to split up that draft table of deliverables so it matches better with the CG/WG Proposal Stages proposal.

(Please thumbs-up as encouragement if you support this)

↳ In reply to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy” @github.com/plehegar I read that FedID CG/WG Proposal Stages proposal (https://github.com/w3c-fedid/Administration/blob/main/proposals-CG-WG.md) and it makes a lot of sense to me as a thoughtful and rational methodology to incubate ideas and proposals in a CG through levels and when to uplift a proposal into the corresponding WG. I support it.

I think this would work well for numerous technical proposals being discussed in the Social Web CG to help them evolve and advance iteratively, and provide a more explicit way to evaluate them (independent of their specific topic or technology) for taking up by a potential future Social Web WG.

👍 to a comment on issue 87 of GitHub project “tpac2024-breakouts”

👍 to issue 87 of GitHub project “tpac2024-breakouts”

👍 to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy”

👍 to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy”

👍 to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy”

👍 to a comment on issue 435 of GitHub project “strategy”

Dear Creative Commons (@creativecommons.org @creativecommons@mastodon.social @creativecommons@x.com),

Can we have CC-NT licenses for no-training (ML/LLM, GenAI in general), just like we have CC-NC for non-commercial?

My previous post¹ reminded me that I’ve been creating, writing, inventing, and then sharing things with #CreativeCommons (CC) #licenses for a long time (I have to see if I can dig up my first use of CC licenses.)

I’ve used and recommended a variety of CC licenses for decades, e.g.
* CC0 — for standards work, e.g. I drove and wrote up https://wiki.mozilla.org/Standards/licensing (with help from lawyers)
* CC-BY — aforementioned blog post (and other snippets of #openSource)
* CC-BY-NC — photos on Flickr (dozens of which have been used in publications²)
* CC-SA — for CASSIS³, which I still consider experimental enough that I chose "share-alike" to deliberately slow its spread, and hopefully reduce mutations (while allowing ports of its functions to other languages)

So I have some idea of what I’m talking about.

There have been LOTS of discussions of the challenges, downsides, and disagreements with sweeping use of copyrighted content to train generated artificial intelligence AKA #genAI software and services, sometimes also called #machineLearning. The most common examples being Large Language Models AKA #LLM, but also models for generating images and video. Smart, intelligent, and well-intentioned people disagree on who has rights to do what, or even who should do what in this regard.

There have been many proposals for new standards, or updates to existing standards like robots.txt etc. but I have not really seen them make noticeable progress. There are also lots of techniques published that attempt to block the spiders and bots being used to crawl and collect content for GenAI, an arms race that ends up damaging well-established popular uses such as web search engines (or making it harder to build a new one).

The brilliant innovation of Creative Commons was to look at the use-cases and intentions of creators publishing on the web in the 2000s and capture them in a small handful of clear licenses with human readable summaries.

Creatives are clamoring for a simple way to opt-out of their publicly published content from being used to train GenAI. New Creative Commons licenses solve this.

This seems like an obvious thing to me. If you can write a license that forbids “commercial use”, then you should be able to write a license that forbids use in “training models”, which respectful / well-written crawlers should (hopefully) respect, in as much as they respect existing CC licenses.

I saw that Creative Commons published a position paper⁴ for for an IETF workshop on this topic, and it unfortunately in my opinion has an overly cautious and pessimistic (outright conservative one could say) outlook, one that frankly I believe the founders of Creative Commons (who dared to boldly create something new) would probably be disappointed in.

First, there is no Creative Commons license on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?

Second, there are no names of authors on the Creative Commons position paper. Why?

Lots of people similarly (to the position paper) said the original Creative Commons licenses were a bad idea, or would not be used, or would be ignored, or would otherwise not work as intended. They were wrong.

If I were a lawyer I would fork those existing licenses and produce such “CC-NT” (for “no-training”) variants (though likely prefix them with something else since "CC" means Creative Commons) just to show it could be done, a proof of concept as it were that creators could use.

Or perhaps a few of us could collect funds to pay an intellectual property lawyer to do so, and of course donate all the work produced to the commons, so that Creative Commons (or someone else) could take it, re-use it, build upon it.

Someone needs to take such a bold step, just as Creative Commons itself took a bold step when they dared to create portable re-usable content licenses that any creator could use (a huge innovation at the time, for content, inspired in no doubt by portable re-usable open source licenses⁵).

References:

¹ https://tantek.com/2024/263/t1/20-years-undohtml-css-resets
² https://flickr.com/search/?user_id=tantek&tags=press&view_all=1
³ https://tantek.com/github/cassis
⁴ Creative Commons Position Paper on Preference Signals, https://www.ietf.org/slides/slides-aicontrolws-creative-commons-position-paper-on-preference-signals-00.pdf
⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-source_software_licenses

20 years and two weeks ago, I came up with undohtml.css and unknowingly invented the mechanism of CSS Resets (AKA reboot or reset style sheets¹) which spawned numerous variants, many still in broad use on the web today.

https://tantek.com/log/2004/09.html#d06t2354

A one sentence problem description, and a short paragraph describing my problem-solving, actions, license, link to less than 300 bytes of code (not counting comments), and a few future thoughts.

The rest of that blog post was about “debug scaffolding”, the part I thought was more interesting at the time.

Eric Meyer (@meyerweb.com @meyerweb@mastodon.social) followed up ~10 days afterwards with his thinking and improvements:
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/09/15/emreallyem-undoing-htmlcss/
where he mentioned “resetting” in passing, but not actually calling it a "reset".

~2.5 years later Eric published “Reset Styles” with further reasoning and improvements:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/12/reset-styles/
describing them as: “reset” or “baseline” set of styles.

Subsequently he iterated in several more blog posts:
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/14/reworked-reset/
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/04/18/reset-reasoning/ — this is Eric’s first post where he explicitly calls them “reset styles”, which I believe is the origin of the eventual phrase “CSS Reset” and “reset style sheets”
* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ (yes a Matrix: Reloaded reference)

~6 months later Eric published his evergreen resource “CSS Tools: Reset CSS”
* https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/
which, as you see within the URL: “css/reset”, is perhaps where the phrase “CSS Reset” comes from, and it’s also the label (link text) he gives that page in his UI about-page² and the first content link in his 404 page³.

My technology invention takeaways from all this:

1. if you find yourself repeatedly solving the same (especially annoying) problem, create a re-usable solution that works for you
2. write up your problem statement / use-case in only one sentence
3. publish your solution (on your personal site⁴), name it something short, with only a short paragraph description, and re-use/remix friendly license (like Creative Commons)

And things not to worry about (that may get in your way to publishing):

1. perfecting or making your solution “big enough” or “the right size”. does it solve your problem? then it’s already the right size.
2. coming up with the perfect name. instead, name it what it does. someone might come up with a better name weeks, months, or years later. let them run with it!
3. waiting to blog multiple things. I could have blogged undohtml.css by itself, probably should have, and instead lumped it into a blog post with another CSS thing I came up with.

Further reading and resources for CSS Resets:

* More history: https://css-tricks.com/reboot-resets-reasoning/
* Large collection: https://perishablepress.com/a-killer-collection-of-global-css-reset-styles/

References:

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reset_style_sheet
² https://meyerweb.com/ui/about.html
³ https://meyerweb.com/404
⁴ https://indieweb.org/

#undoHTML #undoHTMLCSS #reset #CSSreset #resetstyles #webdesign #technology #invention #indieweb