The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden
If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.
Link tags: web
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POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world
This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:
Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.
Long live hypertext! – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden
This is how I write:
As an online writer, my philosophy is link maximalism; links add another layer to my writing, whether I’m linking to an expansion of a particular idea or another person’s take, providing evidence or citation, or making a joke by juxtaposing text and target. Links reveal personality as much as the text. Linking allows us to stretch our ideas, embedding complexity, acknowledging ambiguity, holding contradictions.
Coming home | A Working Library
While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
Mandy’s writing positively soars and sings in this beautiful piece!
The web we want: A beginner’s guide to the IndieWeb · Paul Robert Lloyd
This is a terrific presentation from Paul. He gives a history lesson and then focuses on what makes the indie web such a powerful idea (hint: it’s not about specific technologies).
An Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers - Webventures
In an earlier era, startups could build on the web and, if one browser didn’t provide the features they needed, they could just recommend that their users try a better one. But that’s not possible on iOS.
I’m extremly concerned about the newest bug in iOS 18:
Whaa? That’s just shockingly dreadful!
Introducing TODS – a typographic and OpenType default stylesheet | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
This is a very handy piece of work by Rich:
The idea is to set sensible typographic defaults for use on prose (a column of text), making particular use of the font features provided by OpenType. The main principle is that it can be used as starting point for all projects, so doesn’t include design-specific aspects such as font choice, type scale or layout (including how you might like to set the line-length).
Nic Chan
What an excellent personal website!
The Neverending Story
Since the early days of the web, large corporations have seemingly always wanted more than the web platform or web standards could offer at any given moment. Whether they were aiming for cross-platform-compatibility, more advanced capabilities, or just to be the one runtime/framework/language to rule them all, there’s always been a company that believes they can “fix” it or “own” it.
Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.
What Is React.js? (Webbed Briefs)
Its proponents can be weird, it takes itself far too seriously, and its documentation is interminable. These are some ways that some people have described Christianity. This video is about React.js.
Indieweb Vs Indie Web - fyr.io
So the human web, the people net, the your-net. Whatever it is called, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it is yours, if you want it. If you’re tired of the conglomerate-net, disgusted by the commercialised web, sick of being the product, allergic to The Algorithm, then you can have something else. Something of your own.
You want to upload your artwork? Write fanfic? World build? Document your developing Sistrum-playing skills? Discuss your experiences slice-of-life style? Experiment with poetry?
Do it.
Use wordpress if you want. Use Blogger. Hell, use Frontpage 98 if you want. Or learn some HTML And CSS and type it all up in notepad.exe. Or just HTML, don’t even bother with the CSS. Just make it yours.
Raw dog the open web!
In our current digital landscape, where a corporate algorithm tells us what to read, watch, drink, eat, wear, smell like, and sound like, human curation of the web is an act of revolution. A simple list of hyperlinks published under a personal domain name is subversive.
HTML Web Components Can Have a Little Shadow DOM, As A Treat | Scott Jehl, Web Designer/Developer
This is an interesting thought from Scott: using Shadow DOM in HTML web components but only as a way of providing sort-of user-agent styles:
providing some default, low-specificity styles for our slotted light-dom HTML elements while allowing them to be easily overridden.
HTML Web Components Make Progressive Enhancement And CSS Encapsulation Easier! | CSS-Tricks
Three great examples of HTML web components:
What I hope is that you now have the same sort of epiphany that I had when reading Jeremy Keith’s post: HTML Web Components are an HTML-first feature.
The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog
After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.
Robin Rendle — Instability
The whole point of the web is that we’re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesn’t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.
But that instability was always there.
No Web Without Women
From Ada Lovelace to Nicola Pellow.
WP2 - The requirement for browsers operating on iOS devices to use Apple’s WebKit browser engine [PDF]
The Competition & Markets Authority brings receipts:
The requirement that all browsers on the iOS operating system use a specific version of the WebKit browser engine controlled by Apple, means that there is no competition between browser engines on the platform. Browser vendors cannot switch to an alternative browser engine or make changes to the version of WebKit used on iOS. Similarly, consumers are unable to switch to a browser based on an alternative browser engine. We consider that the lack of competitive pressure is likely to reduce Apple’s incentives to improve WebKit.
MSEdgeExplainers/WebInstall/explainer_same_domain.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers
This proposal is exactly what I was asking for!
C’mon browsers, let’s make this happen!