28 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2023
    1. HTML had blown open document publishing on the internet

      ... which may have really happened, per se, but it didn't wholly incorporate (subsume/cannibalize) conventional desktop publishing, which is still in 2023 dominated by office suites (a la MS Word) or (perversely) browser-based facsimiles like Google Docs. Because the Web as it came to be used turned out to be as a sui generis medium, not exactly what TBL was aiming for, which was giving everything (everything—including every existing thing) its own URL.

    1. Rather than dealing with the invariably convoluted process of moving my content between systems — exporting it from one, importing it into another, fixing any incompatibilities, maybe removing some things that I can’t find a way to port over — I drop my Markdown files into the new website and it mostly Just Works.

      What if you just dropped your pre-rendered static assets into the new system?

  2. Sep 2023
  3. May 2023
    1. If you doubt my claim that internet is broad but not deep, try this experiment. Pick any firm with a presence on the web. Measure the depth of the web at that point by simply counting the bytes in their web. Contrast this measurement with a back of the envelope estimate of the depth of information in the real firm. Include the information in their products, manuals, file cabinets, address books, notepads, databases, and in each employee's head.
    1. The Web does not yet meet its design goal as being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read. That level of immediacy of knowledge sharing waits for easy-to-use hypertext editors to be generally available on most platforms. Most information has in fact passed through publishers or system managers of one sort or another.

  4. Dec 2022
    1. Spend some time with Arc, the new browser from The Browser Company of New York.

      https://arc.net/

      First I've heard of this.

  5. Nov 2022
    1. Donations

      To add some other intermediary services:

      To add a service for groups:

      To add a service that enables fans to support the creators directly and anonymously via microdonations or small donations by pre-charging their Coil account to spend on content streaming or tipping the creators' wallets via a layer containing JS script following the Interledger Protocol proposed to W3C:

      If you want to know more, head to Web Monetization or Community or Explainer

      Disclaimer: I am a recipient of a grant from the Interledger Foundation, so there would be a Conflict of Interest if I edited directly. Plus, sharing on Hypothesis allows other users to chime in.

  6. Oct 2022
    1. @1:10:20

      With HTML you have, broadly speaking, an experience and you have content and CSS and a browser and a server and it all comes together at a particular moment in time, and the end user sitting at a desktop or holding their phone they get to see something. That includes dynamic content, or an ad was served, or whatever it is—it's an experience. PDF on the otherhand is a record. It persists, and I can share it with you. I can deliver it to you [...]

      NB: I agree with the distinction being made here, but I disagree that the former description is inherent to HTML. It's not inherent to anything, really, so much as it is emergent—the result of people acting as if they're dealing in live systems when they shouldn't.

  7. Sep 2022
  8. Aug 2022
  9. Jul 2022
    1. I recently started building a website that lives at wesleyac.com, and one of the things that made me procrastinate for years on putting it up was not being sure if I was ready to commit to it. I solved that conundrum with a page outlining my thoughts on its stability and permanence:

      It's worth introspecting on why any given person might hesitate to feel that they can commit. This is almost always comes down to "maintainability"—websites are, like many computer-based endeavors, thought of as projects that have to be maintained. This is a failure of the native Web formats to appreciably make inroads as a viable alternative to traditional document formats like PDF and Word's .doc/.docx (or even the ODF black sheep). Many people involved with Web tech have difficulty themselves conceptualizing Web documents in these terms, which is unfortunate.

      If you can be confident that you can, today, bang out something in LibreOffice, optionally export to PDF, and then dump the result at a stable URL, then you should feel similarly confident about HTML. Too many people have mental guardrails preventing them from grappling with the relevant tech in this way.

  10. Jun 2022
  11. May 2022
    1. Building and sharing an app should be as easy as creating and sharing a video.

      This is where I think Glitch goes wrong. Why such a focus on apps (and esp. pushing the same practices and overcomplicated architecture as people on GitHub trying to emulate the trendiest devops shovelware)?

      "Web" is a red herring here. Make the Web more accessible for app creation, sure, but what about making it more accessible (and therefore simpler) for sharing simple stuff (like documents comprising the written word), too? Glitch doesn't do well at this at all. It feels less like a place for the uninitiated and more like a place for the cool kids who are already slinging/pushing Modern Best Practices hang out—not unlike societal elites who feign to tether themself to the mast of helping the downtrodden but really use the whole charade as machine for converting attention into prestige and personal wealth. Their prices, for example, reflect that. Where's the "give us, like 20 bucks a year and we'll give you better alternative to emailing Microsoft Office documents around (that isn't Google Sheets)" plan?

    1. However when you look UNDERNEATH these cloud services, you get a KERNEL and a SHELL. That is the "timeless API" I'm writing to.

      It's not nearly as timeless as a person might have themselves believe, though. (That's the "predilection" for certain technologies and doing things in a certain way creeping in and exerting its influence over what should otherwise be clear and sober unbiased thought.)

      There's basically one timeless API, and that means written procedures capable of being carried out by a human if/when everything else inevitably fails. The best format that we have for conveying the content comprising those procedures are the formats native to the Web browser—esp. HTML. Really. Nothing else even comes close. (NB: pixel-perfect reproduction à la PDF is out of scope, and PDF makes a bunch of tradeoffs to try to achieve that kind of fidelity which turns out to make it unsuitable/unacceptable in a way that HTML is not, if you're being honest with your criteria, which is something that most people who advocate for PDF's benefits are not—usually having deceived even themselves.)

      Given that Web browsers also expose a programming environment, the next logical step involves making sure these procedures are written to exploit that environment as a means of automation—for doing the drudge work in the here and now (i.e., in the meantime, when things haven't yet fallen apart).

  12. Mar 2022
  13. citeseerx.ist.psu.edu citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
    1. The complete overlapping of readers’ and authors’ roles are important evolution steps towards a fully writable web, as is the ability of deriving personal versions of other authors’ pages.
  14. Feb 2022
  15. Sep 2021
    1. This is not a published Chrome extension and it uses an odd workaround to circumvent Chrome security. So I'm not sure how safe it is. Keep an eye on it; if it develops enough, it could be quite useful.

  16. May 2021
    1. editor-browser tool sets

      This hasn't happened yet, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We seem to be moving away from a read/write web, with authors only being able to edit content they've created on domains that they control. The closest I've seen to this is the Beaker Browser.

  17. Feb 2021
  18. Jan 2021
  19. May 2020
  20. Apr 2020
    1. So in the case of Chrome, the developers have essentially said "we will leave this to the user to decide in their preferences whether they want autocomplete to work or not. If you don't want it, don't enable it in your browser". However, it appears that this is a little over-zealous on their part for my liking, but it is the way it is.
  21. Dec 2019
  22. Jul 2019
    1. Comparison between web browsers

      This is one of the best resources on web privacy I've ever seen. I warmly recommend it!

  23. Jan 2019
  24. Jan 2016
  25. Nov 2014