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.

This is less than ideal. Besides non-technical people needing to wade into the middle of (what very well might appear to them to be a blob of) JS to update their site, here are some things that Zonelets depends on JS for:

1. The entire contents of the post archives page
2. The footer
3. The page title

This has real consequences for e.g. the archivability for a Zonelets site.

The JS-editing problem itself could be partially ameliorated by with something like the polyglot trick used on flems.io and/or the way triple scripts do runtime feature detection using shunting. When the script is sourced via script element from another page, it behaves as JS, but when visited directly as the browser destination it is treated like HTML and has its own DOM tree for the script itself to make the necessary modifications easier. Instead of requiring the user to edit it as freeform text, provide a structured editing interface, so e.g. adding a new post is as simple as clicking the synthesized "+" button in the list of posts, copying the URL of the post in question, and then pasting it in—to a form field. The Zonelets script itself should take care of munging it into the appropriate format upon form "submission". It can also, right there, take care of the escaping issue described in the FAQ—allow the user to preview the generated post title and fix it up if need be.

Additionally, the archives page need not by dynamically generated by the client—or rather, it can be dynamically filled in exactly once per update—on the author's machine, and then be reified into static HTML, with the user being instructed to save it and overwrite the served version. This gets too unwieldy for next/prev links in the footer, but (a) those are non-essential, and don't even get displayed for no-JS users right now, anyway; and (b) can be seen to violate the entire "UNPROFESSIONAL" etthos.

Alternatively, the entire editing experience can be complimented with bookmarklets.

The problem almost certainly starts with the conception of what we're doing as "building websites".

When we do so, we mindset of working on systems

If your systems work compromises the artifacts then it's not good work

This is part of a broader phenomenon, which is that when computers are involved with absolutely anything people seem to lose their minds good sensibilities just go out the window

low expectations from everyone everyone is so used to excusing bad work

sui generis medium

violates the principle of least power

what we should be doing when grappling with the online publishing problem—which is what this is; that's all it is—is, instead of thinking in terms of working on systems, thinking about this stuff in such a way that we never lose sight of the basics; the thing that we aspire to do when we want to put together a website is to deal in

documents and their issuing authority

That is, a piece of content and its name (the name is a qualified name that we recognize as valid only when the publisher has the relevant authority for that name, determined by its prefix; URLs)

that's it that's all a Web site is

anything else is auxiliary

really not a lot different from what goes on when you publish a book take a manuscript through final revisions for publication and then get an ISBN issued for it

so the problem comes from the industry

people "building websites" like politicians doing bad work and then their constituents not holding them accountable because that's not how politics works you don't get held accountable for doing bad work

so the thing to do is to recognize that if we're thinking about "websites" from any other position things that technical people try to steer us in the direction of like selecting a particular system and then propping it up and how to interact with a given system to convince it to do the thing we want it to do— then we're doing it wrong

we're creating content and then giving it a name

Around 1:48:00

What if every library that you use had, like, some interactive documentation or interactive representation? [...] The author could maybe add annotations.

This is how I feel about most people's personal websites. Few people have homepages these days, but even for people who do, even fewer of those homes have anyone really living there. All their interesting stuff is going on on Twitter, GitHub, comments on message boards...

Really weird when this manifests as a bunch of people having really strong opinions about static site tech stacks and justifications for frontend tech that in practice they never use, because the content from any one of their profiles on the mainstream social networks outstrips their "home" page 100x to 1.

Funnily enough, I've been on an intellectual bent in the other direction: that we've poisoned our thinking in terms of systems, for the worse. This shows up when trying to communicate about the Web, for example.

It's surprisingly difficult to get anyone to conceive of the Web as a medium suited for anything except the "live" behavior exhibited by the systems typically encountered today. (Essentially, thin clients in the form of single-page apps that are useless without a host on the other end for servicing data and computation requests.) The belief/expectation that content providers should be given a pass for producing brittle collections of content that should be considered merely transitory in nature just leads to even more abuse of the medium.

Even actual programs get put into a ruddy state by this sort of thinking. Often, I don't even care about the program itself, so much as I care about the process it's applying, but maintainers make this effectively inextricable from the implementation details of the program itself (what OS version by which vendor does it target, etc.)

Nevermind LibreOffice Draw, you can use LibreOffice Writer to author the actual content. That this is never seriously pushed as an option (even, to my knowledge, by the LibreOffice folks themselves) is an indictment of the computing industry.

Having said that, I guess there is some need to curate a set of templates for small and medium size businesses who want their stuff to "pop".

Indeed. Web literacy among the masses is pitifully low. Browsermakers are certainly to blame for being poor stewards. Hot Valley startups are responsible as well. (See https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/.)

This guy gets it.

Great way to put it. One thing that I keep trying to hammer is that the "minimum thing" here looks more like "open up a word processor, use the default settings, focus on capturing the content—i.e. writing things out just as you would if you were dumping these thoughts into a plain text file or keeping it to, say, the subset of Markdown that allows for paragraph breaks, headings, and maybe ordered and unordered lists—and then use your word processor's export-to-HTML support to recast it into the format that lets use their browser to read it, and then FTP/scp/rsync that to a server somewhere".

This sounds like I'm being hyperbolic, and I kind of am, but I'm also kind of not. The process described is still more reasonable than the craziness that people (HN- and GitHub-type people) end up leaping into when they think of blogging on a personal website. Think about that. Literally uploading Microsoft Word-generated posts to a server* is better than the purpose-built workflows that people are otherwise coming up with (and pushing way too hard).

(*Although, just please, if you are going to do this, then do at least export to HTML and don't dump them online as PDFs, a la berkshirehathaway.com.)

Simone, Costanza De, Antonella Battisti, and Azzurra Ruggeri. “Differential Impact of Web Habits and Active Navigation on Adolescents’ Online Learning.” PsyArXiv, March 1, 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hsvc4.

Participatory: web literacy

3 of these 4 are goals for my classroom without tech even on my mind, but with tech, they can transcend even further into the daily lives of digitally literate students

design, revise, remix, MAKE SOMETHING

searching, determining credibility, etc.

how do we make sure that students are not just "skimming" or doing #2???

all things that can easily be worked into any curriculum that involves technology

as teachers, we need to connect them to the world around them.. this world is digital in the modern age, so we can offer them not only the opportunity to do good for others but also for themselves

we can prepare them for the future workforce; many jobs require certain skills with tech - managing social media, programming, contacting customers via chat and phone, etc.

Web Literacy 2.0 discusses how people use web literacy in their everyday lives. For example, "navigating the web" needs to be taught just as the concepts of print do. Quality online readers know where to look, what to ignore, and how to locate information. Writing on the web is also a skill that needs to be explicitly taught. A writer must be able to learn through making and creating. They must be able to communicate their ideas in written word, through presentations as well as through well organized and chosen aesthetics. Rating 10/10

Video: Alan November TEDx talk "Do you know how to use google?" We need web literacy for teachers as well

Digital Literacy Framework of Points

Completely agree with this statement!

This is an essential part of PBL, internet research is the essential skill students need to be able to obtain information and analyze their findings.

This can be seen as a problem or as an advantage, information is always changing, ideas are been created and developed. Students and teachers do not need to wait for books to print materials to be accessible, is right there.. one click away, now how we find and analyze information on the web is the tool our students need to become web literate .

students using this sites need to have web-literacy skills to obtain accurate and relevant information.

Educators guiding these students should have the necessary skills to effectively modify the route of the inquiry. some may argue that pre-k students are too young for this projects, but with the right guidance even little ones can benefit from it.

TPACK and web-literacy has been proven to help student to deductive evaluate, organize and synthesizing information effectively

higher level of thinking! this skills will help students to become leaders rather to recall information. In the end of the day, everyone can search and find imformation at anytime, but can they find the "right" information?

when directing students to google searchs, is important to guide our students to "get their web literacy hat on" this means to use their reading strategies to ensure the information is valid, important and related to our search.

using Wikipedia as a source of information

Example of importance of fact-check. How to spy lies based on a truthful story.

Some ideas for checking Facts in the web

Even though I consider myself web literate enough to tell the difference between a personal and academic page, I honestly didn't know that the "~" denoted that. I really need to get better about thinking of web addresses and code as a language (which they are).

democracy and web literacy

Chatting with Mozilla's current person in charge about open practice/pedagogy. We could quote her here

What evidence supports this claim. Are recruiters reporting that college graduates are unable to show proficiency in fact-checking sources or evaluating and verifying information they find on the internet?

Thoughts on this resource? Civic Online Reasoning