Tag: open web

We should preserve the past on the web, and learn to make sites even more future-safe. The web is where human knowlege accumulates. #

It’s time for tech people to have values, as journalism, medicine and law do. Deliberately taking features out of the web, claiming pieces of the web as corporate property, forcing the history offline, all are terrible abuses of what make the Internet great. An ethical technologist would refuse to do this work.#

When we teach people to create technology, they should learn to respect and enhance the things that make the Internet great, not help modern day robber barons appropriate them. #

The Internet is a place for the people, like parks, libraries, museums, historic places. It’s okay if corporations want to exploit the net, like DisneyLand or cruise lines, but not at the expense of the natural features of the net. #

Source: Scripting News: The Internet is going the wrong way

For the past couple months, I’ve been using this site to keep a log of changes I make to my long-form site. I tag these posts “changelog” and include a link to them in the header menu.

WordPress, which this site runs on, supports querying a tag intersection. I’ve found this helpful when searching through my changelog. For example, to query this site for all changelog posts pertaining to education, use this link formulation.

https://rnbn.blog/tag/changelog+education/

If you follow education, there’s some interesting stuff in there.

Since these changelog posts link back to the posts they’re describing, pingbacks show up in the comments of the referenced posts. This results in reciprocal links between the posts on my long-form blog and the changelog posts on this site, handled automatically. That’s nice. Unfortunately, since the changelog posts do not have titles, all that shows up in the text of the pingback link is the name of this site. For now, I’m being lazy and living with it.

I updated “Compassion is not coddling. Design for real life.” with a selection from “Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk”.

“Edge case” is, to be frank, a phrase that should be banned from all developer conversations (and then tattooed onto the forehead of anyone who continues to use it).

When we say “Edge Case” we mean “Stress Case”. In their book, Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer & Sara Wachter-Boettcher point out that what we glibly call an “edge case” is normally an enormously stressful event for a user.

It often accompanies high emotions, stress, physical problems, financial problems, etc. When we discount and dismiss the “edge case”, we’re actually saying “I don’t care about that particular user’s stressful situation”.

Source: Dear Developer, The Web Isn’t About You | sonniesedge.co.uk

I also dropped in these lines.

Without the social model and intersectionality, we’re just bikeshedding injustice. There is no path to inclusive design that does not involve direct confrontation with injustice. “If a direct confrontation of injustice is missing from our strategies or initiatives or movements, that means we are recreating the conditions we’re pretending to want to destroy.”

I’ll further explore the common ground between the social model, intersectionality, and design for real life in a later update, or perhaps a new post.

The way the soup has hit the fan with Cambridge Analytica kind of looks like a bat signal to save the open web. 

We’ve literally placed the open web behind a paywall, simply by not giving a shit.

With authoritarianism on the rise globally, now more than ever is the time to invest in a healthy, decentralised, diverse, and open World Wide Web.

We’ve forced millions onto closed platforms as we’ve built a web that’s unusable from anywhere else than our privileged urban bubbles.

WordPress has democratised screwing up 30% of the web

Companies from the WordPress industry, together with an ally no less powerful than Google, have joined forces to support contributions to the betterment of the WordPress ecosystem at scale.
A 30% chunk of the web potentially being improved by a single component.

Even though individual team members go great lengths in welcoming every new voice, and treat every concern with respect—at their current pace both Gutenberg, and AMP have struggled to build trust in the integrity of their underlying decision making within their communities.

The real problem with performance on the web is that the recipe for fast web pages is boring simple:
Load less stuff.

Performance, careful design thinking, good citizenship on the web—these things are virtues. You have to practice them.
AMP wraps all these things into a convenient package and enables you to use instead of practice. There’s no need to change, to learn, to understand, to perhaps become a better person on the way even—just use new stuff.

Apparently, we have to be incentivised into our own future, because we can’t be bothered. But it sure sucks.

WordPress is AMP’s ticket to 30% of the web.

I had thought the crisis of the open web could be solved with education, flanked by a standardised, whitelisted library of well-optimised WordPress components—Accelerated WordPress, essentially, or WordPress lite.
In both, my ignorance and arrogance towards AMP I hadn’t even noticed AMP was pretty much just what I believed was needed—only a lot more advanced.

I thought I hated AMP. I now realise that what I hated was the fact that a thing like AMP has become necessary, and that I—like you, probably—have contributed to its becoming a necessity.

Source: AMP and WordPress will scale performance on the web for millions of users, hate it or love it | GlückPress

“The young progressives grew up in a time when platform monopolies like Facebook were so dominant that they seemed inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet. To criticize social media, therefore, was to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression.”

The older progressives, however, remember the internet before the platform monopolies. They were concerned to observe a small number of companies attempt to consolidate much of the internet into their for-profit, walled gardens.

To them, social media is not the internet. It was instead a force that was co-opting the internet – including the powerful capabilities listed above – in ways that would almost certainly lead to trouble.

The social internet describes the general ways in which the global communication network and open protocols known as “the internet” enable good things like connecting people, spreading information, and supporting expression and activism.

Social media, by contrast, describes the attempt to privatize these capabilities by large companies within the newly emerged algorithmic attention economy, a particularly virulent strain of the attention sector that leverages personal data and sophisticated algorithms to ruthlessly siphon users’ cognitive capital.

Source: On Social Media and Its Discontents – Study Hacks – Cal Newport

See also,