Tags: open

Invokers (Explainer) | Open UI

This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.

Pluralistic: The (open) web is good, actually (13 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since.

A great round-up from Cory, featuring heavy dollops of Anil and Aaron.

[this is aaronland] generative adversarial therapy sessions

Mobile phones and the “app economy”, an environment controlled by exactly two companies and designed to extract a commission from almost every interaction and to promote native and not-portable applications over web applications. But we also see the same behaviour from so-called “native to the web” companies like Facebook who have explicitly monetized reach, access and discovery. Facebook is also the company that gave the world React which is difficult not to understand as deliberate attempt to embrace and extend, to redefine, HTML itself.

Perversely, nearly everything about the mobile/app economy is built on, and designed to use, HTTP precisely because it’s a common and easy to implement standard free and unencumbered by licensing.

The #ViewSource Affordance

Engineers who care about the open culture of the web should recognize that the threats to that culture come not only from Digital Enclosure by large, private companies of the most important pieces of the web.

They should also recognize the risks of Technical Enclosure, and the non-technical value of the #ViewSource affordance in perpetuating the open culture of web development.

Documentation for GPTBot - OpenAI API

Now that the horse has bolted—and ransacked the web—you can shut the barn door:

To disallow GPTBot to access your site you can add the GPTBot to your site’s robots.txt:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Openly Licensed Images, Audio and More | Openverse

A search engine for images and audio that’s either under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain.

Mona Sans & Hubot Sans

Two new lovely open source variable fonts from Github.

The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time | The New Yorker

This story of the Network Time Protocol hammers home the importance of infrastructure and its maintenance:

Technology companies worth billions rely on open-source code, including N.T.P., and the maintenance of that code is often handled by a small group of individuals toiling away without pay.

Remix Icon - Open source icon library

I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.

“Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc” – Terence Eden’s Blog

I love this: Terence takes eleven years to reflect on a comment I made on stage at an event here in Brighton. It’s all about the longevity of the web compared to native apps:

If you wrote an app for an early version of iOS or Android, it simply won’t run on modern hardware or software. APIs have changed, SDKs weren’t designed with forward compatibility, and app store requirements have evolved.

The web has none of that. The earliest websites are viewable on modern browsers.

As wrote at the time, I may have been juicing things up for entertainment:

Now here’s the thing when it comes to any discussion about mobile or the web or anything else of any complexity: an honest discussion would result in every single question being answered with “it depends”. A more entertaining discussion, on the other hand, would consist of deliberately polarised opinions. We went for the more entertaining discussion.

But I think this still holds true for me today:

The truth is that the whole “web vs. native” thing doesn’t interest me that much. I’m as interested in native iOS development as I am in native Windows development or native CD-ROM development. On a timescale measured in years, they are all fleeting, transient things. The web abides.

The week the open web won – Hi, I’m Heather Burns

So to me, this blog represents the original promise of the open web.

The one that’s here, and still is here, and always has been here, and is available to you.

Right now.

The one where you can speak the truths that you believe without the permission, or the editorial control, or the power dynamics, of anyone claiming to hold authority over you; or, perhaps, anyone keen to impose it.

Heather takes a break from her relentless crusading in favour of users against the idiocy of the UK government and reflects on the joy of doing it all from her own personal website.

And perhaps you should too, on your own blog, owned on your own hosting space, using your own words, and speaking your own truth. That sounds like a good little weekend project, don’t you think?

Notes from a gopher:// site - daverupert.com

The result of adding more constraints means that the products have a broader appeal due to their simple interface. It reminds me of a Jeremy Keith talk I heard last month about programming languages like CSS which have a simple interface pattern: selector { property: value }. Simple enough anyone can learn. But simple doesn’t mean it’s simplistic, which gives me a lot to think about.

A Web Renaissance

Thanks to the mistrust of big tech, the creation of better tools for developers, and the weird and wonderful creativity of ordinary people, we’re seeing an incredibly unlikely comeback: the web is thriving again.

Smart analysis from Anil, though I’m not sure I’d agree with his emphasis on tools and frameworks—it’s the technology built into browsers that has really come along in leaps and bounds, allowing people to do more with less code.

But then there’s this:

So if we have the tech, then why hasn’t it happened already? The biggest thing that may be missing is just awareness of the modern web’s potential. Unlike the Facebooks and Googles of the world, the open, creative web doesn’t have a billion-dollar budget for promoting itself. Years of control from the tech titans has resulted in the conventional wisdom that somehow the web isn’t “enough”, that you have to tie yourself to proprietary platforms if you want to build a big brand or a big business.

True! Anil also points to an act of rebellion and resistance:

Get your own site going, though, and you’ll have a sustainable way of being in control of your own destiny online.

What is the Web? - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

“Be linkable and accessible to any client” is a provocative test for whether something is “of the web”.

Open Web Advocacy

A grassroots coalistion of web developers lobbying to get Apple to allow fair competition on iOS.

We have identified the #AppleBrowserBan as the number one threat to the future of the open web.

Canned web development — Jeremy Wagner

Our mental model for how we build for the web is too reliant on canned solutions to unique problems.

This is very perceptive indeed.

Compounding this problem is that too few boot camps are preparing new web developers to think critically about what problems are best solved by JavaScript and which aren’t — and that those problems that are best solved by JavaScript can be solved without engaging in frivolous framework whataboutism. The question developers should ask more often when grappling with framework shortcomings shouldn’t be “what about that other framework?”, but rather “what’s best for the user experience?”.

The web is a miracle

I wonder what kinds of conditions would need to be true for another platform to be built in a similar way? Lots of people have tried, but none of them have the purity of participation for the love of it that the web has.

Manrope – free sans-serif variable font

This font is a crossover of different font types: it is semi-condensed, semi-rounded, semi-geometric, semi-din, semi-grotesque. It employs minimal stoke thickness variations and a semi-closed aperture.

Inspired by Terence Eden’s example, I applied for membership of the AMP advisory committee last year. To my surprise, my application was successful.

I’ve spent the time since then participating in good faith, but I can’t do that any longer. Here’s what I wrote in my resignation email:

Hi all,

As mentioned at the end of the last call, I’m stepping down from the AMP advisory committee.

I can’t in good faith continue to advise on the AMP project for the OpenJS Foundation when it has become clear to me that AMP remains a Google product, with only a subset of pieces that could even be considered open source.

If I were to remain on the advisory committee, my feelings of resentment about this situation would inevitably affect my behaviour. So it’s best for everyone if I step away now instead of descending into outright sabotage. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’d like to thank the OpenJS Foundation for allowing me to participate. It’s been an honour to watch Tobie and Jory in action.

I wish everyone well and I hope that the advisory committee can successfully guide the AMP project towards a happy place where it can live out its final days in peace.

I don’t have a replacement candidate to nominate but I’ll ask around amongst other independent sceptical folks to see if there’s any interest.

All the best,

Jeremy

I wrote about the fundamental problem with Google AMP when I joined the advisory committee:

This is an interesting time for AMP …whatever AMP is.

See, that’s been a problem with Google AMP from the start. There are multiple defintions of what AMP is.

There’s the collection of web components. If that were all AMP is, it would be a very straightforward project, similar to other collections of web components (like Polymer). But then there’s the concept of validation. The validation comes from a set of rules, defined by Google. And there’s the AMP cache, or more accurately, Google hosting.

Only one piece of that trinity—the collection of web components—is eligible for the label of being open source, and even that’s a stretch considering that most of the contributions come from full-time Google employees. The other two parts are firmly under Google’s control.

I was hoping it was a marketing problem. We spent a lot of time on the advisory committee trying to figure out ways of making it clearer what AMP actually is. But it was a losing battle. The phrase “the AMP project” is used to cover up the deeply interwingled nature of its constituent parts. Bits of it are open source, but most of it is proprietary. The OpenJS Foundation doesn’t seem like a good home for a mostly-proprietary project.

Whenever a representative from Google showed up at an advisory committee meeting, it was clear that they viewed AMP as a Google product. I never got the impression that they planned to hand over control of the project to the OpenJS Foundation. Instead, they wanted to hear what people thought of their project. I’m not comfortable doing that kind of unpaid labour for a large profitable organisation.

Even worse, Google representatives reminded us that AMP was being used as a foundational technology for other Google products: stories, email, ads, and even some weird payment thing in native Android apps. That’s extremely worrying.

While I was serving on the AMP advisory committee, a coalition of attorneys general filed a suit against Google for anti-competitive conduct:

Google designed AMP so that users loading AMP pages would make direct communication with Google servers, rather than publishers’ servers. This enabled Google’s access to publishers’ inside and non-public user data.

We were immediately told that we could not discuss an ongoing court case in the AMP advisory committee. That’s fair enough. But will it go both ways? Or will lawyers acting on Google’s behalf be allowed to point to the AMP advisory committee and say, “But AMP is an open source project! Look, it even resides under the banner of the OpenJS Foundation.”

If there’s even a chance of the AMP advisory committee being used as a Potempkin village, I want no part of it.

But even as I’m noping out of any involvement with Google AMP, my parting words have to be about how impressed I am with the OpenJS Foundation. Jory and Tobie have been nothing less than magnificent in their diplomacy, cat-herding, schedule-wrangling, timekeeping, and other organisational superpowers that I’m crap at.

I sincerely hope that Google isn’t taking advantage of the OpenJS Foundation’s kind-hearted trust.

PlymouthPress – A Letterpress Image Font

An experimental image font made using the University of Plymouth’s unique letterpress workshop.

Grungy!

The font is intended for display purposes only, and not is suitable for body text.