Tags: sharing

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

It turns out I’m still excited about the web

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Notes – David Bushell

David is on board. Who else?

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate “content” generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

1. It’s really, really, really hard work, and
2. It feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they’re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle …I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you’re all set. But if you’re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don’t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey “AI” algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil’s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it’s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone’s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don’t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there’s no reason why one article couldn’t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There’s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there’d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of “playlists” of hand-picked articles. “Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.”

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I’m just throwing this out there. I’d love it if someone were to run with it.

There was a discussion at Clearleft recently about browser support. Rich has more details but the gist of it is that, even though we were confident that we had a good approach to browser support, we hadn’t written it down anywhere. Time to fix that.

This is something I had been thinking about recently anyway—see my post about Baseline and progressive enhancement—so it didn’t take too long to put together a document explaining our approach.

You can find it at browsersupport.clearleft.com

We’re not just making it public. We’re releasing it under a Creative Commons attribution license. You can copy this browser-support policy verbatim, you can tweak it, you can change it, you can do what you like. As long you include a credit to Clearleft, you’re all set.

I think this browser-support policy makes a lot of sense. It certainly beats trying to browser support to specific browsers or version numbers:

We don’t base our browser support on specific browser names and numbers. Instead, our support policy is based on the capabilities of those browsers.

The more organisations adopt this approach, the better it is for everyone. Hence the liberal licensing.

So next time your boss or your client is asking what your official browser-support policy is, feel free to use browsersupport.clearleft.com

Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.

There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:

Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.

Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:

Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.

Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.

Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.

But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:

The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.

The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.

Terence Eden’s Blog

A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.

Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.

No one is policing this.

Robin Rendle — Good and useful writing

The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.

SCALABLE: Save form data to localStorage and auto-complete on refresh

When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).