Web Non-Standards and Other 2020s Headaches

Big Tech's grip on developer resources is so unthinkably tight that simply, new devs do not know how to build websites and apps that won't violate their users' privacy. But yeah, let's all wave our arms and spread the "Privacy is not Dead" meme.

The forthcoming content-packager app after reorganisation of the interface. In general aura it feels a bit like posting on an old-school forum, except the live preview is ever-present, and it responds instantly to changes in the Markdown. This view shows an HTML5 image block, which has SEO-viable markup and is inserted via an upload-style dialogue. Alternatively, images can be inserted via a shortcode or standard Markdown.

To keep you up to date on my forthcoming content-packager, whilst simultaneously bemoaning the state of the technological world, I'm stopping off for a quick rant on Web Standards. Far from promoting universal compatibility, as any Standards regime should, Web Standards - or Web Non-Standards, to dub them a little more appropriately - have succeeded only in making exclusion and digital dictatorship the default.

For anyone who doesn't regularly read this blog, I'm in the latter throes of building a radical desktop publishing app, which sits in the gap between a website-builder and a post-Microsoft word-processor, and is designed to take a hardline stance against surveillance giants. I've learned many things along the way, but perhaps more than anything else, I've learned that trying to maintain both competitiveness and compatibility in a piece of web-tech is near impossible. By order of ye interwebz' controlling forces.

Content-Packager Update

Take things offline and the dynamics totally change. The overheads disappear. No one needs to pay for anything. The subjugation stops, and it's Big Tech who are locked out of the party - not you.

Cyberquotes will provide a flexible means to cite interesting and funny people from ANY online platform.

In early June I documented a forthcoming content-packaging system, designed to run offline, cross-platform, with no software installation necessary. This has become a pretty serious project - for me at least - and I want no one to be in any doubt that the app is on its way. These things are fairly straightforward to codge up to an experimental standard, but crafting them into decent and widely usable apps is a lot of work for one person.

The single biggest challenge through the course of the app's development has been browsers' general reluctance to communicate with files when there's no server or authentication layer.

From the beginning, the goal with this app was to provide a real alternative to surveillance culture, rather than just whining about it on a blog. I honestly couldn't find one online platform that was a real solution. I'd dig up some tiny indie startup via Marginalia - proprietor assuring users it was all about independence and content. Then I'd find that self-same proprietor in dev land extolling the virtues of his Cloudflare CDN and talking about users like they were beads on an abacus.

Coming Soon: A Free, Serverless, Hyper-Private Content-Packager for Writers

"No installations, no server, no logins, no network connections, no command-line configurations, no technical knowledge required. Click one icon and the editor fires up in your browser - OFFLINE.

The forthcoming packager in dark mode. Write to the left-hand pane in simple Markdown, and the fully-formatted post is built as a live preview in the right-hand pane as you type. Save when you're done. Distribute as you please.

Have you noticed that the louder a tech company chants the word "privacy!", the more its products involve you connecting to someone else's computer?

Some time over the past quarter of a century, we've managed to forget that "private" used to mean "NO ONE ELSE'S BUSINESS".

Not: "No one else's business except Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, Facebook, Fastly, Github, GoDaddy, your ISP, your browser provider, three San Francisco-based 'nonprofits', and an 'independent' team of React developers in Palo Alto".

Just: "No one else's business".

Somehow, we've allowed the above collection of rampant datamongers to persuade us that in fact, "privacy" means taking everything we used to do offline in actual private, and putting it on someone else's computer. Then chucking fourteen middlemen with industrial-scale data suction pumps into the connecting passage - all of whom, of course, claim they're somehow not collecting any of the data.