Tantek Çelik

The article doesn't define the "open web," and platforms like Facebook and Twitter would seem to mostly follow the dictates set out in Tantek's original definition.[1] So it's hard to guess at what the author means -- Facebook and Twitter aren't "the open web" by tautology, basically. It's really hard to engage with the author's arguments that way.

What is trivial to understand is that the author's proposed remedy doesn't work:

> The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy. We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.

The fundamental problem with this is that siloing content the way the author suggests (publications with strong identities and paywalls to get readers to give money in exchange for content) breaks hyperlinks. It breaks sharing. Paywalls work when there's a marginal benefit to knowing something that someone else doesn't -- say, it helps you pick stocks better than the next guys. Otherwise, all else being equal, the article I can share with my friends, link to in my blog post, that I can engage with and respond to and have other people able to read the same article I am -- that's far more valuable than the article that I…

Here are a few links from my bookmark folder on the subject, in no particular order:

How to use contrast to your advantage-
http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/rule-three-contrast-contrast-contrast/

Use colors that have varying intensities, not just differnet colors. Focus on how it looks in greyscale
http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/becoming-a-master-designer-rule-two-limit-your-colors/

Visualizing Fitt's Law
http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/

Software Has personality.
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2007/09/lightrooms_goals_1.html

Copy sites you like, such as:
http://orderedlist.com/articles/single-line-css#comments
or http://www.joyent.com/

How to make your designs suck less:
http://jimwhimpey.com/blog/2007/simple-ways-to-help-your-design-suck-less-1/

Load faster, by doing a low-res version first.
http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=464

How to do sound design
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/why_is_that_thing_beeping_a_sound_design_primer

More on Sound Design
http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/03/22/how-to-make-user-interfaces-musical.html

Use smart color pickers
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6434

Whitespace Matters!
http://alistapart.com/articles/whitespace

You can make a UI feel responsive, by minimizing the number of clicks
http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813

Write Production UIs, never use…

I'm not outraged, but I think it's a self-defeating move for Facebook. Which is fine, since Facebook - as a walled garden which is opposed to the Open Web - needs to go away anyway.

Edit:

I'm thinking more and more that I will probably be deleting my Facebook account sometime in the not too distant future. I'd really rather be doing all of my information sharing / browsing / interaction using a pure Open Web[1] oriented platform and that's exactly what Facebook is not.

Not sure exactly what form this will take, but I want to move to a platform which is not a walled garden, and is based on open and decentralized standards like RSS/Atom, ActivityStrea.ms, ActivityPub, RDF, FOAF, SIOC, XMPP, NNTP, SMTP, and the like.

A proper Web platform should allow anyone to participate on their own terms without some corporation being able to arbitrarily decide the terms of what you can do, while simultaneously profiting from the resale of our personal data.

Maybe this will mean Mastodon, maybe I'll go back to a self-hosted Roller based blog, etc. I already self-host an ejabberd server for XMPP messaging, so that will probably be part of what I do going forward.

[1]: http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web

> then many years later 'box-sizing: border-box' was introduced and widely praised and adopted by frameworks

Well, IE implemented their version of the box model in '97 (coincidently, NN4 did the same); the box-sizing property was first proposed in 1999[1], and first appeared in a draft in 1999[2], and implemented in Gecko in 1999[3] and in IE5/Mac in 2000[4].

That's two years from IE/NN shipping the non-standard box model (the standard one was defined before IE4 and NN4 shipped) to having a property to toggle between them. To me, that isn't "many years".

Really what makes it seem like many years is the fact that IE didn't implement box-sizing until IE8 which shipped in 2009.

[1]: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-css-wg/1999JanMar/0201.html (sorry, W3C MO space, but I think at this point nobody cares if I mention that publicly)

[2]: https://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#box-sizing

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko/commit/3ee32d59158a036bd6673c72ed29b137f1fa78bb

[4]: http://tantek.com/notes/csssupport.html

CSS 2 predates the rule.

The initial drafts of CSS 2.1 on the other hand, were published in 2002, yet it was 2011 by the time it became a full reccomendation despite having been in use for a long period by that stage. CSS3 colors (i.e. rgba() etc.) also became a full recommendation on the same day.

> Two months earlier, in March of 1998, CSS 2 had become a W3C Proposed Recommendation (PR) which meant that it was considered "done" and was simply awaiting a procedural W3C member review and vote. For all practical purposes, nothing else was going to get fixed in CSS 2. There wasn't a Candidate Recommendation (CR) phase back then, as evidence by the fact that no-one (including my Tasman team as part of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 for the Macintosh) was able to implement CSS 2 as specified. The problems in CSS 2 were far more severe than mere errata - we had to develop a full revision to fix it.

http://tantek.com/2011/160/b1/css-2-1-css3-w3c-open-web-standards-practices-learned

I'd be interested to know more about what type of content Trump published on his own blog, that proved unsuccessful. As someone observing from the UK, my assumption is that it was probably more long-form content. I wonder if comments were even possible. It wouldn't surprise me if short chunks of content, such as tweets, were far more popular with Trump's base than longer articles.

Edit: I see there are what I assume to be a couple of examples from his blog. They look very much like individual tweets. This turns it into quite an interesting case, one of a handful of examples I've seen where someone publishes the equivalent of their own twitter stream, on their own site. I used to have a great example, but I can't for the life of me now find it! In the case I've seen previously, the content was syndicated from the site to twitter — obviously, Trump doesn't have that option.

Edit2: It's Tantek Çelik's blog I'm thinking of: https://tantek.com/