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the trouble with q quotes

Among the underutilized HTML elements is the q tag, for quotes. This should, depending on user agent, render with appropriate opening and closing quote marks, without needing to specify them by hand. This sounds really convenient, to avoid ambiguity when quotes are nested inside quotes inside quotes. I said, “Alex told Bobby, “according to Chris, “Danny said “No way am I the one who’s confused,” when asked,” direct quote,” yesterday morning,” emphatically. Lucky Danny.

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Posted 24 May 2022 14:21 by tedu Updated: 24 May 2022 14:21
Tagged: web

css vs webgl cubes

I wanted to conduct a little experiment, and it turned into a few experiments in one. I was watching a youtube video about creating 3D scenes purely in CSS. At first, it seems pretty ridiculous. Surely this has to be too much effort, but then as it came together, it wasn’t that difficult. CSS has more potential as a lightweight 3D rendering language than I may have suspected.

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Posted 20 May 2022 06:23 by tedu Updated: 20 May 2022 06:26
Tagged: programming web

ActivityPub as it has been understood

If you’re looking to move beyond the silos of social media sites run by individual companies, you’re maybe looking for federation, which allows multiple sites to communicate and interoperate with each other. You post a photo on this site, your friends on another site can share it, your family on a third site can comment on it. Assuming that’s what you want.

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Posted 06 Aug 2019 15:54 by tedu Updated: 28 May 2021 04:05
Tagged: activitypub web

AP networking

Some more notes about networking between federated ActivityPub servers. A brief overview covered a fairly typical exchange to transfer a post from one server to another. Here’s a few more details, how following works, and some more notes about addressing and delivery.

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Posted 01 Aug 2019 14:17 by tedu Updated: 06 Aug 2019 15:29
Tagged: activitypub web

activity notes

So you have an ActivityPub actor and you want to say something. What are you going to post? Might I suggest a Note?

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Posted 17 Jul 2019 19:32 by tedu Updated: 02 May 2022 01:18
Tagged: activitypub web

the activity person examined

One of the basic objects in ActivityPub is the actor. Also known as a Person, although there’s no promise it’s a human. If you are building ActivityPub software, or curious how the network works, it’s a good place to start. The ActivityPub spec and underlying ActivityStreams vocabulary explain what could or should be here, but not necessarily what you’ll see in the wild.

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Posted 08 Jul 2019 18:44 by tedu Updated: 02 May 2022 01:15
Tagged: activitypub web

404 Found

When a web page (or other resource) cannot be found, a web server is supposed to return code 404, Not Found. Additionally, it can return some other content for a human viewer. And so, if you visit https://mastodon.social/honktime](https://mastodon.social/honktime) with a browser, you can watch a tooter tantrum, but requesting the same URL with curl displays < HTTP/2 404.

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Posted 04 Jul 2019 18:55 by tedu Updated: 04 Jul 2019 23:21
Tagged: web

what happens when you activity post

You’re out there posting on your federated status federator, and people are reading your posts, and you’re reading their posts, but how exactly does it happen? What’s talking to what? (Equally applicable to tooting, but we don’t use that word in my house.)

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Posted 02 Jul 2019 21:24 by tedu Updated: 02 Jul 2019 21:24
Tagged: activitypub web

extension injection detection

One of the unexpected but very interesting side effects of the brutalist html quine is that anything added to the page suddenly becomes visible as well. In the common case, this might be browser extensions adding custom stylesheets, but it might also be stylesheet or script injection by a network interloper.

What if every web page had a little something like this embedded in it?


That’s an actual style. It should be the only one visible on this page. If there’s anything else visible, it’s not coming from me.

Posted 05 Jun 2019 10:12 by tedu Updated: 20 May 2022 02:29
Tagged: web

honking for fun and profit

It’s been a little while, so a few more notes about ActivityPub implementation, federation, and other odds and ends. There’s no real order to these notes, just things that have come up in the past two months.

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Posted 03 Jun 2019 09:03 by tedu Updated: 06 Aug 2019 15:52
Tagged: activitypub project web