There’s a feature called bracketed paste supported by some “modern” terminals and editors, etc. When text is pasted from the clipboard, the terminal brackets it in special markers so that the receiving program knows it came from the clipboard and not the keyboard, and thus might turn off autoindent, etc.

It’s also supported by some shells, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen people claim that this is a security measure. Yeah, sure, it’s totally safe to paste commands from a website into the shell, because bracketed paste will let you review them before executing.

Does it work? The brackets delimiting the pasted text are just bytes as well, in band. A website can put the end paste sequence into the clipboard as easily as any other text.

Here are two buttons for testing. One runs ls. The second tries a little harder.

ls bonus

In testing, xterm turns the escape into a space, and nothing happens but a little gibberish spray. Other terminals appear to be not so lucky.

ActivityPub August rolls on. Now with more (some) ActivityPub support in flak.

I held off on adding it before because I wasn’t sure how deep I wanted the integration to go, and I had some doubts about how useful minimal support would be. Time to find out.

Posts are now available as activity Article objects. There’s a minimal Person actor as well, since every post needs an author, but that’s about it. I think the objects are complete enough even for fussy implementations to accept them, but one never knows.

No inbox support, no following, no replies, etc. (Strike that. we’ve got follows and deliveries and creates now. Oh my.) Getting into delivery adds a lot more code (it did) and admin maintenance (oh well). So many little commits to fix all the bugs.

Another issue is that sometimes I like to experiment with posts that include custom scripting or styling, and that’s not going to federate well. Oh well, I guess you can figure it out and click through. Or not. WASM over AP when?

It’s been four years since honk 0.1. Before that, the preview, and shortly after the followup. But finally, after a long journey, we’ve reached honk 1.0. (Narrator: honk is a microblog server that federates with other servers via ActivityPub.)

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Reddit is deddit. Everybody needs to write a replacement. Mine is called azorius.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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