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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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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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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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.

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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