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<title>What happens after HTML? - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>What happens after HTML?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-12</p>
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<p>Back in the murky days of the early 2010's, possibly even 2009, I wanted to make my first website. I and a friend, who I fell out of contact with in high school, wanted to make a pay-to-play website in the same veins as Webkinz. Of course, the business venture was doomed to fail, as we would be selling not plush stuffed animals but shitty pompom balls glued on pieces of heart-shaped felt to resemble a little creature. I asked my father for help, as apparently he'd set up a crude website of his own a decade earlier to announce my birth and share pictures of my infant self, and he laughed me out of the room and told me that making websites costed money.</p>
<p>Undeterred, I found a tutorial for HTML and CSS off some backwater website. It was nothing like the slick tutorials one would find today if they wanted to learn, nor had I any idea that places like Codecademy existed. The website gave a small zip file to download, full of sample images and navigational buttons, and I slowly worked my way through with Notepad and a constantly crashing Windows Vista machine. (<a href="../february/32bit.html">The same one that's now mine, funnily enough.</a>) I only remember that this happened in elementary school because I know I showed my social worker (or maybe she was a counselor; I don't remember) the files on a flash drive I'd smuggled in.</p>
<p>I felt like the world's most wanted criminal as I signed up for a free hosting service under a false name and an obviously fake address. The terms of service said that they would attempt to verify all addresses and terminate the accounts of people who they couldn't verify existed. It apparently took them over a decade to figure it out and delete my abandoned site there. Or maybe it was just an inactive account being cleaned...</p>
<p>A major part of what initially pulled me towards Gemini was the simplicity of the <code>text/gemini</code> markup language. HTML is littered with ending tags and closing tags. Sure, one could serve plaintext <code>.txt</code> files, but then there wouldn't be any inline links or stylization whatsoever. And <a href="../june/homo.html">heaven knows I hate unformatted plaintext</a> when it comes to the web. Both from an aesthetics standpoint, since I hate blandness and homogeneity, and from a neurodivergent one, since walls of tiny text that all blend into one another demand an attention span to plod my way through far longer than I can usually muster.</p>
<p>Another pretty damning argument, or weak depending on the point of view, is that Gemini <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707212036/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730408">isn't backwards-compatible with the pre-existing web</a>. As the top commenter on the Hacker News thread (in a <a href="../february/hackernews.html">rare moment of sanity for an HN comment</a>) says, emphasis mine:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. <strong>But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies.</strong></p>
<p>... <strong>The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants.</strong> They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But I didn't come here to dunk on Gemini again. My point is that most modern browsers, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-preview-plus/febilkbfcbhebfnokafefeacimjdckgl?hl=en-US">without</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer-webext/">extensions</a>, don't natively render document types other than <code>text/html</code>. (I am counting PDFs in on this since technically rendering those is thanks to an extension, just now usually built-in.) Even trying to view an image standalone makes the browser generate an impromptu HTML document to display it in. Thus, if one wants to build an accessible website that doesn't require potential visitors to install additional extensions or even <em>whole browsers</em>, they have to either handwrite HTML or subordinate themselves to a framework or service that does it for them. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708221307/https://www.webdesigndev.com/10-good-and-10-bad-things-about-adobes-dreamweaver/">Adobe Dreamweaver</a>, which I thankfully never had the misfortune of using, is notorious for constructing bloated and opaque HTML.</p><p>But since mainstream browsers don't look like they're going to support Markdown rendering natively anytime soon, one writing their website would have to somehow translate their pages into HTML <em>before</em> they hit the browser. In other words, if the client side won't do or can't be trusted to do it, the server will have to do it. Using one of my tulpas' sites <b>(EDIT 2021-07-18: the website no longer exists because I no longer own the domain)</b> (with consent), I experimented with several server-side Markdown-to-HTML servers:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211729/https://github.com/crempp/mdweb">mdweb</a> worked well when it was configured properly. But it relies heavily on templates, and the ones it comes with are riddled with JavaScript and weird CSS frameworks that were exactly what I was trying to <em>escape</em> from. The documentation is sparse and doesn't really go into detail how to write a theme from scratch, so I deemed it more trouble than it was worth.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211716/https://github.com/mkaz/lanyon/">lanyon</a> also relies heavily on templates. This one <em>did</em> have proper documentation on how to write them, but the web server didn't seem to actually render any changes to my site unless I manually stopped and restarted it each time, which rather... defeats the purpose. True, I could write a systemd service and a crontab line to restart it every few hours, but if I were actively writing a document and wanted to see how it looked like before I anounced it, I'd have to wait until the next time the server restarted, and if I wasn't doing anything to my site, it would be reloading unnecessarily.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211706/https://github.com/oscarmorrison/md-page">md-page</a> depends on client-side JavaScript to be enabled. Since it's essentially an HTML page with Markdown hanging off the end, without that JavaScript to turn it into valid HTML, most browsers would just mangle the raw Markdown into an unreadable glob of text.</li>
</ul>
<p>This site runs on Caddy. If we were still on the glorious Caddy 1.x days, we'd have a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211659/https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/markdown">markdown directive</a> built in that does everything we want: just throw some <code>text/markdown</code> files in a folder, point the server to a <code>style.css</code> file to throw on everything, and go. But Caddy 2.x insists on using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708223918/https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/templates">templates</a> and making the prospective site-writer dig through complicated, sometimes non-existent, documentation to try to grasp some semblance of Markdown rendering.</p>
<p>Thankfully, since the old 1.x download pages were still up, I <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224225/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/amd64?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">saved the program</a> in the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224355/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/arm7?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">Wayback Machine</a> so it would continue to be available after the Caddy developers memoryholed everything. Meaning, with the power of a reverse proxy, I could write a site entirely in Markdown with the end reader none the wiser.</p>
<p>Here's my current configuration:</p>
<pre>
REDACTED:2015 {
root /home/vanevander/Sync/website/azure/
markdown / {
css /style.css # this gets applied to every page
}
tls off # since this is behind a reverse proxy
bind 127.0.0.1 # don&#39;t let people bypass the reverse proxy
browse # dynamically generate file listings for folders without an index.md, like how Gopher and Gemini do
}
</pre>
<p>But this only works for server-side websites. Since one of my goals (or restraints) with this is to not assume the client knows this is supposed to be Markdown, I can't just slap a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708225311/https://github.com/rivy/js-user.markdown-render">userscript</a> in a ZeroNet directory and call it a day. And even if I were to do that, I'd have to maintain a separate version of the website just for peer-to-peer websites, as inserting that JavaScript would also affect Caddy's rendered pages.</p>
<p>And even though <a href="../february/32bit.html">I hate Node.js with a passion</a>, I have to admit that the latest builds of Beaker Browser support <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708231723/https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/guides/create-a-markdown-site">rendering Markdown automatically</a>. Although CSS isn't automatically applied, and thus one has to put the HTML line at the top of the file to enable it. Curiously enough, this makes Caddy's pages have duplicate CSS entries, although it doesn't seem to affect the pages. Beaker Browser also doesn't play well (actually, at all) with Caddy's convention of writing TOML at the top of a Markdown file to set metadata such as the page title, so this:</p>
<pre>
+++
title = &quot;Page title here&quot;
+++
</pre>
<p>gets rendered as:</p>
<p><code>+++title = "Page title here"+++</code></p>
<p>which is obviously ugly and doesn't work at all. Normal <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tags work as a workaround, I guess.</p>
<p>So, under this system, I'm not entirely free of HTML, nor can I yet code an entire page from memory since I have to remember the CSS line. But it's a start towards a future without template files, a future where blogging demands less mental working memory, less friction against chronic fatigue.</p>
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<p>So I'm revisiting this post a few days after I drafted it. Tired and worn out from work, a precious hour or two from willing my body to sleep like a rock so that tomorrow is less hell.</p>
<p>Despite all of the rationalization I've done above, I still can't seem to will myself to follow through with anything I've written here on my own site. Mostly because of the dependency on a technically dead piece of software. Not that a transition to Markdown would be the worst thing ever- it's still <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200712143250/https://plaintextproject.online/articles/2018/01/26/markdown.html"><em>plaintext</em>, after all</a>- but it would be like moving my entire digital notepad to a word processor on a whim. Even with LibreOffice's open formats, if I don't have access to the software and I <em>need</em> to open a file right then and there, the best I can do is unzip it like any other archive and go digging within. I can convert the HTML to Markdown until the cows come home, but if I don't have a server that can serve those files, then what's the point? I'd just have to go back eventually.</p>
<p>In some future yet unknown to me where we've all migrated onto a computing architecture other than ARM or x86, hopefully one that's fully open-source, what will the software we use look like? Will we even be on Linux anymore, or even a UNIX-based system while we're pondering? Caddy can talk a big game about not having any dependencies, but it still technically has one: the Go language. If Go doesn't exist on the systems of the future, good luck getting Caddy to run on it without any kind of virtualization. (Assuming the climate crisis doesn't knock us down to Raspberry Pi-levels of computing power and we can even virtualize in the first place.)</p>
<p>What will the web look like, for that matter? What will the browsers and the networks we use prioritize? Ease-of-use like Markdown, or infinite customization like HTML? Or will some other plaintext format take its place? Or will the commercialization come to a tipping point, and everyone is forced to use some proprietary binary format?</p>
<p>Or maybe the world will shatter and the internet die forever, and something else rise up in its place, and none of this will matter anyway.</p>
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<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
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<title>You Can't Stop The Signal - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>You Can't Stop The Signal</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-26</p>
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025616/https://vonupodcast.com/faq/"><strong>Vonu</strong> is the condition or quality of, as well as the action of achieving, an invulnerability to coercion. Etymologically, it is an awkward contraction of the phrase, VOluntary Not vUlnerable (hence, "vonu").</a>
</blockquote>
<p>Copyright requires coercion. If there is no State with a monopoly on violence to loom over a populace and threaten whoever has the misfortune of losing a copyright lawsuit with time in jail or theft of money or property, then there is no real power in a license attached to "intellectual property". In the end, it doesn't matter if the license is permissive or not; people who you don't like with ideologies you disapprove of are going to take it and use it, and there is nothing you can do to stop them without resorting to violence, and you are beset with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721020653/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Max_Stirner">phantasms</a> and riddled with delusions if you think otherwise.</p>
<p>Early 2018 up until it shut down in August 2019, I spent a lot of time on 8chan. My favorite board was /tech/, home of ceaseless threads where Linux and BSD fanboys fought it out and femboys shared screenshots of their riced desktops. The /fucko/ threads were my favorite. Laden with useful (if not a little outdated) advice on how to technologically protect oneself from the State, and how to destroy the evidence were one to find out that the police were after them. From the baby things like switching to FOSS software and making a GPG keypair to ghosting it out with Tails and Libreboot and full-disk encryption with a built-in "nuke". How ironic that imageboards like 8chan have a reputation of being wastelands and havens for all sorts of disgusting identitarians like neonazis, and yet their effort ended up helping me, an <em>anarchist lesbian</em>, clean up my digital tracks even further than what I'd started with the Google Freakout of 2016.</p>
<p>I am sure that they would have been <em>extremely displeased</em> to know that their knowledge helped someone they would have so openly considered a degenerate, a walking piece of filth, someone to be exterminated from the land. But how were they to know? How would they have stopped me from seeing the fruits of their research without also severely restricting their ability to disseminate it amongst themselves? Should they have written a "No Homosexuals Allowed" license and slapped it on top of their carefully constructed guides? Obviously they did not, and <em>it wouldn't have worked anyway</em>. A piece of paper, digital or physical, is not going to stop me from using information. And because I was <em>vonu</em> from them, hidden from 8chan's logging by Tor and Tails, there would be no way for them to know that any kind of copyright infringement had taken place.</p>
<p>I must admit, I erupted in laughter when I saw the so-called <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200713171551/https://github.com/climate-strike/license">"Climate Strike Software License"</a>. The general gist of it is that certain pieces of software, mostly Python math-related modules from the list they provided, are in use by companies contributing to the climate crisis, and thus they must be stopped by a... digital piece of paper. Never mind that the CSSL violates the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721024722/https://opensource.org/osd-annotated">canonical Open Source Definition</a>, and thus, if a piece of software switched to this new license, it would immediately break GPL compatibility and thus fuck over every FOSS project relying on it, climate-accelerating or not. Do you <em>really</em> think that a megacorporation so obviously protected by the governments that allow it to exist would be cowed by a mere text file? Only relatively recently has the GPL been proven <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721015944/https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/13/gnu_gpl_enforceable_contract/">to be able to be upheld in court</a>, but even then, it was <em>in court</em> by an entity with the financial resources to take the offender to court. And changing the license will ultimately do nothing, as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025033/https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7375/is-it-possible-for-linux-developers-to-retroactively-pull-their-code-from-linu">you can't retroactively revoke a license from code</a> as the code-of-conduct controversy with the Linux kernel proves. Said harmful companies could just continue to use the old versions of the programs covered under licenses that they aren't violating and carry on with their day so long as the code still works.</p>
<p>In the case that I cited above, it was one company against another company. One entity with the money to pursue litigation against another company with the money to defend themselves. Although I wouldn't use <em>vonu</em> to describe their position, the existence of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721030530/https://anti-slapp.org/what-is-a-slapp">SLAPPs</a> prove that corporations and governments have little to no fear of individual people mounting complaints against them. Do you really think you can successfully defend your piece of "intellectual property" from license violation in any meaningful way without litigation? <strong>In the end, without the threat of violence, nobody gives a shit about licenses, and those who do have a cop in their heads. Your code, your art, is going to get stolen anyway, and there isn't anything you can do about it other than hope you have the social clout for people to know who it really belongs to anyway and respect that of their own free will.</strong></p>
<p>Video games are technically pieces of software. Almost all of them are under a proprietary license that forbids making backups or sharing them with friends or obtaining the software through "unauthorized" channels. But I don't give a shit! Nintendo's "copyright" is a phantasm to me. I will download <a href="https://the-eye.eu/public/rom/">every classic ROM they have</a> (and a few... <em>contemporary</em> ones, while we're at it) and not feel a single shred of guilt.</p>
<p>Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the <a href="http://archive.md/N2zNP">"No Harm"</a> license, have little to no power in the actual world. For example, one with a vendetta against me who knew I used a piece of software under the aforementioned license could easily take my post about <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">being gender-critical</a> and claim that I am contributing to "hate speech or discrimination" regarding gender and gender identity. Even though nowhere in the post do I advocate for violence or claim to hate anyone with a "gender identity", merely just state that I find the concept of gender personally stifling, it's their word against mine.</p>
<p>In all that I do, I strive more and more to achieve <em>vonu</em>, to become invulnerable to coercion. That's why there's so many darknet gateways into this website. That's why I write under a pseudonym. That's why I left the Zaibatsu and the tildes and Neocities. I already know that, in my short time on the internet, I have made a myriad of enemies who would love to see me go dark and never post a single thing again, who would gladly shut me up had they the power. And some days, I have to admit, I wonder what it would be like to throw it all away and return to being a normie. But this website is my home. It is the one thing I can come back to at the end of day and know that it is truly mine. And even then- even <em>then</em> it is not completely vonu. I still rely on other parties: Namecheap and Namesilo for domains, Vultr for VPS hosting, Paypal to pay them off every month or year, a bank to pay Paypal off, a job to pay the bank off, enough positive/neutral social standing to keep my job, enough customers at the place I work at to justify my slot on the payroll... I feel freer than I did when I started MayVaneDay five years ago, and yet I am still so entrenched in the ruts of other people's lives, still at the mercy of so many entities.</p>
<p>Take the aforementioned example of my stance on gender. I am neither "trans-exclusionary" nor a "radical feminist". But I am sure that someone, somewhere, has labeled me as a "TERF". That is why I laugh when I see codes of conduct like the one at the Gemini hosting service <a href="http://archive.md/zLsDI">tanelorn.city</a>. You have the right to decide who uses your server resources. You have the right to decide who you want to associate and dissociate with. I am in no way advocating that authoritarians be given free rein to shit up everything, or even to be listened to. <strong>Just remember: those who you do not want to share your spaces with will set up their own spaces. Just like how you wish they would cease to exist, so do they wish the same upon you. The ways you protect yourself will be the ways they protect themselves. You cannot stop them. But they cannot stop you either.</strong> Tor's anonymity comes agnostic of the beliefs of the person using it. GPG encryption works regardless of the beliefs of the person using it. Any attempt to weaken these, like the State's persistent attempts to get backdoors inserted into proven encryption methods that plague their investigations, will not only weaken those who truly need it but also do nothing to people not under the State's duress, to the exact people you <em>don't</em> want using those tools.</p>
<p>You do not want to associate with me because of who you think I am, impression true or false regardless? Fine. But technologies like Tor and I2P allow me to be <em>vonu</em> from you. I don't want to use Gemini for <a href="../june/homo.html">reasons I stated in an earlier post</a>, but if I did want to set up my own server, there is nothing Solderpunk could do to stop me. Not a license, not a strongly-worded letter to fuck off, not a legal campaign (and honestly, I doubt he would sling the court system against me both because he is a very kind man and because he lives in a different country than me). I have the source code to multiple servers and clients. Given enough time, I could write my own. And who is to stop me from using them once I have them? A protocol is an idea. Ideas want to be free.</p>
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<p>But enough of depressing things like software development. Let's take a little break, have a little comic relief as a treat. You've read a lot of words. Feel free to rest your eyes a bit here. The words will still be here when you get back.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721043449/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bullying-tweet">Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Copyright Real Hahahaha Brodie Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Bro Close Your Eyes Haha</a>
</blockquote>
<p>Rest of this post aside, it's absolutely wild how humans that lived long before us decided that we can just... take certain combinations of letters and numbers and symbols and say, "I created this. I own this arrangement of characters. Only I can control how this arrangement is used." Like... On a purely technical level, there is no difference between a novel and six hundred pages of me keysmashing. It is only because we as human beings ascribe value and meaning to the former and not the latter that only the former gets shackled in the copyright system.</p>
<p>Absolutely wild how it's possible to get locked up for nothing more than distributing combinations of letters and numbers and symbols. Aren't they all symbols in the end? Scrawlings we assign value to in the system we call "language"? Ultimately it's all just chicken scratch. And yet entire industries rise and fall on controlling where they go...</p>
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<p>Patents are "intellectual property", sheets of paper that entities only abide by because of fear of litigation. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States would not be in the deplorable state it is in now if it were not for the patent system enabling price gouging. The free market would run wild, companies seeking the cheapest way to produce medicine, and the one with the best balance of low prices and high quality would get the most business.</p>
<p>Stories are "intellectual property". And my ever-growing collection of ebooks can attest to the fact that DRM is only a temporary and relatively-easily-defeated measure to stop ebook piracy. And even though most literature and other vehicles of stories are licensed under the equivalent of proprietary licences, that doesn't stop <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721040201/https://archiveofourown.org/works/20579735?view_full_work=true">fanfiction writers</a> or the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190826192503/https://gamebanana.com/skins/148006">modding community</a>. And song remixes... I hate how "remix" has become synonymous with "drown out everything else in the song with the same sounds in every single goddamn trap song", but it <em>is</em> derivative, and it is <em>not</em> stopping anytime soon.</p>
<p>Given enough time, everything will become public domain, and none of this will matter anyway. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201205180143/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/my-stolen-code-on-github.html">Your carefully crafted software license will go to shit.</a> Your copyright will lapse. And a million flowers will bloom out of the cracks where once they were confined to only your walled garden. Your "copyright" is only a temporary delay that helps no one and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200722153327/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/sdf.org/0/users/jebug29/log/2020-07/20-2209">prevents well-meaning people from preserving whatever legacy you have.</a></p>
<p>Authoritarians will steal your "intellectual property". Authoritarians will see your "keep out" signs and spit on them and trample them under their feet on their way to take what is yours and claim it as your own. Licenses are like laws; clearly they have failed to prevent tyranny from taking root. The time for working within the State is over. Friendship ended with legislation; now direct action is my friend.</p>
<p>Copyright is a phantasm. Its only weight comes from the threat of State violence. Steal their code, their stories, their songs, their "intellectual property" right back. Liberate yourself with the fruits of their labor just as they have enslaved you with yours. Achieve <em>vonu</em>.</p>
<p>They can't stop your signal.</p>
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<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
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