The tech industry kicked the web out of the web.
scripting.com is your canary in a coal mine.
If you can read it then your browser is a real web browser.
If it can’t it’s phony baloney.
That's the big picture behind the Web of Markdown, an idea that has generated surprising interest among devs, esp now that Claude Code exists to enable weekend projects that can do miraculous things.
My longtime friend Andrew Shell has quickly put together what looks like a Chrome plugin that starts work on how to display a Markdown web page. And it looks fucking beautiful, as I imagined it might. Get rid of the bullshit just tell me what you have to say. A web that you can read. A web without interstitials. A web every write lusts for as well as an editor that can be used everywhere. This is the nightmare of the companies whose products inhabite the de-webbed web of 2026 (and that's all there is). Let's go back and pretend the VCs didn't run all their get-rich-quick schemes, what would the fucking web be like if it was all about two things -- writing and reading and the tech got out of the fucking way and let the writers do their thing. I think it'll actually work this time because they really fucked up the web and we can show them dramatically what it would be like if they hadn't. I've said this before if they insist on twisting what remains of the web into more bullshit, our option is to re-create the web and forget about them, leave them in the dust.
By the way, now I'm glad I have a source:markdown element in most of my RSS 2.0 feeds. I knew they'd come in handy! :-)
Back to Andrew's project, I said in a comment, I want more Markdown and absolutely no Chrome.
I have to trust Google for far too many things, but I think we can get rid of our dependency on Chrome. Now is the best time in a long time, as there's a hybrid product forming and they don't have the best AI system, and btw -- even if they did as users we are highly motivated for them to get some competition. And the AI companies don't do HTML or CSS, they do Markdown. So much so that Google had to convert their office product to Markdown before OpenAI would work with them. The wind is blowing away from Google and into Markdown, and I'm going to insist that they support HTTP in addition to HTTPS to make sure Google hears loud and clear that they can't run the web as if it were a corporate platform.
I have completely lost interest in new phones. The last one I bought was a Pixel 9 because they said it would have great AI features. At that time the sky was the limit, there were new breakthroughs every afternoon in AI. Now it's just an app. I have to carry an iPhone because I use an Apple Watch. Phones are utilities for me. I have a lot more interest in weed whackers these days. Not kidding. Now a story. I wanted to check the model of the phone. Went to settings, and the command at the end of the menu should tell me the version, but they had changed that. So I figured I'd go back up to Gemini, their AI app, and ask it. Of course it has no idea where it's running. Screen shot. That would be one of the real problems they could solve, making it easy to control the computer you're running on. The whole UI should be in AI. All it did was print basically a page from the user manual, with the same out of date instructions. How many years have we been working on AI already, this is the easy stuff that they haven't done. Tech companies get back to your business, make your software better. You can and it's long overdue. BTW, it's a Pixel 9 Pro.
I'm working on a server app to read blogroll source in OPML, and build a database of other blogrolls that are linked to feeds in the original blogroll, accessed via the feed or html source. It was a lucky thing when I designed the format for subscription lists back in the 00s that it included the htmlUrl attribute, it makes the HTML easier to find (though the channel-level link element in the feed could play the same role). Anyway, of course I'm using a SQL database for all this, and when I was thinking about it initially I thought "no big deal" it's a variant of a SQL table I've now done a dozen times. But it was a big deal, because I've yet to come up with a way to factor this so that I have a library that knows how to make the kind of table that keeps coming up all the time, to bury the complexity and make creating a new one much simpler. Same thing with CSS and JavaScript. I know the justification for CSS is that it makes scaling from phones to desktops possible, but that would be equally possible if you provided a good object with properties that can be configured at runtime. That's how we do it on servers with a config.json file. Then you could do a much better job of factoring browser-based apps. Imagine how much smoother everything would be if these structures could be factored. This probably doesn't make sense to too many people, maybe it won't even make sense to me in a couple of years, when hopefully I've moved on to a better way of doing these things. I would love to have the time to take a crack at doing the factoring anyway, I'm sure it's possible, just not obvious how to do it. In the meantime I think there are now enough blogrolls out there to build something interesting out of them, which is why I'm taking my break from The Next Product to do this.
