#dev 2025-08-01

2025-08-01 UTC
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[mattl] Made a URL shortener that doesn’t need a database. https://mat.tl/s/
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epoch that's a neat way of doing it
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epoch for an extra challenge, it might be possible to do it without any javascript somehow?
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epoch you can have URI fragments trigger CSS rules
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epoch not sure if something like, a <meta http-equiv="refresh"> that is hidden with CSS would work
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epoch if nothing else, you could make it show only the link to be redirect to on the page with css
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[mattl] hm, if you want to do a JS-free version, but I don’t know about using CSS to show the URL…
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epoch https://thebackupbox.net/~epoch/short.html#plum ?
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[mattl] This blew up. Made a URL shortener that doesn’t need a database. https://mat.tl/s/
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cobbland Smartly done. I've already borrowed it for my own site. Thanks!
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doesnm through it needs javascript
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[mattl] No it doesn’t
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[mattl] But it won’t automatically redirect you without JavaScript, it’ll take you to the correct link on a page full of links.
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doesnm great ux /j
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doesnm [mattl]: btw why data-url and href are repeated?
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[mattl] Great UX as the default behavior of web browsers?
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[mattl] data-url is only used for the JavaScript stuff, the regular anchor is so it works in any browser.
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[mattl] cobbland: send me a link to your page. I might start a list of these pages.
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cobbland mattl: https://cobb.land/s/
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cobbland Not much there yet. Just enough to make sure it works. But I definitely plan on using it going forward.
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Loqi [preview] Cobb
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[mattl] Awesome. Good looking site too.
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doesnm [mattl]: you can't make article.href ?
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cobbland Thank you!
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doesnm also downloaded over https://doesnm.cc/s/
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[mattl] doesnm: how would that work without JavaScript?
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doesnm [mattl]: switch id to anchor maybe. So you just make <li rel="bookmark"><a id="short-name" href="https://example.com">short-name</a></li>
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[mattl] I don’t think rel works on an li.
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doesnm in https://mat.tl/s/ li's have rel's to bookmark
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[mattl] That might be a bug of mine then.
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[mattl] Fixed it.
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doesnm i'm deleted data-url's and maked redirect to href.
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doesnm not sure what is broken, working at least in iceraven
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[mattl] What’s iceraven?
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[mattl] What is iceraven?
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "iceraven" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "iceraven is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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doesnm https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
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Loqi [preview] [fork-maintainers] iceraven-browser: Iceraven Browser
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[mattl] Ah it’s only for Android.
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doesnm are you on ios?
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[mattl] Yeah, fully. iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple Watch, AppleTV, making a movie in Final Cut Pro.
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doesnm There is only a lack of Apple Vision Pro
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[mattl] I tried it. The fire alarm went off in the Apple Store. I didn’t like it.
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capjamesg [mattl] your URL shortener looks interesting.
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capjamesg Is it using JS?
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doesnm it is
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[mattl] 2-3 lines of javascript, which aren’t required.
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[mattl] https://chat-uploads.indieweb.org/files/2025/08/dev-20250801-183437-screenshot_2025-08-01_at_14.34.28.png
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[mattl] works just fine without javascript or even CSS.
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capjamesg How does it work?
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[mattl] List item with a unique ID…. the JavaScript loads the corresponding URL and redirects to it. If you don’t have JS, the page jumps to the anchor ID.
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[mattl] I think no-JS stuff should be no-CSS or minimal-CSS.
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[snarfed] [mattl] huh, interesting. why?
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[mattl] I would expect no-JS to be read by curl or something similar. I try to support it but if I’m honest I still think of JavaScript and especially CSS as new things.
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[mattl] As turning off JS gets harder and harder, I can see that difference becoming more obvious again.
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[snarfed] CSS generallly shouldn't cause problems for programmatically parsing HTML, right?
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[mattl] I think even the minimal browsers try to support a little bit of CSS. I used to hide that by wrapping a style tag around an @import statement. I’d prefer to not push any CSS to a browser like that and just let the users own preferences happen.
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[snarfed] styling is personal preference obviously, you're welcome to style your own stuff however you want!
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[snarfed] ...just not sure I'd expand that to general advice to limit styling to appease machine interpretability
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[snarfed] style is valuable for humans, etc 😎
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[mattl] Yeah my worry is that you wind up with a situation like this. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/modern-web-technologies/
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[snarfed] yeah that's clearly no good. but CSS is...how many decades old? the two seem pretty different
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[snarfed] (and CSS generally degrades gracefully, right? browsers generally ignore new features that they don't support yet...?)
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[mattl] CSS is almost 30 years old but I’d say people really started using CSS for layout around 20 years ago.
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[snarfed] sure. and again, serving styled HTML to decades-old browsers that don't support CSS should still work and be usable, right?
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[snarfed] if CSS literally breaks some niche browser, and supporting that browser is an important use case, then ok! I wouldn't advise most developers or publishers to make that choice, but everyone gets to choose for themselves 🤷
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[mattl] Yeah I’m talking only in the case of no-JS stuff. I’d say that making it degrade nicely is important and that includes CSS. I have no idea why Basecamp doesn’t work on a relatively new browser.
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[mattl] There seemed to be some misunderstanding about my thing not needing JavaScript earlier
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