#dev 2026-10-14

2026-10-14 UTC
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[artlung] Wrote about it. https://artlung.com/blog/2026/10/13/brushes-app-2026/
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rnkn got all my model tests passing! now for controllers
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WinnerWind [artlung]: aw, so glad that someone cares about that app even now :3
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WinnerWind if i keep the file extension of a file as it is but change it to another image format, when loading that image in a web browser, will things break? i can't seem to find consensus on this topic
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WinnerWind i'm talking about images loaded mainly by <img> because i want to convert things from one image format to another image format but then changing the references is going to be tricky
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WinnerWind i tried it out in firefox and things ended up OK, no errors, image rendered in fine
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tdrayson The only thing that would break is if the image is being used anywhere other than your website.
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tdrayson the main concern as a developer when working with clients is usually that they've used images in newsletters etc that are hosted on the website that would then break.
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IWDiscord <t​drayson>
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WinnerWind why would those break? they'd also be within an <img> tag, right
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tdrayson wait I read what you did wrong... you changed an image from a `jpg` to `png` but kept the extension `.jpg`?
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ulhar4409 i thiiiink if the server says it's actually png (i.e. via Content-Type: header) it should be interpreted as png by the client, even if the filename ends in jpg or something
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ulhar4409 on the other hand, if you can't control that header, the server might assume that .jpg is always .jpg format
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tdrayson Apparently, some email clients will reject if the header and file extension don't match. But probably not really relevant unless you're sending emails or whatever.
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WinnerWind tdrayson: considering i'm only talking about my personal website it should be ok
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WinnerWind offeringofpie: https://winnerwind.in/webmentions/replies/2026-10-08-JL-build-your-own-tools your reply now appears on the page!
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WinnerWind i think the lack of profile picture is probably because you didn't define a u-photo on your page: no need to if you don't want to!
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offeringofpie I'll have a look into adding it 🙂
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WinnerWind offeringofpie: there's a whole list of supported microformats, if you're the kind of person who loves filling forms /lh! https://microformats.org/wiki/h-card
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WinnerWind (you don't have to fill all of it and i'm pretty sure some webmention services would end up dropping the less important ones anyway)
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offeringofpie I remember now, I added a lot of the h-card spec, but decided against adding the photo. That's a quick change 🙂
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GWG aaronpk[d]: Was wondering..what are you thinking of gaining inspiration from from Dawarich?
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aaronpk their dashboard and world map are cool
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GWG aaronpk: Look at GeoPulse as well. It was a bit more lightweight... I crashed Dawarich and haven't rebuilt it
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GWG This was my screenshot from Geopulse if you missed it https://img.shanske.xyz/2026/10/Screenshot-From-2026-10-12-19-03-27.png
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GWG And this was a raw import of coordinates.
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GWG It also has dashboards
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GWG I picked a day I didn't mind you all seeing
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[snarfed] re https://socialspec.org/ (from #indieweb), looks like a collection of sidefiles inside /.well-known. followings in OPML, contact info in VCF, bio ("about") in Markdown. 🤷
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voxpelli My lose interpretation of socialspec.org: It’s meant to be a current day OStatus style use case driven glue between existing pieces
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voxpelli What is socialspec?
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Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "socialspec" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "socialspec is ____", a sentence describing the term)
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[snarfed] maybe! but noticeably less functionality than OStatus. no replies etc
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voxpelli [snarfed]: OStatus itself never had replies, it relied on ActivityStreams and Salmon, it itself only defined a few link relations + what specs to fit together
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voxpelli That part of describing what stack one builds upon is an omission for socialspec – intended or unintended
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[snarfed] I thought OStatus was an umbrella project that *included* AS1, Salmon, etc...?
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[snarfed] no matter though
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[tantek] yay I suppose it was about time for people reinvent that
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Loqi 😊
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[snarfed] this feels so much smaller in scope to me, it seems more like reinventing h-card + blogroll
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[snarfed] ...at least they used existing formats? 🤷
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voxpelli Originally not even webfinger was much more than a URL convention and a link relation, host-meta being the full spec, but then of course someone needed to “fix” that
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[tantek] I mean PoCo was like that too
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[tantek] I predict the domain socialspec .org will be dead and hijacked in 5 years if not less
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voxpelli I think it should all just be made link relations / patterns on top of webfinger / hostmeta / html tags: https://bsky.app/profile/voxpelli.com/post/3mxtvhfvrak2h
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[tantek] pretty sure it can all be done in HTML without any sidefiles
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[Sophia] ported my codepens to my .org domain so I can start posting to my own site and syndicating out - felt good. I went with svelte. https://www.fractalkitty.org/
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[artlung] Nice! [Sophia] did you use the v2 API tooling to facilitate that?
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[Sophia] no - I about cried - I ported everything over and then an email came out later that day
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[Sophia] timing - right?
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[artlung] i've heard timing is everything, so, retroactive HugOps for that deal
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ulhar4409 randomly curious if anyone's indieauth implementations cancel an HTTP request partway through if it finds what it needs
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ulhar4409 in theory, if you can successfully parse enough data to find your links, you don't need the rest of the data, right?
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ulhar4409 although... client would probably have to make sure the tag it "uses" is fully formed, or at minimum that the href attribute is fully formed (rel attribute splits on space, so it's a little more cheesable here)
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ulhar4409 and this probably risks becoming Advanced Stupid (as opposed to Simple Stupid) for future maintainers anyway
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gRegor Not sure what you mean
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gRegor you could make a HEAD request to see if the endpoints are advertised there
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ulhar4409 like, if the client is streaming chunks of the http response, maybe it could be proactive with those chunks and abort the request should it realize it has everything it needs
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aaronpk i've definitely done it where it does a HEAD first and only does GET if there'sn othing there
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aaronpk i don't think the complexity of dealing with streaming parsing HTML is worth the few bytes of savings
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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calebhailey Also... hello aaronpk[d] 👋 I'm a fellow Portlander and would love to get coffee someday. I think we have some mutual friends (former AppFog and Twitter folks). 😊
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calebhailey First off let me say I'm a big fan of IndieWeb projects!
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calebhailey 👋 hi y'all. I'm just catching up with the chatter about the socialspec.org project. It me.
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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calebhailey [tantek]: It is true that you don't need side files for any of this. In fact, you don't really need to reach much further than "rel" links. And I love me some semantic HTML and HTML templating (that's why I created https://hypertexting.dev/docs/reference/templates/).
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calebhailey I guess my feeling over the years about things like h-cards and other HTML markup-based approaches is that they require a per-theme implementation effort as opposed to a per-CMS implementation effort. And as much as I would like for it not to be the case, not everyone is comfortable editing HTML. But exporting an OPML file from a feed reader or podcast app, or exporting a VCF from your contacts app is something anyon
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calebhailey I also arrived at SocialSpec from the app development perspective where web scraping is simultaneously more work and less reliable than fetching data in native formats (e.g. OPML subscriptions lists or vCards) at predetermined endpoints.
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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calebhailey But these are just my opinions, and I'm happy to be wrong about any of them. Just explaining some of the thought process that led me to this point.
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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calebhailey Lastly, I'm very much thinking about socialspec.org as a documentation initiative _first_, and software project second. So far I'm just documenting a collection of patterns based on open standards. My thinking has been that the first three specs are just the starting point, and that the could be expanded to document more patterns (e.g. metadata, mentions, etc). But I wanted to see what kind of reaction this initial e
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[aciccarello] Glad to hear some of the thinking around it calebhailey
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[aciccarello] There's some criticism of the .well-known pattern on the readme which is probably the best summary of concerns with the pattern. https://indieweb.org/.well-known#Criticism
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[tantek] not really. literally not a format issue. all the "exporting a" use-cases can be exporting a single HTML file
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[tantek] focusing on CMS implementation effort is missing the bigger cost which is maintenance
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[tantek] basically sidefiles rot due to admintax maintenance costs
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[tantek] and because they are - on the side - not visible to most humans so they get less attention / bug fixes
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calebhailey [aciccarello]: 👀
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[tantek] what is DRY?
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Loqi DRY is an acroynm for Don't Repeat Yourself https://indieweb.org/DRY
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[tantek] what is a side-file
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Loqi The sidefile-antipattern is a violation of the DRY principle by the use of secondary files (typically in some one-off XML format) to provide information that is a duplicate of information available in primary files on a website (in HTML), and is an antipattern due to typical DRY violation problems such as out-of-date, missing, corrupted, or outright false data https://indieweb.org/side_file
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[tantek] lots more points / examples there
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[tantek] btw beauty of "exporting" an HTML file is the user can preview *all* the data in the browser to make sure it's what they want, and then just press "Save"
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[aciccarello] Yeah, I'd agree that maintenance is a bigger issue. I was thinking someone could potentially point to a tool that converts an h-card into a vcard or about.md which helps avoid the maintenance cost.
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calebhailey [aciccarello]: TI(also)L https://mnot.net/blog/2026/well_known_uris from the author of RFC8615
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[aciccarello] that's a good discussion of tradeoffs 👍
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[aciccarello] I've noticed that "well known" specs often suffer from the discoverability issues, especially when trying to get initial adoption. Not all well-known URLs are well known.
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[tantek] also well-known has been abused for short-term convenience far beyond its intended use-cases
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[tantek] mnot would be among the first to admit that
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[aciccarello] I see how HTML parsing can be seen as a barrier, though most programming languages have good parsing libraries. Especially if you're looking at tools looking for a collection of URLs, rel links can actually end up being handy.
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gRegor .maybe-well-known? :)
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calebhailey haha
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[aciccarello] lol
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ulhar4409 .never-heard-of/
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gRegor Also welcome, Caleb!
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calebhailey thx, happy to be here, and grateful for this feedback! 🙏
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gRegor We do love to bridge all the things, so a converter tool from HTML to * format is definitely possible. Granary is a good example of that
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gRegor What is Granary?
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Loqi granary is an open source social web translator that converts between various feed and activity formats, used by IndieWeb community members to for example automatically generate feed files from HTML https://indieweb.org/granary
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gRegor I use it to generate Atom feeds from my microformats h-feed, for example
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[aciccarello] This quote seemed relevant to the goals of http://socialspec.org:
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[aciccarello] > The problem is that this pattern locks you into a 1:1 relationship between services and sites.
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gRegor lol just noticed my example use is in the dfn. Good wiki'ing!
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[aciccarello] As much as people in the indieweb promote everyone having a personal site domain, not every service is set up that way.
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calebhailey [aciccarello]: Yeah, most of HyperTexting is built in golang, and 99% of the reason is because the stdlib net/html is so so so good. It's so good that I jumped through an obscene number of hoops (before agents were good enough to help) to package HyperTexting's go libraries as Binary XCFrameworks so I could use them on iOS, because I didn't like ANY of the HTML parsing options I found for Swift.
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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calebhailey I'm also a big fan of Jamstack architectures, where I'll be cruising right along in Javascript land and forget that I can't just use DOMParser without adding a package dependency.
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[aciccarello] I do love me some JavaScript #noshame
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calebhailey me too!
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gRegor Especially since it's standardized more and don't have to use jQuery for as much. quite fun at times!
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calebhailey But not all modern Javascript environments are created equally. And since DOMParser isn't always available, approaches that require web scraping aren't always as easy as they should be.
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gRegor Recently I used an IntersectionObserver to animate part of a page once it scrolled into the viewport. I was impressed
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calebhailey heh, yeah, vanilla JS in the browser is really good now
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[artlung] The theory would be that were a popular CMS implement such a spec we would get immediate interop on this sort of thing. What I've observed is that upstart social media sites love interop when they're scrappy and small, and then somehow manage to deprecate them once they get going. But I do think the effort to quantify what we would need for this is a worthy effort.
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[artlung] And obvious overlap and common cause with Fediverse and ATProto things.
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calebhailey > But I do think the effort to quantify what we would need for this is a worthy effort.
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calebhailey If you s/quantify/document/ this is basically one of my main motivations for SocialSpec.org. For example, if you visit the SocialSpec.org home page and click on the tabs in the little social widget you'll see it's interactive. You can scroll the following list and about content. I want to demonstrate what kind of social experiences are possible with open standards like RSS, OPML, VCF, and a stinkin' markdown file, LO
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calebhailey > But I do think the effort to quantify what we would need for this is a worthy effort.
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IWDiscord <c​alebhailey>
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[tantek] Bridging++ and exports++
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Loqi exports has 1 karma over the last year
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Loqi Bridging has 1 karma over the last year
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[tantek] and welcome calebhalley++
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Loqi calebhalley has 1 karma over the last year