Yes, America is burning, and it has always been burning.And then, in the middle of a pandemic and a financial crisis, with millions of people suddenly out of work and unable to so much as greet each other for fear of contracting a deadly illness, a Minneapolis Police Officer …
“The first working draft of the CSS variables module was published around 2012, and CSS custom properties for cascading variables (as it was more accurately renamed) finally gained traction around 2017 with browser support parity.”
If you've ever seen your browser automatically fill in your shipping address, or seen your iPhone offer to scan a credit card on an e-commerce site, you're seeing Autofill in action.
The spec describes ways that an HTML <input> element can use the "autocomplete" attribute to hint to the browser that it should offer to fill it with specific Autofill data, if the browser has it and if Autofill is enabled. There's a long list of values related to names, addresses, phone numbers, dates, and more. Additionally, since users might have more than one of a thing, these can be scoped with values like "home", "work", etc. It's possible to further group addresses by "shipping" and "billing", and even to group larger chunks of forms by named sections.
An example might look like:
<input name="home-street-address" autocomplete="shipping home street-address">
An IndieWeb use-case for Autofill
Web sign-in is a very IndieWeb concept where you sign into websites using your personal web address, rather than an email address or username.
The sign-in form for webmention.io asks you to sign in using a URL.
As with any repetitive tasks, typing my site's URL into these login forms gets annoying. My main browser (Firefox) is pretty smart. Autocomplete kicks in after I type a few characters from my URL and it will offer to fill in URLs that I've typed before. However, since most URLs start with "https://", autocomplete suggestions aren't very useful until I've typed out 9 or more characters (or if I start typing from somewhere in the middle).
It's my thinking that, with this in place, a browser should automatically suggest my URL without me typing anything at all!
A URL-shaped hole in Autofill
I tried this out by setting up url autocomplete suggestions on two different apps with Web Sign-in. (Specifically, my personal instance of Aperture, and the IndieWeb webring).
I then tried signing in and out several times to both sites, using the same URL each time. Browsers tested include Firefox, Chromium, and iOS Safari, all with Autofill enabled.
I am sad to report that none of the tested browsers attempted to automatically fill in the URL value. The extra autocomplete attribute didn't break the default autocompletion, but I still see it suggest every URL it knows about rather than learning one.
I have had trouble finding documentation on how specific browsers implement Autofill. One note in Jason's 2016 article suggests that browsers may need multiple "hints" before it will decide that a particular input is part of a group which should be auto-filled.
Another hint comes from Chromium's settings for managing Autofill data. This is what the form looks like for adding a new address:
Chromium address dialog with fields for name, street address, and more. There is no field for URL.
On Saturday my partner put on Broken Arrow (“Why?” “It’s on HBO Now and I don’t remember how it’s different from Face/Off”).
Me, around 15 minutes in: Oh yeah the park ranger! Gosh she is so familiar.
Me, around 40 minutes in: Argh, who is she, this is going to drive me crazy.
Me, around an hour in: OH. SHE’S PRINCESS DAISY FROM THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS MOVIE.
Later, watching Super Mario Bros. (film).
Me: I don’t know why they added a personal-assistant-slash-love-interest for Koopa.
Partner: She’s my favorite so far.
Me: What? Why?
Partner: She’s in Killing Eve!
Me: 😯
If you’d like to follow this thread yourself, some kind soul has uploaded the otherwise-apparently-unavailable-on-streaming-services SMB film to Vimeo.
jmac.org — Moved to NYC and started attending local HWCs just before The Lockdown. Very interested in Webmention as a technology to connect websites to one another - but wants to improve the focus on how it can be used for real human interaction!
martymcgui.re — Long-time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Been working on lots of random projects. Currently thinking about turning his pile of "read" posts, largely dumped from GoodReads, into more usable pages about what he's reading now, reading next, and read recently.
david.shanske.com — Long-time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Been working on location features, aspirationally. Looking forward to a time when he can thrill audiences by reporting being in a location other than "Home".
Sandro — Has been building CMSes and more for years. Been working on some new stuff that works even offline!
Kevin — Worked w/ sandro at Limewire some years ago! Attended past HWC SF meetings in the Before Times. Has been calling into the West Coast virtual meetings, first time calling into East Coast. Wants his site (zootella.com) to publish to 3 places - webserver, local files, and Beaker Browser (just went 1.0!)
Mike — Did web development for years, then stopped, now back again! Learned about IndieWeb through Micro.blog community. Interested in making sure the software he develops is a "good IndieWeb citizen". Working on a kind of Meetup competitor.
jgregorymcverry.com — Long time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Currently working on a website for a poetry radio show. Folks from all over the world can submit clips. It's wiki-based, but can also receive webmentions.
gRegorLove.com — In San Diego, but joining East Coast to see some new faces. Been out of IndieWeb-land for a bit but dipping toes back in.
kevinmarks.com — Long-time IndieWeb. Microformats co-founder with Tantek and has been blogging forever!
Talked a bit about how Beaker works. You make edits locally and then they are published from your own machine. Others on the Beaker network can share your site. Everything is signed with keys and content-addressable so you're the only one that can make changes to your published stuff.
Beaker left behind DAT in the 1.0 release, breaking old URLs. They promise to never do this again, though?
Kicks Condor did some good writing on Dat:// and how Beaker used it, as well as Duxtape, a tool that he built to share mixtapes over Dat.
Kevin Marks has done a presentation on Dat, as well! Went through it in the Zoom. Compares to Web Packaging, including issues with content-addressability like trying to apply copyright takedowns and censor content.
With so many tools, projects, protocols, and more available that solve different parts of the problems of self-publishing, how can we encourage more folks to pick them up and use them instead of silos?
Owning your own content and publishing compared to organic foods. It's more involved and expensive, and some folks see it as niche or unnecessary, but you get benefits for the effort!
Twitter rolled out a feature to control who can reply to specific tweets. Predictably, they were terriblysmug about it.
Context collapse is a problem everywhere on the web, but it's such a deep problem on Twitter that maybe they can't claw it back. So, this feature is a maybe almost-good idea that won't actually help the folks who receive the most abuse.
There's a new microformats parser for JavaScript!Lots of interest in publishing it under an IndieWeb or Microformats umbrella to supersede the previous one (microformats-shiv?) which is some years out of date. Difficulty: need to track down who "owns" the Microformats account on NPM.
It passes a lot of the newly updated tests, includes support for mf2 and mf1, and more! Thanks to Jason Garber for kicking off some recent work there.
gRegor reviewed recent updates to php-mf2 that are very close to a new release!
jmac.org working on a command line tool called Whim (link?) to allow folks to receive and process webmentions. Hopes to have something for folks to play with in the next month. This was kicked off by a friend trolling him by sending webmentions and nudging him to support posting short notes to his own site.
kevinmarks.com is revisiting mention.tech to fix some issues with timing out on unresponsive pages.
“Some updates and notes from NYS and NYC. New York State continues to increase testing capacity for COVID-19 on a daily basis, for our Adafruit team there are tests available minutes away, from COVID-19 testing to antibody testing.”
Tonight I discovered that I had been playing Animal Crossing all wrong to this point. It's not about expanding and decorating a house, it's not about collecting unique specimens for Blathers' museum, or filling an island with things to see and do.
It's about fashion.
I received an invite from @thatonegm giving me about an hours' notice.
You are cordially invited to the West Windfall Fashion Show at 8:00 pm EST (in ~50 minutes). Windfall will be open to friends. Bring your fanciest, silliest, comfiest outfits and show them off!
thatonegm poses in a hero costume next to a sign announcing a Fashion Show.
I quickly ran to my house and whipped up some outfits for my fish wand, gathered up some hosting gifts, and made it to the airport just in time.
Our gracious host had not only prepared an amazing stage and audience space, but also welcome gifts and gifts for participation!
Here are some snaps I took of the show.
Our host welcomes us to the showA flashy mermaid!Alexander HamiltonReady for a night at the opera!Some lost boy?Some landlord cosplay!
Afterwards, I took a trip to see the sights of the island. There were amazing things to see!
The gnome vignettes were truly inspired. Gnomes painting gnome paintings, gnomes at a picnic, gnomes prognomesticating, and more!
Found a cool performance venue but the line for the restroom was killer.
Thanks so much to thatonegm for his abundant hospitality and for such a well organized event!
Somehow, a bar has been raised! Perhaps there is no limit to the heights one can achieve in Animal Crossing: New Horizons??
“During a time when we are unable to attend funerals or memorials for our loved ones and when we are unable to console each other in person, it’s comforting to have the means to do so through the soft and slow gameplay of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.”
