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This site is now browsable with cURL

2020-01-14T00:00:00.000Z

Update: The insanity has gone even deeper and this site is now browsable using plain TCP.

TL;DR - This site is now browsable from the command line using cURL. Give it a try:

curl https://apitman.com/txt/17

Yesterday, I wrote a quick rant essentially whining about how I couldn't figure out how to get my Roku smart TV to play a video I was hosting. I ended the post with the following:

When you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case ... HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs.

There was some good discussion about the woes of smart TVs, and some great suggestions for alternative solutions, but a large number of comments were focused on the fact that my blog is rendered in JavaScript. Here are a few of my favorite exerpts:

Please make your stuff work with reader view.

Please make your stuff work without JavaScript. This is a simple text-only web page (in courier new ffs) and it refuses to load with JavaScript disabled. There is no valid reason for this.

Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case.

Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it. But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, here: Thinking about the primitive, simple case is often, from the creator's perspective, more work than it's worth.

I mean, if you're going to wax lyrical about how what your making should support that basics, you should at least first make sure you're doing the same thing.

I mean, it loads fast for me.

I consider that stage of fuckwittedness either absolutely deliberate (which it appears to be in this case based on the authors defence of their practices), or utter incompetence.

And when it does load, it's white Courier on black, as if specifically designed for poor usability and accessibility.

Quote "HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs." Says the one who can't have a simple HTTP only site and I had to enable JS on NoScript in order to read his rant.

8 hours in and Spitman's site is still a black page, even with JS enabled.

Instead, you push that compute off on your readers; actively harming the environment in the process. Yes, in this day and age I feel it's quite justifiable to point that out. You could render it once and be done with it, but instead you chose to have it be rendered (inefficiently) tens or hundreds of thousands of times, consuming orders of magnitude more energy and generating heat, all to "avoid a dependency". This should be, in this day and age, morally reprehensible.

At the end of the day, my site did not support the simple case, making me at best a hypocrite, at worst a planet destroying megalomaniac.

Well, that ends now.

The thing is, I totally agree with these folks. It makes me sad how complicated these insane virtual machines we call web browsers have become. In part because of this complexity, browser competition is dying.

To quote myself from a comment yesterday:

In my perfect world, the JS-app functionality of browsers would be broken off into a separate "app player" application that users would download, and browsers would be stripped down to basic HTML and a subset of CSS (essentially fonts, colors, and flexbox). In that world I would definitely have an HTML-only version of my blog.

But the more I thought about it, I don't think even HTML/CSS is truly supporting the simple, primitive case. At the end of the day, most of my content is text. And text requires only Unicode (and often just ASCII). So, in that spirit, as of today my content is totally accessible using nothing but cURL, or any other HTTP client.

This post can be accessed here:

curl https://apitman.com/txt/17

To see a feed of my posts, go here:

curl https://apitman.com/txt/feed

There's a navigation section at the top of each page with links and cURL commands to the other sections. I've found it pretty easy to navigate, both using copy/paste from the CLI, and quickly modifying the URLs in the browser, and using the back/forward buttons.

I know this whole thing might come off as sarcastic, or passive aggressive, and I totally admit that was part of my motivation at first. But the more I worked on this, the more I liked it. It made me think a lot more about accessibility, and what would happen to a lot of content on the web if we didn't have our JS VMs for some reason.

This also gave me a greater appreciation for Markdown, and other human-readable text formats. When I first re-wrote my site a few months ago, I struggled to choose between Markdown and plain HTML. Markdown seemed like a dependency to me. But now I realized HTML has a much bigger dependency: a web browser. In the simple case, you don't need a Markdown renderer to read this post.

This is still an early experiment. I've thought about how I could implement things like forward/back. I'd love to hear if anyone else has ideas for how to improve the experience.

Specifically, I have one open question: while working on this, I realized just how ugly inline links (especially long ones) can be in unrendered Markdown. For this post, I put them at the bottom in reference section style. But I'm wondering how this is for accessibility. What do visually impaired folks prefer?