[TI-05] html energy and human webs
less intellectual and more spiritual, less arguing for and more sitting with a particular feeling
After hosting the bay area meetup for html.energy to make websites over the weekend, I've been thinking about the question of what is html energy?
Omar, in his brief letter about html energy, described it as a series of more likes and less likes: like using old, deprecated tags is more and loading javascript from another file is less. Generally, I found that people with some experience making websites have a pretty good sense of this. They understand that handwritten html is more like it than dynamically inserting content or using a build system. Or that using inline styles is more like it than creating a strict “design system.” I like this way of trying to define it precisely because it doesn’t yield a strict definition. It is valuable because of how imprecise it is. It's open to immediate (and not so rigorous) interpretations and intuitions.
There’s this sense that this kind of energy is “pure.” In that what people create is innocent and derived from authentic desire. There is no “end” other than to create something interesting, fun, and/or worthy of banter. I’m noting as I write this that I changed my initial word choice to “banter” from “discussion.” html energy feels less intellectual (book club) and more spiritual (full moon gathering). It feels less about arguing for or even exploring any particular idea, and more about sitting with a particular feeling. I felt weird making the portal site for the meetup because I decided to use Vite and Typescript for it (a preferred choice and also for the efficiency of creating links for each page..). I had a hazy vision that this site would be a place where people from each individual meetup location could personalize, in the same way that open google docs offer empty space for expression1. I pictured every link taking on a unique personality of the city turning the whole site into a mismatched house, full of random yet priceless trinkets.
I wanted each link to each page to slowly grow a personality of its own that represented each city. For each templated link to become feral through the actions of people. I wanted this gathering place to be an exercise in wilding.
In the end, I don’t think anyone actually added to the portal outside of me, partly from the overhead of coordination and mostly, I suspect, from the inaccessibility of editing. What I really wanted was to be able to share the website open to "anyone with the link" rather than needing to individually invite everyone as a collaborator to the Github repository. Github is not so much "html energy," so this kind of thing is not supported (and what kind of enterprise would have this request?). "html energy" also feels more like grassroots community gatherings rather than strictly organized meetups, more like small informal groups than hierarchical businesses, people who just want to have fun than people trying to optimize every part of their life.
Sites with "html energy" feel poetic. They feel personal and sometimes disorienting or uninviting. They are rife with clues about the texture of the maker. They offer a path for someone to create space for themselves or something they care about online. They point to the kind of internet that I want to spend more time in—the kind that feels like people doing what they do best: being people.
I've been grasping toward more ways for people to express this kind of energy on the internet. How can poetic sites and single-purpose websites feel more like what you would expect from spending a quarter hour traversing the internet, rather than the flood of information and the push and pull of algorithms? How can I take a stroll through a place full of these and live by a forest full of html energy, with countless trails that give me the space to become more intimate with another's energy?
One idea Jamie and I were tossing around the other day is how we might make the web feel more alive. Specifically, how can digital spaces more naturally imbue presence, in the same way that you can't help leaving a mark in the physical world (unless you do the work to remove it), whether it's your footprint in the dirt, your empty bowl by the sink, or the impression in the pillow. The idea we were exploring was a library you could add via a script import that brings HTML elements to life with this presence using special attributes.
For example, you could imagine an can-move attribute that you can add to any HTML element that allows it to be moved by anyone and that state is preserved for everyone. Or a can-draw attribute that allows you to scribble on top of it. Or a can-age attribute that causes it to fray at the edges based on how many people have interacted with it.
https://twitter.com/xhfloz/status/1653740562648821760?s=20
the same vibe as what mmm.page is doing here... but persistent and collaborative?
This kind of infrastructure feels like it gets very close to what I was gesturing at with the (we)bsite I made with Jacky, except it generalizes some of the interactions we made into a very easy syntax.
The main unresolved challenge in my mind is: where will all this state live? the easiest thing is to provide free storage for this, but it brings up problems of defense against abuse while staying as accessible and easy to plug in as possible. Ideally, users could have the state persist directly to their website or a data storage that they own.. If you have thoughts or want to riff on this, let me know. For now, I think there’s enough there that it’s worth a prototype..
see the Party in a Google doc