2013-04-16 UTC
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# 00:39 tantek so I'm trying out the white-space:pre-wrap trick to see how it goes and it's making me fix-up white-space handling in my storage code :)
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# 00:45 tantek ok I've decided to trim leading/trailing white-space when retrieving note entry-content from storage, so that in the HTML storage files, it can have leading/trailing linebreaks to make the storage files more readable but not effect the stored user-authored content.
# 00:45 tantek disallowing leading/trailing whitespace from note-content seems like a reasonable trade-off
# 01:03 tantek.com edited /note (+330) "/* White space */ did a test on what Twitter preserves and what it doesn't. only thing it collapses is multiple linebreaks into one blank line at most." (
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# 03:04 tantek added whitespace support to Falcon. linebreaks made it to the Twitter POSSE'd copy. which then made it one more generation with the Twitter -> FB copy. amazing.
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# 03:17 tantek.com edited /note (+837) "Indieweb implementations / tantek.com Falcon notes support preserving/presenting whitespace and POSSEing to Twitter" (
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# 03:19 Loqi Ok, I'll tell him that when I see him next
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# 08:57 tommorris eschnou: the only problem with that is that Flattr pays me in Euros, which I can spend rather easier than Bitcoin. ;)
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# 09:03 eschnou tommorris, well, it is as easy to get euro out of an exchange than out of Flattr, the issue is more the volatility, but that goes both ways, imagine if you had received a few coins of tip when they were 10 cents worth :-)
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# 09:38 tantek tommorris - do you ever post notes with linebreaks in whitespace rather than with markup?
# 09:38 tantek (and then POSSE those whitespace linebreaks to Twitter etc.?)
# 09:40 tantek seems like another note content capability that's worth implementing, since Twitter supports it
# 09:41 tommorris HTML semantics are more interesting to me. so if I needed to do that, I'd probably use <pre> or <br />
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# 16:05 tantek tommorris - I agree re: "HTML semantics are more interesting to me" - but then I just write a longer post, an article.
# 16:06 tantek to me a "note" has always mean "plain text" from an authoring perspective - I just type prose and maybe paste in a URL or two (which it then makes sense to auto-link because that's what users expect)
# 16:06 tantek and it makes text URLs more usable (click instead of copy/paste)
# 16:07 tommorris "What do you want to share?" → "Post it on your website" ;)
# 16:09 tantek I mean I realize it's a spectrum between "a quick thought / comment / share of a URL" and "a series of related thoughts / in depth exploration"
# 16:09 aaronpk tantek: I like the plaintext distinction with notes
# 16:09 tantek but I have found things do seem to fit into note vs. article size chunks / styles / structures
# 16:09 tantek aaronpk - the plaintext distinction makes sense to me mostly from a writing perspective
# 16:10 aaronpk compose in a simple text field and all you have to worry about is the text?
# 16:11 tommorris is enough of an insufferable dork that he's willing to pop HTML/markdown into notes
# 16:11 tantek since markdown is actually a form of markup. even if it is still plain text, it's deliberately block structured plain text
# 16:12 tantek now that even Twitter is preserving spacing / linebreaks, it makes sense to accept those as part of notes as well
# 16:15 tantek so I think as part of a note *authoring* UI it's now important (expected) that linebreaks, blank lines, and multiple space characters are preserved from when writing (authoring), to displaying/presentation, and ideally, syndication as well
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# 16:27 tantek.com edited /note (+287) "/* Indieweb thinking */ user expectations about note whitespace have been set by dominant implementations" (
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# 16:28 tantek aaronpk - have you considered whitespace posting-presentation-syndication support to your notes?
# 16:29 aaronpk also I'm trying to figure out how my "notes" with photos fit into this
# 16:29 tantek tommorris - when you do use explicit markup (<br>  
# 16:29 tantek etc.) for whitespace in your notes, do you convert them to character entities when syndicating to twitter?
# 16:29 tantek aaronpk - is it rich content or just auto-embedding?
# 16:30 aaronpk could be auto-embedding just like twitter treats it
# 16:30 aaronpk i mean other than the fact they made up their own meta tags
# 16:31 tantek and sometimes it breaks with the flow of the content
# 16:31 tantek because there's too much UI/design junk around their embeds
# 16:32 aaronpk how would that best fit in to the plaintext+autoembed model?
# 16:32 tantek did you type/paste in the <iframe> markup yourself?
# 16:32 aaronpk I wrote the text in my markdown file, and at the bottom put in the soundcloud embed code
# 16:32 tantek or did you just paste in a soundcloud URL and have your code auto-detect it and create the iframe?
# 16:32 tantek because you as the author explicitly wrote/pasted markup
# 16:33 tantek if all you had done was paste a soundcloud URL to an audio page or audio file, and then your blogging system created the embed automatically, then it would be a note
# 16:34 tantek e.g. when I paste a Youtube URL in my notes, Falcon automatically converts it to an embed
# 16:34 aaronpk of course ultimately I want to be able to host the sound file myself and not rely on soundcloud
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# 16:34 tantek yeah - having to paste all that ugly markup is not note-like at all
# 16:35 tantek plus, I'd expect the iframe embedding codes to change over time (iiframes are kind of like proprietary APIs - right there in the src attribute)
# 16:37 aaronpk I'm trying to imagine a stream of short content I post, including photos, audio, video, etc
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# 16:41 tantek aaronpk - until you're actually hosting the photos/audio/video on a domain you control, you're not really posting it, you're *maybe* embedding it
# 16:43 tantek well a lot of what makes these distinctions is the posting UI
# 16:43 tantek so until you start having to design/create a photo posting UI on your own site, it's going to be difficult to sensibly explore the issues
# 16:44 tantek vs. photos, audio, video embeds (which I think we've mostly figured out)
# 16:53 tantek Twitter is awkward about all their auto-markup. They t.co wrap links, and they UI-wrap/interrupt image/video/audio embeds.
# 16:54 tantek their "embeds" are more like fat "link previews", the "Twitter Card" being a rich summary of the article or whatever resource you're linking to.
# 16:55 tantek aaronpk - let's get back to our conversation in october
# 17:01 tantek we were making progress there because we were talking about concrete post types that we are all actively posting on our own sites or actively trying to build UIs to post
# 17:01 tantek the checkin vs. note discussion was particularly interesting
# 17:02 tantek as in, what's "just" a checkin vs. a note posted from a location vs. a checkin with a note attached?
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# 17:04 tantek I think the conclusion we reached in person was that maybe we didn't need separate "types" for these
# 17:04 tantek and that you could infer which it was purely by the presence/absence of information
# 17:05 tantek e.g. location from device GPS / GeoLocation API -> just the location where you're posting from
# 17:05 tantek vs. presence of an explicitly user-chosen venue -> checkin of some sort
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# 17:06 tantek it gets more challenging when you include photos, but since none of us are actually building that ourselves currently, it's not something we can really hope to make much progress on
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# 17:07 tantek barnabywalters has an install of openphoto - but he doesn't integrate any of his open photo posts into the rest of his updates / stream in anyway. it's kind of its own content silo on his own site. not how I'd want to do indieweb photos at all.
# 17:07 aaronpk i've been trying to figure out what sort of content I'm most likely to create by using existing tools and silos since they are easier to engage with
# 17:08 aaronpk as in, I don't want to overengineer something on my site before I know if i'll actually use it
# 17:08 tantek and I'm proceeding on ease of design/implementation first
# 17:13 tantek aaronpk - indeed, existing use patterns are a good rough metric :)
# 17:13 tantek but then I tend to sort them by how easy to hard they would be to implement on my own site.
# 17:13 tantek hence I started with plain text notes, and have been slowly adding features to those
# 17:14 tantek so I have a geo user question for you aaronpk (and caseorganic)
# 17:15 tantek what's the point of posting a tweet with location information? what does it do for me (as the user posting it) and what does it do for people reading my tweets? why is it interesting/useful to anyone?
# 17:15 tantek (I ask because I've never posted a tweet with location information and can't figure out / understand the use-case)
# 17:15 tantek (and figure you two have thought about this a lot)
# 17:16 tantek though other geo-minded folks, please chime in if you have an answer (e.g. tommorris)
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# 17:17 caseorganic tantek: it's much more useful to post an instagram photo with location
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# 17:17 caseorganic tantek: some use cases on twitter - "help!" if you're in trouble - geolocating it would be useful
# 17:17 tantek caseorganic - photo posts with location I totally get and do all the time. tweets I don't.
# 17:18 tantek though frankly in a "help" situ it's faster (I've found) to simply *type* where I am etc. than wait for geo location information to come-up, confirm, etc.
# 17:19 tantek because geo information is so often "invisible" - it requires extra UI steps to make it work = extra time = not going to do it in an emergency
# 17:19 tantek worse - devices get geo information wrong all the time - and having it be wrong in an emergency would be particularly bad
# 17:20 tantek so basically, lack of trust for device geo = not going to use it in a help situ
# 17:21 tantek of course if I don't actually *know* where I am and I need help, then some (even possibly error-prone) geo information is better than nothing I guess? but now we're talking quite a bit of an edge case.
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# 17:26 tantek is currently thinking/working on adding "reply" support to Falcon notes.
# 17:32 aaronpk I usually don't include location in my tweets, but sometimes I do
# 17:36 tantek interesting - so it's more useful when traveling (away from home city)
# 17:37 aaronpk or at events, even if the event is in your own city
# 17:38 tantek when you want to indicate city granularity but have no need (or desire?) to broadcast specific venue information (which may be more ephemeral)
# 17:38 tantek your real world examples help illustrate this quite well
# 17:38 aaronpk actually I haven't found a case that I would want to include a venue with a text update
# 17:39 tantek most tweets with location seem to include quite detailed lat/long
# 17:39 Loqi tantek meant to say: most tweets with location seem to include quite precise lat/long
# 17:39 aaronpk more often I actually want to include an *event* with a text update, but not a venue. like "SXSW 2013" rather than "Austin Convention Center"
# 17:39 tantek right, and we were figuring out how to post venues themselves on your own site :)
# 17:41 aaronpk actually the tweets I posted only include city-level location data. they don't include exact lat/lng
# 17:46 aaronpk they used to show a little map under tweets that had a polygon of the neighborhood of the location
# 17:51 tantek aaronpk - that's ironic. Twitter dropped their own embed/card of the location!
# 17:54 tantek aaronpk - actually I'm a bit shocked at the interaction - clicking on the location takes you to a Google map
# 17:55 tantek (from that "near the Louvre" tweet which said "Paris, Paris" - WTF - and then linked to 48.88144752,2.35143095 )
# 17:55 tantek ok so even Twitter sucks at location annotated notes
# 17:57 aaronpk yea, it used to show the polygon not the exact lat/lng
# 17:57 tantek yes - all your tweets you linked to above, when you click on the location it takes you to a highly precise lat/long
# 17:57 aaronpk i think the lat/lng is the center of "Paris, Paris" not the actual location i was in
# 17:57 tantek which I'm assuming is not what you meant, since you didn't describe it that way in the use-cases
# 18:01 tantek which describes location as a feature in a way that it doesn't work / isn't supported any more it appears :(
# 18:02 tantek it's the same problem that most geeks / programs have with time and dates, since they try to convert everything to epoch seconds
# 18:03 tantek which is not what humans mean when they express times and dates
# 18:03 tantek aaronpk - see for example that Redit/HN thread about dates and times regarding your post on relative dates/times
# 18:04 tantek so yes, "artificial precision" is quite the important term to describe what they're doing/thinking wrong(ly) :)
# 18:04 tantek see also - database designers and their schema
# 18:06 tantek darn - no Wikipedia article for "artificial precision"! and I know I didn't make it up. now looking for another reference.
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# 18:35 tantek that's probably the boldest article creation I've attempted on Wikipedia - we'll see what happens to it.
# 18:37 tommorris Smith's book might, but there's kind of a large literature on vagueness in philosophy
# 18:37 tantek aaronpk's tweet is merely used to illustrate that example
# 18:38 tommorris and one would have to be careful whether one is referring to epistemic or semantic vagueness
# 18:38 tommorris I'll have a look when I'm not working like a maniac on work stuff.
# 18:38 tantek tommorris - I'm a bit shocked that nowhere in wikipedia did the phrase "artificial precision" occur - even though it is in common use
# 18:38 tantek both types of vagueness can have artificial precision applied to them
# 18:39 tantek tommorris - yeah the accuracy vs. precision article is pretty involved as well
# 18:39 tantek I'm hoping "artificial precision" doesn't just get merged into being a section somewhere else
# 18:40 tommorris you'll run up against 'Wikipedia is not a dictionary'. ;)
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# 18:51 tantek tommorris - I'm hoping the phrase is nerdy / scientific enough to appeal to typical wikipedians
# 18:52 tantek which is ironically too precise for the broader concept of artificial precision
# 18:52 tantek which I just added a note about to the artificial precision article
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# 18:57 tantek aaronpk - whatever happened to Mixer Labs / GeoAPI - acquired by Twitter and then … ?
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# 19:13 tantek I figure it will be very easy for you to implement yourself
# 19:16 barnabywalters interesting discussions in the logs — yes, there is not much communication between my openphoto server and my notes
# 19:16 barnabywalters photos as standalone content vs images/photos as part of notes is something I’m struggling with a bit
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# 19:19 aaronpk i have my own "openphoto" basically at a totally separate domain, i don't consider it integrated into my site as i would like
# 19:19 aaronpk i think the "what is a note" discussion is still pretty open
# 19:20 barnabywalters aaronpk: I like openphoto, but I suspect I will eventually ditch it for my own solution
# 19:20 aaronpk it's fine as a full photo management stack, that's just not what I want in terms of publishing a photo stream
# 19:20 barnabywalters aaronpk: tantek: yeah, and whether or not HTML/line breaks are acceptable adds even more complexity :)
# 19:21 barnabywalters aaronpk: I have found it sub-optimal for small images (it scales them up to horrible dimensions) and weirdly shaped images (screenshots/panoramas, both of which i do a lot)
# 19:23 barnabywalters to make the note plaintext vs HTML argument even more interesting… I just did a bunch of note UI brainstorming, trying to solve a few problems I’ve had:
# 19:23 Loqi !calc 1: having as much useful context as possible when replying to something
# 19:24 barnabywalters one potential solution I might try implementing is to have a “context” section above the note authoring box
# 19:24 barnabywalters if you’re replying to content, it loads the summary in (like some twitter clients)
# 19:25 barnabywalters otherwise, there’s a small quick research button, inspired by writing kit on the iPad
# 19:26 barnabywalters aaronpk: i.e. I’m writing a note where I mention a book, so I type the name into the quick research box, and it gives me D&Dable blocks with the author’s h-card, a wikipedia link, etc
# 19:28 tantek barnabywalters - sorry, was incorporating the geo in notes discussion above into the wiki
# 19:29 tantek here's a very early example where I could have used linebreaks:
# 19:29 tantek and even if the version to Twitter truncated some/most of the list, it would still show up as a partial list that you could could click through to see the rest
# 19:30 tantek not alternatively - it is an ordered list, semantically
# 19:30 tantek but I didn't want to bother with typing all the markup
# 19:31 tantek and either way, it makes sense to POSSE it to twitter
# 19:31 aaronpk see I would have typed that as "* item one\n* item two\n..." and had my web site convert to <li> syntax
# 19:31 tantek aaronpk - you just illustrated the error in that approach
# 19:31 tantek because "* item" would make an *unordered* list item
# 19:32 tantek whereas if you just write what you want to show up
# 19:32 aaronpk actually "1. item one\n2. item two\n" is valid markdown syntax too :)
# 19:33 tantek you don't need the steps of "parse the plain text hints" - "translate to HTML" - "display with CSS" - or "translate back to plain text to POSSE to twitter"
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# 19:33 tantek but the fact that you gave as an example the imprecise answer of unordered makes me think that such "syntax thinking" gets in the way of the message
# 19:34 tantek it's less work to just type plain text and have it work
# 19:34 aaronpk so you're saying that a note should be as close to plaintext as possible basically?
# 19:34 tantek than to worry about, will it work in markdown?
# 19:34 aaronpk i.e. whatever text you type is exactly what displays
# 19:34 aaronpk and that's how a note is different from an article?
# 19:34 tantek I think the "what is a note" has been very much defined by tweets and status updates
# 19:36 tantek there are many more note/article differences - but plaintextness is certainly a strong aspect of being a note
# 19:36 tantek implicit = autolinking/embedding rather than <a href> / <iframe> / <img>
# 19:38 tantek barnabywalters - the other aspect of whitespace in notes to consider (wrote it up on the wiki), is that now there's a broader user expectation of notes preserving whitespace from authoring to posting to display
# 19:38 tantek and if we want anyone to take our note-posting alternatives seriously, they ought to be at least as good
# 19:40 aaronpk so that also means basically no other content in a note other than text, where the text may include a URL
# 19:40 aaronpk so if I want to post a photo as a note, I would include the URL of the photo, meaning the photo would have to live at some other URL on my site
# 19:41 barnabywalters at least as good to be taken seriously = letting the whims of silos dictate how we author and publish our content?
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# 19:45 aaronpk actually that first quote was from me :) i'll fix
# 19:50 tantek barnabywalters - I don't see it as "whims of silos" but more that they are evolving in response to user practices
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# 19:50 barnabywalters tantek: and in just the same way, my software is evolving in response to my practises — so why should I adapt it to fit in with the silos?
# 19:52 tantek barnabywalters++ for posting his UI sketches on his own (sub)domain :)
# 19:53 tantek barnabywalters - strongly agreed with "my software is evolving in response to my practises"
# 19:54 tantek so I didn't add the whitespace support "to fit in with the silos", but rather, because the silos seemed to finally have consistent support, it felt like the broader user expectations were raised (mine included) and that's why I did it
# 19:54 tantek plus the white-space:pre-wrap solution is quite elegant
# 19:54 tantek in terms of letting you just store the whitespace as part of the plain text, round trip it and if it just work
# 19:55 tantek I can totally understand not caring about whitespace support for notes
# 19:56 tantek I've often found I've wanted to add linebreaks or even a blank line in a note just to express things a bit differently
# 19:56 tantek in my opinion, line breaks are a form of punctuation, just like ,;.!?
# 19:56 barnabywalters tantek: yeah, that makes a lot of sense. plaintext can be just as, if not more so, than HTML
# 19:56 tantek I also think there's the "it demos better" aspect :)
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# 19:57 tantek aaronpk himself has posted notes with linebreaks on his own site, but just not in POSSE'd copies
# 19:58 aaronpk I need a place to store this list of my "notes" that are not plaintext in order to review them later
# 19:58 tantek well, not really, it's hard to type chess characters :P
# 19:59 tantek it demos better because you can show a multiline note / list just working, on your site, and POSSE'd on Twitter
# 19:59 tantek it makes the note publishing flow look richer than what most people are used to
# 19:59 tantek (people are obviously used to linebreaks on FB status updates)
# 20:00 tantek the chess characters use case is brilliant because it provides an awesome fallback display for an *actual* chess UI
# 20:01 tantek and *that* would make an awesome demo. show an indieweb chess playing UI and how it POSSEs each move/boardstate out to Twitter so folks on Twitter can follow along
# 20:02 tantek it would automatically generate all the chess text stuff
# 20:02 barnabywalters oh, right, okay — in which case, the line breaks thing is only relevant to the POSSE part of the flow
# 20:03 tantek but once you implement the POSSE part of the flow, it seems easy enough to add support in your own notes
# 20:05 barnabywalters so, the leonardo da vinci blockquote -> p markup broke, but apart from that there’s nothing much
# 20:06 barnabywalters my problem with using the white-space CSS is that it creates an expectation that my notes must have that style applied in whatever context they are taken into
# 20:07 barnabywalters what if someone wants to quote one of my notes with (for e.g.) the web action toolbelt selection thing
# 20:07 tantek for embeds copy/pasting, that's where adding auto-markup may help (e.g. explicit <br/>s)
# 20:07 tantek since you're already giving them markup for the <blockquote> h-cite etc.
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# 20:08 tantek ah for RSS/Atom , that's another place where you could add explicit <br/>s automatically
# 20:08 barnabywalters tantek: not h-cite by default, but it could easily be configured. Actually, using h-cite more is one of the reasons I want to build the drag+drop quick research/reply thing
# 20:09 tantek christopheducamp is using h-cite on blockquotes of notes
# 20:09 barnabywalters typing out markup+h-cite, even in full length blog posts, is rather a lot of effort
# 20:09 tantek barnabywalters - indeed which is why my blog posts have them automated :)
# 20:10 tantek (the text field at the bottom for copy/pasting a full markup citation)
# 20:11 barnabywalters so, the approach I’m thinking about is the citing author’s tools generating the markup, your implemented approach is the cited authors tools generating the markup
# 20:12 barnabywalters what would be *really* cool would be to make my quick research/reply UI auto-detect author-supplied cite markup
# 20:13 barnabywalters tantek: side note whilst looking for an article on your site: is the first note being bigger a recent change, or just something I’ve not noticed?
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# 20:23 tantek the first note being bigger has been that way since near the beginning (2010) of when I started posting notes on my site and POSSEing to Twitter
# 20:24 barnabywalters tantek: no, I meant some mechanism allowing you to specify the markup you want people to use as a citation in a machine-discoverable way
# 20:25 tantek aaronpk - re: there we go - do you have a name for your indieweb cms yet that drives aaronparecki.com?
# 20:26 tantek barnabywalters - ah you mean a "how to cite this post" poshformat :)
# 20:27 tantek barnabywalters the "how to cite this post" discovery question is *almost* identical to link-preview discovery
# 20:28 barnabywalters ooh, that’s a point — how do microformat parsers handle the contents of input elements?
# 20:28 tantek so I'm not even sure a site should dictate the markup to cite it
# 20:28 tantek rather it should provide the information necessary to make a citation,
# 20:29 tantek and then leave it up to the site that is doing the citing to pick their own markup that works for their template/display etc.
# 20:29 tantek and we can instead provide best practices documentation on the wiki, e.g. when you cite another site, here's some markup to use
# 20:30 tantek the problem with copying the markup from other sites is they may not use the citation style (MLA, TCMOS, APA) that you want
# 20:30 tantek but by just parsing the properties, you can reconstruct an h-cite accordingly
# 20:30 tantek without depending on any specific HTML markup
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# 21:05 tantek Larry Halff's latest project is an interesting twist on IndieWeb/POSSE
# 21:06 tantek it's a good exploration of another area of the broader publishing problem space - in particular, how to deal with publishing / POSSEing more private-ish posts?
# 21:06 tantek very indiewebish pitch: " If you have enough know-how to set up a self-hosted WordPress installation that connects to Facebook, then you know enough to get going with Whiskers"
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