[a quote from Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.] made me think a lot about the early days of Gutenberg and the huge
resistance it had in the community, including causing the fork of ClassicPress. Now that we’re much further along there’s a pretty widespread acceptance of Gutenberg, and it’s
responsible for the vast majority of all WP posts and pages made, however if we had taken a vote for whether it should happen or not, it probably wouldn’t have ever gotten off the
ground.
What’s funny is if you go back even further, using a visual WYSIWYG editor in the first place was very controversial, and many people didn’t want the classic editor brought into
WordPress.
Long-term WordPresser here; I remember when 2.0 integrated TinyMCE and it was absolutely necessary to ensure that raw HTML editing
remained an option, clear and up-front. Which I’m glad of: I probably hit raw HTML about once a month when I’m blogging, to this day!
I was among those who strongly resisted Gutenberg. Nowadays I use it every day! But my primary personal blog, which was already almost six years old when it migrated to WordPress 1.2
back in 2004, still uses the classic editor. I enjoy that I have the freedom to do that.
When we talk about open source meaning freedom, this is the kind of thing we mean. Years ago, I was in charge of the CMS for a major academic
institution when the company behind that CMS made a gradual and concerted effort to become less-open-source. That CMS didn’t have the ecosystem
and community around it that WordPress has, and so no forks took off, and so my employer got locked-in to upgrading to a new version that was mostly-closed-source and was in some ways
inferior. Ugh.
(Incidentally, I got them off that CMS: they’re now using a mixture of WordPress and Drupal for most of their
systems. Open source won.)
Change isn’t always good. But open source provides the freedom to embrace change in the way that suits you best.
Last week, I discovered Geneveive Raine‘s “The Continuum”, a super-compressed image comprised of
1-pixel-tall versions of her home page’s daily banners, stitched together1.
I thought it was a beautiful idea, so I stole adapted it to produce an illustration based on the featured images of my blog posts:
Only about 38% of my 5,445 blog posts have featured images suitable for use in this diagram. But here they are!
I generated a horizontal version too, but I’ve used the vertical version above because it’s more-suitable for use with a
HTML imagemap2.
Here’s the code I used to generate the images (and the imagemap), if you want to run it against your own
WordPress-ish blog.
Footnotes
1 Which was in-turn inspired by Movie
Iris, a tool that visualises the frames of a movie as a radial graphic.
2 What’s a HTML imagemap, you ask? You don’t need to ask: you shouldn’t be using it
anyway. Relying on it means you’re setting yourself up for an accessibility nightmare. Anyway: I used one above: you
can click on any “stripe” of the image to jump to the corresponding post. It needed some fighting-with because imagemaps can’t work with rescaled images, so I’ve forced the height of
the image even as it resizes horizontally. Not that you’re going to click on the stripes anyway: it’s just about the worst way imaginable to navigate a blog.
It turns out my seriesofefforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than
I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but
it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).
The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.
So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds,
filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.
Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.
Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.
Some people actually want to read this crap, apparently.
I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed,
I’ve got you covered:
Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like
removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they
outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you.
…
There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for
sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear
the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact – think throwing away the Oreos when you
start your diet.
…
Wise words from Cory about why he isn’t on Bluesky, which somewhat echo my own experience. If you’ve had the experience in recent memory of abandoning an enshittified Twitter (and if
you didn’t yet… why the fuck not?), TikTok, or let’s face it Reddit… and you’ve looked instead to services like Bluesky or arguably Threads… then you haven’t learned your lesson at all.
Freedom to exit is fundamental, and I’m a big fan of systems with a built-in Ulysses Pact. In non-social or unidirectionally-social software it’s sufficient for the tools to be open
source: this allows me to host a copy myself if a hosted version falls to enshittification. But for bidirectional social networks, it’s also necessary for them to be federated,
so that I’m not disadvantaged by choosing to drop any particular provider in favour of another or my own.
Bluesky keeps promising a proper federation model, but it’s not there yet. And I’m steering clear until it is.
I suppose I also enjoyed this post of Cory’s because it helped remind me of where I myself am failing to apply the Ulysses Pact. Right now, Three Rings is highly-centralised, and while I and everybody else involved with it know our exit strategy should the project have to fold (open
source it, help charities migrate to their own instances, etc.) right now that plan is less “tie ourselves to the mast” than it is “trust one another to grab us if we go chasing
sirens”. We probably ought to fix that.
Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app,
which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things!
The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I’ve once again had to update my script to “fix” the feed so that it only contains, y’know, news.
The people who make the most money in WordPress are not the people who contribute the most (Matt / Automattic really is one of the exceptions here, as I think we are). And this is a
problem. It’s a moral problem. It’s just not equitable.
I agree with Matt about his opinion that a big hosting company such as WPEngine should contribute more. It is the right thing to do. It’s fair. It will make the WordPress community
more egalitarian. Otherwise, it will lead to resentment. I’ve experienced that too.
…
In my opinion, we all should get a say in how we spend those contributions [from companies to WordPress]. I understand that core contributors are very important, but so are the
organizers of our (flagship) events, the leadership of hosting companies, etc. We need to find a way to have a group of people who represent the community and the contributing
corporations.
Just like in a democracy. Because, after all, isn’t WordPress all about democratizing?
Now I don’t mean to say that Matt should no longer be project leader. I just think that we should more transparently discuss with a “board” of some sorts, about the roadmap and the
future of WordPress as many people and companies depend on it. I think this could actually help Matt, as I do understand that it’s very lonely at the top.
With such a group, we could also discuss how to better highlight companies that are contributing and how to encourage others to do so.
…
Some wise words from Joost de Valk, and it’s worth reading his full post if you’re following the
WP Engine drama but would rather be focussing on looking long-term towards a better future for the entire ecosystem.
I don’t know whether Joost’s solution is optimal, but it’s certainly worth considering his ideas if we’re to come up with a new shape for WordPress. It’s good to see that people are
thinking about the bigger picture here, than just wherever we find ourselves at the resolution of this disagreement between Matt/Automattic/the WordPress Foundation and WP Engine.
Thinking bigger is admirable. Thinking bigger is optimistic. Thinking bigger is future-facing.
If you’re active in the WordPress space you’re probably aware that there’s a lot of drama going on right now between (a) WordPress hosting company WP Engine, (b) WordPress
hosting company (among quiteafewotherthings) Automattic1,
and (c) the WordPress Foundation.
If you’re not aware then, well: do a search across the tech news media to see the latest: any summary I could give you would be out-of-date by the time you read it anyway!
I tried to draw a better diagram with more of the relevant connections, but it quickly turned into spaghetti.
In particular, I think a lot of the conversation that he kicked off conflates three different aspects of WP Engine’s misbehaviour. That muddies the waters when it comes to
having a reasoned conversation about the issue3.
I’ve heard Matt speak a number of times, including in person… and I think he did a pretty bad job of expressing the problems with WP Engine during his Q&A at WCUS. In his defence,
it sounds like he may have been still trying to negotiate a better way forward until the very second he walked on stage that day.
I don’t think WP Engine is a particularly good company, and I personally wouldn’t use them for WordPress hosting. That’s not a new opinion for me: I wouldn’t have used them last year or
the year before, or the year before that either. And I broadly agree with what I think Matt tried to say, although not necessarily with the way he said it or the platform he
chose to say it upon.
Misdeeds
As I see it, WP Engine’s potential misdeeds fall into three distinct categories: moral, ethical4,
and legal.
Morally: don’t take without giving back
Matt observes that since WP Engine’s acquisition by huge tech-company-investor Silver Lake, WP Engine have made enormous profits from selling WordPress hosting as a service (and nothing else) while
making minimal to no contributions back to the open source platform that they depend upon.
If true, and it appears to be, this would violate the principle of reciprocity. If you benefit from somebody else’s
effort (and you’re able to) you’re morally-obliged to at least offer to give back in a manner commensurate to your relative level of resources.
The principle of reciprocity is a moral staple. This is evidenced by the fact that children (and some nonhuman animals) seem to be able to work it out for themselves
from first principles using nothing more than empathy. Companies, however aren’t usually so-capable. Photo courtesy Cotton.
Abuse of this principle is… sadly not-uncommon in business. Or in tech. Or in the world in general. A lightweight example might be the many millions of profitable companies that host
atop the Apache HTTP Server without donating a penny to the Apache Foundation. A heavier (and legally-backed) example might be Trump Social’s
implementation being based on a modified version of Mastodon’s code:
Mastodon’s license requires that their changes are shared publicly… but they don’t do until they’re sent threatening letters reminding them of their obligations.
I feel like it’s fair game to call out companies that act amorally, and encourage people to boycott them, so long as you do so without “punching down”.
Ethically: don’t exploit open source’s liberties as weaknesses
WP Engine also stand accused of altering the open source code that they host in ways that maximise their profit, to the detriment of both their customers and the original authors of
that code5.
It’s well established, for example, that WP Engine disable the “revisions” feature of WordPress6.
Personally, I don’t feel like this is as big a deal as Matt makes out that it is (I certainly wouldn’t go as far as saying “WP
Engine is not WordPress”): it’s pretty commonplace for large hosting companies to tweak the open source software that they host to better fit their architecture and business model.
But I agree that it does make WordPress as-provided by WP Engine significantly less good than would be expected from virtually any other host (most of which, by the way, provide much
better value-for-money at any price point).
There’s nothing to stop me from registering TurdPress.com and providing a premium WordPress web hosting solution with all the best features disabled: I could even disable
exports so that my customers wouldn’t even be able to easily leave my service for greener pastures! There’s nothing stop me… but that wouldn’t make it
right7.
It also looks like WP Engine may have made more-nefarious changes, e.g. modifying the referral links in open source code (the thing that earns money for the original authors of
that code) so that WP Engine can collect the revenue themselves when they deploy that code to their customers’ sites. That to me feels like it’s clearly into the zone ethical bad
practice. Within the open source community, it’s not okay to take somebody’s code, which they were kind enough to release under a liberal license, strip out the bits that provide
their income, and redistribute it, even just as a network service8.
Again, I think this is fair game to call out, even if it’s not something that anybody has a right to enforce legally. On which note…
Obviously, this is the part of the story you’re going to see the most news media about, because there’s reasonable odds it’ll end up in front of a judge at some point. There’s a good
chance that such a case might revolve around WP Engine’s willingness (and encouragement?) to allow their business to be called “WordPress Engine” and to capitalise on any confusion that
causes.
I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of the legal case: I Am Not A Lawyer and all that. Naturally I agree with the underlying principle that one should not be allowed to profit
off another’s intellectual property, but I’ll leave discussion on whether or not that’s what WP Engine are doing as a conversation for folks with more legal-smarts than I. I’ve
certainly known people be confused by WP Engine’s name and branding, though, and think that they must be some kind of “officially-licensed” WordPress host: it happens.
If you’re following all of this drama as it unfolds… just remember to check your sources. There’s a lot of FUD floating around on the Internet right now9.
In summary…
With a reminder that I’m sharing my own opinion here and not that of my employer, here’s my thoughts on the recent WP Engine drama:
WP Engine certainly act in ways that are unethical and immoral and antithetical to the spirit of open source, and those are just a subset of the reasons that I wouldn’t use them as
a WordPress host.
Matt Mullenweg calling them out at WordCamp US doesn’t get his point across as well as I think he hoped it might, and probably won’t win him any popularity contests.
I’m not qualified to weigh in on whether or not WP Engine have violated the WordPress Foundation’s trademarks, but I suspect that they’ve benefitted from widespread confusion about
their status.
Footnotes
1 I suppose I ought to point out that Automattic is my employer, in case you didn’t know,
and point out that my opinions don’t necessarily represent theirs, etc. I’ve been involved with WordPress as an open source project for about four times as long as I’ve had any
connection to Automattic, though, and don’t always agree with them, so I’d hope that it’s a given that I’m speaking my own mind!
2 Though like Manu, I don’t
think that means that Matt should take the corresponding blog post down: I’m a digital preservationist, as might be evidenced by the unrepresentative-of-me and frankly embarrassing
things in the 25-year archives of this blog!
3 Fortunately the documents that the lawyers for both sides have been writing are much
clearer and more-specific, but that’s what you pay lawyers for, right?
4 There’s a huge amount of debate about the difference between morality and ethics, but
I’m using the definition that means that morality is based on what a social animal might be expected to decide for themselves is right, think e.g. the Golden Rule etc., whereas ethics is the code of conduct expected within a particular community. Take stealing, for example,
which covers the spectrum: that you shouldn’t deprive somebody else of something they need, is a moral issue; that we as a society deem such behaviour worthy of exclusion is an
ethical one; meanwhile the action of incarcerating burglars is part of our legal framework.
5 Not that nobody’s immune to making ethical mistakes. Not me, not you, not anybody else.
I remember when, back in 2005, Matt fucked up by injecting ads into WordPress (which at that point didn’t have a reliable source of
funding). But he did the right thing by backpedalling, undoing the harm, and apologising publicly and profusely.
6 WP Engine claim that they disable revisions for performance reasons, but that’s clearly
bullshit: it’s pretty obvious to me that this is about making hosting cheaper. Enabling revisions doesn’t have a performance impact on a properly-configured multisite hosting system,
and I know this from personal experience of running such things. But it does have a significant impact on how much space you need to allocate to your users, which has cost
implications at scale.
7 As an aside: if a court does rule that WP Engine is infringing upon
WordPress trademarks and they want a new company name to give their service a fresh start, they’re welcome to TurdPress.
8 I’d argue that it is okay to do so for personal-use though: the difference for
me comes when you’re making a profit off of it. It’s interesting to find these edge-cases in my own thinking!
9 A typical Reddit thread is about 25% lies-and-bullshit; but you can double that for a
typical thread talking about this topic!
I’ve never been even remotely into Sex and the City. But I can’t help but love that this developer was so invested in the characters and their relationships that when
he asked himself “couldn’t all this drama and heartache have been simplified if these characters were willing to consider polyamorous relationships rather than serial
monogamy?”1,
he did the maths to optimise his hypothetical fanfic polycule:
As if his talk at !!Con 2024 wasn’t cool enough, he open-sourced the whole thing, so you’re free to try the calculator online for yourself or expand upon or adapt it to your heart’s content. Perhaps you disagree with his assessment of the
relative relationship characteristics of the characters2: tweak them and
see what the result is!
Or maybe Sex and the City isn’t your thing at all? Well adapt it for whatever your fandom is! How I Met Your Mother,Dawson’s Creek, Mamma
Mia and The L-Word were all crying out for polyamory to come and “fix” them3.
Perhaps if you’re feeling especially brave you’ll put yourself and your circles of friends, lovers, metamours, or whatever into the algorithm and see who it matches up. You never know,
maybe there’s a love connection you’ve missed! (Just be ready for the possibility that it’ll tell you that you’re doing your love life “wrong”!)
Footnotes
1 This is a question I routinely find myself asking of every TV show that presents a love
triangle as a fait accompli resulting from an even moderately-complex who’s-attracted-to-whom.
2 Clearly somebody does, based on his commit “against his will” that increases Carrie and Big’s
validatesOthers scores and reduces Big’s prioritizesKindness.
3 I was especially disappointed with the otherwise-excellent The L-Word, which
did have a go at an ethical non-monogamy storyline but bungled the “ethical” at every hurdle while simultaneously reinforcing the “insatiable bisexual” stereotype. Boo!
Anyway: maybe on my next re-watch I’ll feed some numbers into Juan’s algorithm and see what comes out…
Like my occasional video content, this isn’t designed to replace any of my blogging: it’s just a different medium for those that might prefer it.
For some stories, I guess that audio might be a better way to find out what I’ve been thinking about. Just like how the vlog version of my post about
my favourite video game Easter Egg might be preferable because video as a medium is better suited to demonstrating a computer game, perhaps
audio’s the right medium for some of the things I write about, too?
But as much as not, it’s just a continuation of my efforts to explore different media over which a WordPress blog can be delivered2.
Also, y’know, my ongoing effort to do what I’m bad at in the hope that I might get better at a wider diversity of skills.
How?
Let’s start by understanding what a “podcast” actually is. It is, in essence, just an RSS feed (something you might have heard me talk about before…) with audio enclosures – basically, “attachments” – on each item. The idea was spearheaded by Dave Winer back in 2001 as a
way of subscribing to rich media like audio or videos in such a way that slow Internet connections could pre-download content so you didn’t have to wait for it to buffer.3
Podcasts are pretty simple, even after you’ve bent over backwards to add all of the metadata that Apple Podcasts (formerly iTunes) expects to see. I looked at a couple of
WordPress plugins that claimed to be able to do the work for me, but eventually decided it was simple enough to just add some custom metadata fields that could then be included in my
feeds and tweak my theme code a little.
Here’s what I had to do to add podcasting capability to my theme:
The tag
I use a post tag, dancast, to represent posts with accompanying podcast content4.
This way, I can add all the podcast-specific metadata only if the user requests the feed of that tag, and leave my regular feeds untampered . This means that you don’t
get the podcast enclosures in the regular subscription; that might not be what everybody would want, but it suits me to serve podcasts only to people who explicitly ask for
them.
Okay, onto the code (which I’ve open-sourced over here). I’ve use a series of standard WordPress hooks to
add the functionality I need. The important bits are:
rss2_item – to add the <enclosure>, <itunes:duration>, <itunes:image>, and
<itunes:explicit> elements to the feed, when requesting a feed with my nominated tag. Only <enclosure> is strictly required, but appeasing Apple
Podcasts is worthwhile too. These are lifted directly from the post metadata.
the_excerpt_rss – I have another piece of post metadata in which I can add a description of the podcast (in practice, a list of chapter times); this hook
swaps out the existing excerpt for my custom one in podcast feeds.
rss_enclosure – some podcast syndication platforms and players can’t cope with RSS feeds in which an item has multiple enclosures, so as a
safety precaution I strip out any enclosures that WordPress has already added (e.g. the featured image).
the_content_feed – my RSS feed usually contains the full text of every post, because I don’t like feeds that try to force you to go to the
original web page5
and I don’t want to impose that on others. But for the podcast feed, the text content of the post is somewhat redundant so I drop it.
rss2_ns – of critical importance of course is adding the relevant namespaces to your XML declaration. I use the itunes namespace, which provides the widest compatibility for specifying metadata, but I also use the
newer podcast namespace, which has growing compatibility and provides some modern features, most of which I don’t
use except specifying a license. There’s no harm in supporting both.
rss2_head – here’s where I put in the metadata for the podcast as a whole: license, category, type, and so on. Some of these fields are
effectively essential for best support.
You’re welcome, of course, to lift any of all of the code for your own purposes. WordPress makes a perfectly reasonable platform for podcasting-alongside-blogging, in my experience.
What?
Finally, there’s the question of what to podcast about.
My intention is to use podcasting as an alternative medium to my traditional blog posts. But not every blog post is suitable for conversion into a podcast! Ones that rely on images
(like my post about dithering) aren’t a great choice. Ones that have lots of code that you might like to copy-and-paste are especially unsuitable.
You’re listening to Radio Dan. 100% Dan, 100% of the time.(Also I suppose you might be able to hear my dog snoring in the background…)
Also: sometimes I just can’t be bothered. It’s already some level of effort to write a blog post; it’s like an extra 25% effort on top of that to record, edit, and upload a podcast
version of it.
That’s not nothing, so I’ve tended to reserve podcasts for blog posts that I think have a sort-of eccentric “general interest” vibe to them. When I learn something new and feel the need
to write a thousand words about it… that’s the kind of content that makes it into a podcast episode.
Which is why I’ve been calling the endeavour “a podcast nobody asked for, about things only Dan Q cares about”. I’m capable of getting nerdsniped
easily and can quickly find my way down a rabbit hole of learning. My podcast is, I guess, just a way of sharing my passion for trivial deep dives with the rest of the world.
My episodes are probably shorter than most podcasts: my longest so far is around fifteen minutes, but my shortest is only two and a half minutes and most are about seven. They’re meant
to be a bite-size alternative to reading a post for people who prefer to put things in their ears than into their eyes.
Anyway: if you’re not listening already, you can subscribe from here or in your favourite podcasting app. Or you can just follow my blog as normal
and look for a streamable copy of podcasts at the top of selected posts (like this one!).
2 As well as Web-based non-textual content like audio (podcasts) and video (vlogs), my blog is wholly or partially available over a variety of more-exotic protocols: did you find me yet on Gemini (gemini://danq.me/), Spartan (spartan://danq.me/), Gopher (gopher://danq.me/), and even Finger
(finger://danq.me/, or run e.g. finger blog@danq.me from your command line)? Most of these are powered by my very own tool CapsulePress, and I’m itching to try a few more… how about a WordPress blog that’s accessible over FTP, NNTP, or DNS? I’m not even kidding when I say
I’ve got ideas for these…
3 Nowadays, we have specialised media decoder co-processors which reduce the size of media
files. But more-importantly, today’s high-speed always-on Internet connections mean that you probably rarely need to make a conscious choice between streaming or downloading.
4 I actually intended to change the tag to podcast when I went-live,
but then I forgot, and now I can’t be bothered to change it. It’s only for my convenience, after all!
Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
Red and black might be more traditional ladybird colours, but sometimes all you’ve got is blue.
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
Just don’t tell the soup company what I’ve been working on, okay?
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the
other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
Footnotes
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not
completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to
transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the
penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape
and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley
faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
Terence Eden, who’s apparently inspiring several posts this week, recently shared a way to attach a hook to WordPress’s
get_the_post_thumbnail() function in order to remove the extraneous “closing mark” from the (self-closing in HTML) <img> element.
By default, WordPress outputs e.g. <img src="..." />, where <img src="..."> would suffice.
It’s an inconsequential difference for most purposes, but apparently it bugs him, so he fixed it… although he went on to observe that he hadn’t managed to successfully tackle
all the instances in which WordPress was outputting redundant closing marks.
This is a problem that I’ve already solved here on my blog. My solution’s slightly hacky… but it works!
There are many things you could say about the HTML produced to make the page you’re reading now. But “it needs fewer />s” isn’t among them.
My Solution: Runing HTMLTidy over WordPress
Tidy is an excellent tool for tiding up HTML! I used to use its predecessor back in
the day for all kind of things, but it languished for a few years and struggled with support for modern HTML features. But
in 2015 it made a comeback and it’s gone from strength to strength ever since.
I run it on virtually all pages produced by DanQ.me (go on, click “View Source” and see for yourself!), to:
Standardise the style of the HTML code and make it easier for humans to read1.
Bring old-style emphasis tags like <i>, in my older posts, into a more-modern interpretation, like <em>.
Hoist any inline <style> blocks to the <head>, and detect any repeated inline style="..."s to convert to classes.
Repair any invalid HTML (browsers do this for you, of course, but doing it server-side makes parsing easier for the
browser, which might matter on more-lightweight hardware).
WordPress isn’t really designed to have Tidy bolted onto it, so anything it likely to be a bit of a hack, but here’s my approach:
Install libtidy-dev and build the PHP bindings to it.
Note that if you don’t do this the code might appear to work, but it won’t actually tidy anything2.
Add a new output buffer to my theme’s header.php3, with a callback function: ob_start('tidy_entire_page').
Without an corresponding ob_flush or similar, this buffer will close and the function will be called when PHP
finishes generating the page.
Define the function tidy_entire_page($buffer) Have it instantiate Tidy ($tidy = new tidy) and use $tidy->parseString (with your buffer and Tidy preferences) to tidy the code, then
return $tidy.
Ensure that you’re caching the results!
You don’t want to run this every page load for anonymous users! WP Super Cache on “Expert” mode (with the
requisite webserver configuration) might help.
1 I miss the days when most websites were handwritten and View Source typically looked
nice. It was great to learn from, too, especially in an age before we had DOM debuggers. Today: I can’t justify
dropping my use of a CMS, but I can make my code readable.
2 For a few of its extensions, some PHP developer made the interesting choice to fail silently if the required extension is missing. For example: if you don’t have the
zip extension enabled you can still usePHPto make ZIP files, but they won’t be
compressed. This can cause a great deal of confusion for developers! A similar issue exists with tidy: if it isn’t installed, you can still call all of the
methods on it… they just don’t do anything. I can see why this decision might have been made – to make the language as portable as possible in production – but I’d
prefer if this were an optional feature, e.g. you had to set try_to_make_do_if_you_are_missing_an_extension=yes in your php.ini to enable it, or if
it at least logged that it had done so.
3 My approach probably isn’t suitable for FSE (“block”) themes, sorry.
I’ve been playing with the (pre-Alpha version of) Ladybird, and it fills me with such joy and excitement.
As you can see, Ladybird does a perfectly adequate job of rendering this page, including most of its CSS and
virtually all of its JavaScript.
Browser diversity
Back in 2018, while other Web developers were celebrating, I expressed my dismay at the news that Microsoft Edge was on the cusp of switching
from using Microsoft’s own browser engine EdgeHTML to using Blink. Blink is the engine that powers almost all other mainstream browsers; all but Firefox, which continues to
stand atop Gecko.
The developers who celebrated this loss of rendering engine diversity were, I suppose, happy to have one fewer browser in which they must necessarily test their work. I guess these are
the same developers who don’t test the sites they develop for accessibility (does your site work if you can’t see the images? what about with a keyboard but without a pointing device?
how about if you’re colourblind?), or consider what might happen if a part of their site fails (what if the third-party CDN
that hosts your JavaScript libraries goes down or is blocked by the user’s security software or their ISP?).
When was the last time you tested your site in a text-mode browser?
But I was sad, because – as I observed after Andre
Alves Garzia succinctly spelled it out – browser engines are an endangered species. Building a new browser that supports the myriad complexities of the
modern Web is such a huge endeavour that it’s unlikely to occur from scratch: from this point on, all “new” browsers are likely to be based upon an existing browser engine.
Engine diversity is important. Last time we had a lull in engine diversity, the Web got stuck, stagnating in the
shadow of Internet Explorer 6’s dominance and under the thumb of Microsoft’s interests. I don’t want those days to come back; that’s a big part of why Firefox is my primary web browser.
A Ladybird book browser
I actually still own a copy of the book from which I adapted this cover!
Ladybird is a genuine new browser engine. Y’know, that thing I said that we might never see happen again! So how’ve they made it happen?
It helps that it’s not quite starting from scratch. It’s starting point is the HTML viewer component from SerenityOS. And… it’s pretty good. It’s DOM processing’s solid, it seems to support enough JavaScript and CSS that the modern Web is usable, even if it’s not beautiful 100% of the time.
I’ve certainly seen browsers do worse than this at Acid3 and related tests…
They’re not even expecting to make an Alpha release until next year! Right now if you want to use it at all, you’re going to need to compile the code for yourself and fight with a
plethora of bugs, but it works and that, all by itself, is really exciting.
They’ve got four full-time engineers, funded off donations, with three more expected to join, plus a stack of volunteer contributors on Github. I’ve raised my first issue against the repo; sadly my C++ probably isn’t strong enough to be able to help more-directly, even if I
somehow did have enough free time, which I don’t. But I’ll be watching-from-afar this wonderful, ambitious, and ideologically-sound initiative.
theunderground.blog‘s content, with the exception of its homepage, is delivered entirely through an XML Atom feed. Atom feed entries do require <title>s, of course, so that’s not the strongest counterexample!
This blog is available over several media other than the Web. For example, you can read this blog post:
We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is:
A webserver configured to deliver plain text files by preference, e.g. by adding directives like index index.txt; (for Nginx).5
An index page listing posts by date and URL. Most browser won’t render these as “links” so users will have to copy-paste
or re-type them, so let’s keep them short,
Pages for each post at those URLs, presumably without any kind of “title” (just to prove a point), and
An RSS feed: usually I use RSS as shorthand for all feed
types, but this time I really do mean RSS and not e.g. Atom because RSS, strangely, doesn’t require that an <item> has a <title>!
Unlike other sites, I didn’t need to test textplain.blog in Lynx to
know it’d work well. But I did anyway.
In the end I decided it’d benefit from being automated as sort-of a basic flat-file CMS, so I wrote it in PHP. All requests are routed by the webserver to the program, which determines whether they’re a request for the homepage, the RSS feed, or a valid individual post, and responds accordingly.
It annoys me that feed
discovery doesn’t work nicely when using a Link: header, at least not in any reader I tried. But apart from that, it seems pretty solid, despite its limitations. Is this,
perhaps, an argument for my.well-known/feedsproposal?
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTube
