I was flattered to get a reply from Anil Dash to my post about the backlash Mozilla faces for its plan to add AI to Firefox. I’ve read Anil for a long time and admire his work.
That said, I respectfully disagree with his arguments — here’s why.
Google
via Search Engine Roundtable
Old people on the internet probably remember phpBB, a discussion board software that was very popular in the early 2000s. I discovered, by chance, that it still exists and has active development, albeit slow: the phpBB3 series was released in December 2007 and the last major update (3.3), in January 2020. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it…?
In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on.
“What’s going on here is that these quantifications of social connection play right into our (capitalism-inspired) innate desire for more,” he explained.
In creating his extension, Ben questioned why there were so many numbers “a system (and a corporation) that depends on its user’s continued free labor to produce the information that fills its databases.”
All of this in 2012!
More than a decade later, I feel we haven’t internalized Ben’s ahead-of-his-time discoveries. Even alternatives that position themselves as opposites to the abusive practices of commercial platforms like Facebook — think of Bluesky and Mastodon — insist on interfaces packed with numbers. It almost seems like we’ve lost the ability to imagine other models of digital interaction.
Just a QR Code is a simple, straightforward QR code generator without ads or invasive trackers.
Just a QR Code was born from Gabe Schuyler’s dissatisfaction with online generators of this type. “Isn’t it possible to just make a one-page website that uses Javascript to generate QR codes? Something I could save to disk and run locally”, he pondered.
And from that, Just a QR Code was born. Gabe himself was committed to cover the operating costs. In exchange, he asks:
If you find it valuable, you can pay it back by creating your own useful thing for the world and releasing it for free. Let’s take back the friendly web, one vexingly-monetized utility at a time!
It’s this spirit that drives PC do Manual, a host of FOSS apps from Manual do Usuário. Which, by the way, has two QR code generation tools, a general one and another for joining Wi-Fi networks.
As soon as you open the site allow.webcam, it requests permission from your browser to access your webcam. If you grant it, the site takes a picture of you and displays the pictures of all the other people who have also allowed themselves to be photographed. If you decline, you’ll be left with a black screen.
Dark Visitors, a service for monitoring and blocking bots from artificial intelligence companies, has revamped its plans and now offers a very generous free tier, with a cap of 1 million “events.”
You can use the free mode indefinitely or register your credit card to access paid features without charge, as long as your site does not exceed the 1 million events limit. After that, the cost is USD 0.00005 per event.
Last year I had canceled my use of Dark Visitors here when the trial period expired. Now, I’ve reactivated it. It’s almost therapeutic to see the traffic from non-humans around here.
Tiny Emulators brings together a handful of emulators for classic operating systems and games, running directly in your browser. To play the games, use the arrow keys and the spacebar. Some OSs have special commands, which are listed here. I just spent a good few minutes playing the original Prince of Persia.
Hypertext TV is “a celebration of small, handmade games and sites.” The interface simulates an old tube TV, and the available “channels” (sites) vary depending on the day and time — come back on different days to receive different content. It serves as a kind of answer to the unlimited on-demand content offered by modern web. (The code is open source, and you can suggest sites to be added.)
The 404s is an ode to the not found web pages. The name of the site refers to the standard response code of the HTTP protocol for pages not found. This site celebrates the error — and I believe that celebrating our mistakes to the point of taking pride in them is somewhat healthy.
I also think that the 404 page of this Manual could use a little attention, don’t you think?
Another chapter in the series “fascinated by the details of CSS,” this time featuring the attribute text-wrap: pretty and how browsers handle line breaks, “typographic river” (a concept I wasn’t familiar with), and the length of the final line.
Safari is the second-to-last major browser to implement text-wrap: pretty, a feature announced in a super detailed post, which is quite interesting. “Pretty” in English means “beautiful”; I find it lovely that the CSS specification delegates the decisions for presenting beautified text to each browser.
Almost a decade ago, I launched a tech blog in Brazil called Manual do Usuário (“User’s Guide” in Portuguese). Since its inception, it is published with WordPress, one of the oldest CMS — a content management system — and by far the most popular on the web today: it’s estimated that 40% of active websites use it nowadays. WordPress is open source, works well, there’s almost nothing to complain about.
In December 2018, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, released version 5.0 with big fanfare and a radical change: Gutenberg, a new, very visual post editor based on content blocks instead of text.
Gutenberg changes the writing process a lot. If before I was presented with a text area with some formatting buttons at the top when writing some post — a kind of simplified Word —, now it was possible to manipulate the whole appearance of the content using these blocks.
This was not a very well received change. To this day, the Classic Editor plugin, which restores the Word-style editor used until WordPress 4.9, is one of the most popular on the platform, with +5 million active installations and a five-star (top) rating.
Automattic doubled down on Gutenberg in early 2022 by bringing to WordPress 6.0 a thing called Full Site Editor: now, in addition to posts, someone could design the entire site with blocks/Gutenberg. WordPress moved even further away from being a mere blog or text-based publishing tool to become… I don’t know, anything other than that.
With Gutenberg, Automattic — which, it should be mentioned, runs a commercial operation based on WordPress, WordPress.com — decided to pick a fight with DIY and more modern rivals, notably Squarespace and Wix. Not by chance: these have achieved great recognition and a lot of users (and money) in recent years, because they are easier to handle for non-programmers.
And it is indeed easier to make a custom site with Gutenberg, but at what cost? For me (a person who can’t code, but can deal with simple HTML and CSS, by the way), the biggest hurdles are the added complexity when writing anything with blocks and the “dirty” code Gutenberg generates when displaying the site to visitors. (I care a lot about this “invisible” part of the site. I’m not the only one).
WordPress’ new direction alienates a significant portion of its user base. At the very least, those 5 million who use Classic Editor by this day. Maybe we aren’t the most profitable users, but we’re a crowd that, in many cases, has relied on this tool for a very long time to earn our living or just to maintain sites that are doing just fine without Gutenberg, thank you. This is my case: Manual do Usuário has been around for almost a decade.
At the moment, WordPress meets the needs of a site like mine because it is still possible to neutralize much of the excesses that Gutenberg brings to the system using a lot of workarounds in functions.php. Until when? I don’t know.
All WordPress development is dictated by Gutenberg, both within Automattic and in the ecosystem, by third-party developers of plugins, themes, and solutions. This creates apprehension in those who don’t get along with the blocks and would rather do without them. WordPress community support has always been stellar, but it started to fade into something sparse for those out of the blocks train.
The Classic Editor, for example, was supposed to be discontinued at the end of 2021. It got an extra year of support due to its popularity. At the end of 2022, will it be abandoned? I don’t know.
Even a simple site like Manual do Usuário has several dependencies with the chosen CMS. After all, it’s a huge archive that was published on the features, limitations and possibilities of WordPress. Migrating to another tool is always an option, not infrequently a traumatic one that leaves after-effects.
That’s why I’ve been looking fondly at ClassicPress. In 2019, shortly after WordPress 5.0 was released, a group of developers decided to stay in version 4.9, forking the main WordPress into something new. ClassicPress was born.
In three years, however, progress has been slow. Making matters worse, the bureaucratic part and the internal dramas of ClassicPress’ project continue to distract everyone from what matters, from writing code.
At the end of June, the two developers leading the ClassicPress Initiative, the non-profit company responsible for the project, left under heavy criticism. A new group took over with the mission to regain enthusiasm and move the project forward.
It’s not an easy job. Automattic’s structure (and money) are on another scale of magnitude. ClassicPress Initiative is still counting the pennies to pay operating expenses. On exit, the former directors said there was USD 352 left in the company’s bank account.
Even in this not-so-promising scenario, it would be great if ClassicPress thrived. The new management has opened a crowdfunding initiative to cover expenses. Manual do Usuário, in my capacity, has become an early supporter.
It is not yet time to migrate my site to ClassicPress, however. The project is too raw for my needs and current dependencies, and ClassicPress new board still has to figure out fundamental issues, such as deciding to maintain compatibility with WordPress plugins or going for a complete break.
One day, if things go well, I’ll migrate. My fear, however, is that that day will come before rough edges are polished, when WordPress becomes something incompatible with Manual do Usuário, with what it was at the beginning until the fateful version 5.0 at the end of 2018.