mews.page/site/index.html

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN"
  "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Mews</title>
    <meta name="mews-profile" content="0.1" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
    <meta name="description" content="A quiet corner of the web, built on a standard that was already cut back: XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2." />
    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mews-0.1.css" />
  </head>
  <body class="mews-cool">
    <h1>Mews</h1>
    <p>A <em>mews</em> is the lane round the back where the stables used to be:
    narrow, quiet, and not on the way to anywhere. The web could do with one of
    those. Small sites, plain words, nothing watching you read.</p>

    <p>This obviously isn't the first attempt to do so. The
    <a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> and small web crowd have made this case for way longer than I have. The usual answer is to go and build somewhere else, and the people doing it are right about the problem.
    <a href="https://geminiprotocol.net/">Gemini</a> has been at it since 2019, <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/spartan/spartan.mozz.us/">Spartan</a> trimmed even the TLS out of it, and I keep capsules on all of them.</p>
    
    <p>Where I disagree is that it takes a new protocol, which means a new client, a new server, and a page hardly anybody can open from a link you send them. 
    We already had a Web standard that was cut back on purpose, and cut back
    properly: a published spec, a DTD, and a few hundred million handsets to
    test it against. <em>XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2</em> is strict XML built
    from a fixed list of modules, with the desktop machinery left out of the
    build: no frames, no iframes, no image maps, and basic tables instead of
    the full set. It kept scripts and author stylesheets, because a phone in
    2008 was expected to want them.</p>

    <p>Mews goes further, for different reasons, and keeps the <em>MP</em>
    while it is at it. Out go the scripting, style and object modules and the
    event attributes; what is left is a choice rather than a hardware budget:
    headings, paragraphs, lists, links, a few images, one stylesheet that
    nobody gets to write, and nothing at all loaded from a server you don't
    control. The phones were the excuse. The quiet is the point.</p>

    <p><strong>Authors provide structure. Readers control
    presentation.</strong> Every rule in the spec follows from that one line,
    which in practice means I don't get to pick your typeface, your line width
    or your colours, and you don't have to put up with mine.</p>

    <h2>Have a look round</h2>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/spec/0.1" accesskey="1">The spec</a>. Nine short sections.
      You can read the whole thing before your tea goes cold.</li>
      <li><a href="/check" accesskey="2">Check a page</a>. Paste an address and
      find out what it breaks, with the section number that explains why.</li>
      <li><a href="/directory" accesskey="3">The directory</a>. Every site
      whose page passes.</li>
    </ul>

    <h2>The whole page</h2>
    <p>Here is a conforming Mews page, and not an excerpt either. The
    lot:</p>
    <pre>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt;
&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN"
  "http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd"&gt;
&lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
    &lt;title&gt;Signal Bars&lt;/title&gt;
    &lt;meta name="mews-profile" content="0.1" /&gt;
    &lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mews-0.1.css" /&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
    &lt;h1&gt;Signal Bars&lt;/h1&gt;
    &lt;p&gt;Notes on old phones and small screens.&lt;/p&gt;
  &lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;</pre>
    <p>If that looks like 1999 to you, good.</p>

    <h2>One stylesheet, thirty-two colours</h2>
    <p>There is exactly one stylesheet, and you don't write it. Copy
    <a href="/mews-0.1.css" accesskey="4">mews-0.1.css</a> onto your own site,
    link it, and then leave it alone. It sets a readable column width, a light
    theme and a dark one, and four palettes (warm, cool, green, and a
    monochrome one that looks like an early phone screen) which you choose
    between with a single class on the body. Every text colour in it clears
    7:1 contrast against its background, which is a higher bar than most of
    the web bothers with.</p>

    <p>Host your own copy rather than linking mine. If every Mews site pointed
    at one central file, that file's server would see a request for every page
    anybody reads anywhere, and the whole business of loading nothing from
    other sites would have been for nothing.</p>

    <h2>The bits and pieces</h2>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/mews-0.1.css">mews-0.1.css</a>, the stylesheet above.</li>
      <li><a href="/dtd/mews-0.1.dtd">mews-0.1.dtd</a>, which is what the
      checker validates against. Your browser should never fetch it, and
      neither should a client.</li>
      <li><a href="/dtd/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">xhtml-mobile12.dtd</a>, the
      original from 2008, kept here so nobody has to go hunting for it.</li>
    </ul>

    <hr />
    <p>This is a draft, version 0.1, and I am still changing my mind about
    parts of it. The directory is new and nearly empty. But a page written to
    these rules opens on a handset from 2006, in your browser today, and in
    whatever is reading pages in twenty years, because there is almost nothing
    left in it to break.</p>

    <p>So: write something. Link to a neighbour. Leave the light on.</p>
    <p><a href="/about" accesskey="0">About this site</a></p>
  </body>
</html>