mews.page/site/about.html

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    <title>About Mews</title>
    <meta name="mews-profile" content="0.1" />
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    <meta name="description" content="How the Mews directory works, what this site keeps, and how to get in touch." />
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    <h1>About Mews</h1>
    <p>Mews Profile is a working draft. The format, the stylesheet and this
    site are all version 0.1, which is to say I am still changing my mind
    about parts of it, and the spec admits as much in its first paragraph.
    What a given version promises is written down at
    <a href="/spec/0.1" accesskey="1">mews.page/spec/0.1</a>, and it stays
    there once published.</p>

    <h2>How the directory works</h2>
    <p>Anyone can submit an address. The page is fetched and put through both
    of the checks in section 9.1: it has to validate against the Mews DTD, and
    it has to follow the handful of rules a DTD can't express, like keeping
    your images on your own site and the markup under 256 KB (and preferably
    under 64). Pass both and
    your site is listed at once, by nobody's leave but the checker's.</p>

    <p>Listed sites are looked at again every week, and one whose page stops
    conforming is dropped; since I hold no contact details there is nobody to
    warn beforehand, so submit the fixed page and it is listed again
    immediately. A site the checker simply can't reach gets a few days of
    retries before it goes, because being down over a weekend isn't the same
    as being wrong.</p>

    <p>The checks say nothing whatsoever about what a site publishes, and they
    can't: a page about anything at all can be flawless XHTML. So if a listing
    here points at something abusive, write to me and it comes out.</p>

    <h2>What this site keeps</h2>
    <p>A submission stores the address you gave, the domain it belongs to,
    what the checks found, and a salted hash of your IP address so that the
    rate limits work. The salt is replaced every month, so last month's hashes
    stop matching this month's, and raw addresses are never written down at
    all.</p>

    <p>Submissions and results are deleted after ninety days. No cookies,
    nothing loaded from anywhere else, and no analytics, which given the
    subject matter would have been embarrassing.</p>

    <h2>Thanks</h2>
    <p>The format rests on <em>XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2</em>, which the
    <a href="/dtd/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">Open Mobile Alliance</a> finished in
    March 2008 and which is still perfectly good. The stylesheet asks first
    for <a href="https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/"><em>Atkinson
    Hyperlegible</em></a>, made free for anyone to use by the Braille
    Institute of America, and then for
    <a href="https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-code-pro"><em>Source Code
    Pro</em></a> by Paul D. Hunt. Neither is loaded from anywhere: if you have
    them you see them, and if you don't, Verdana is waiting.</p>

    <h2>Get in touch</h2>
    <p>Bug reports, arguments about the spec, and sites that ought to be
    listed and aren't:</p>
    <address>hello@mews.page</address>

    <hr />
    <p>I would rather this stayed small: a format one person can implement in
    a weekend, a directory you can read in a single sitting, and pages that
    still open in 2046. If it grows much past that, something has gone
    wrong.</p>
    <p><a href="/" accesskey="0">Mews</a>
    · <a href="/check" accesskey="2">Check a page</a>
    · <a href="/directory" accesskey="3">The directory</a></p>
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