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docs: tighten the site text and fold the about page into the index

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randogoth 2026-10-11 15:12:14 +03:00
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site/index.html
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@ -10,35 +10,47 @@
<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>
<h1>the mews</h1>
<p>A <em>mews</em> is the lane round the back where the stables were:
narrow, quiet, not on the way to anywhere. Small sites, plain words,
nothing watching.</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><a href="https://geminiprotocol.net/">Gemini</a>, <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/spartan/spartan.mozz.us/">Spartan</a>, the
<a href="https://indieweb.org/">IndieWeb</a> and the small web got there
first, and they are right about the problem. But a calmer web doesn't really need
a new protocol and a client nobody has.</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>There was already a standard cut back on purpose: <em>XHTML Mobile Profile
1.2</em> aka. <em>WAP 2.0</em> is strict XML with no frames and basic tables, because a 2008
phone couldn't afford more. Mews takes out the scripts and styling too. The phones are still the excuse but this time 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>
presentation.</strong></p>
<p>For viewing Mews pages in regular web browsers there is exactly one stylesheet, thirty-two colours and all, 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 leave it alone. Host your own copy rather
than linking this one.</p>
<h2>How the directory works</h2>
<p>Anyone can submit an address. The page is fetched, put through both of
the spec's checks, and listed at once if it passes. Nobody reviews it.</p>
<p>Listed sites are checked again every week, and one whose page stops
conforming is dropped. Submit the fixed page and it goes straight back in.
Being unreachable buys a few days first.</p>
<p>The checks say nothing about what a site publishes. Write to the
address below and a listing comes out.</p>
<h2>What this site keeps</h2>
<p>A submission stores the address you gave, its domain, the findings, and
a salted hash of your IP address for the rate limits, resalted monthly. Raw
addresses are never stored.</p>
<p>Everything is 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>Have a look round</h2>
<ul>
@ -50,58 +62,8 @@
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>
<address>trl@posteo.net</address>
</body>
</html>