J. R. Carpenter || a Handmade Web
Metadata
Highlights
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.
- bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer… it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.
- If a radio from a museum collection is reactivated to play broadcast channels of the present, it changes its status: it is not a historical object anymore but actively generates sensual and informational presence.” Similarly, when viewing old web pages in modern browsers we are confronted with a temporal paradox. Layer upon layer of dated web-design aesthetics overlap and peel like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Pages optimised for lower resolutions now take less than a third of the screen. Ghosts of browsers past mingle with occasional page errors, dead links, and missing images. Sound files play automatically. Warnings abound, issued from earlier eras, addressed to readers who are not us.
- These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.
I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.
- The booming size of today’s mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate… We’re nostalgic for the close-knit, DIY nature of the early web, where everything was smaller…
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a ‘manual’, a ‘handbook’, a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
- In February 2015, Matthew Rothberg created a website called Unindexed which continuously searched Google for itself. It survived for 22 days before being indexed, at which point it was permanently deleted. Rothberg has since shared the source code on GitHub, so you too can create a website which self-destructs the moment Google indexes it.
- Reading the web on an iPhone, iPad, or similar device, readers do not have the option of viewing the page source. The iPad provides consumers with access to materials created by others, but cannot easily be used as a tool in the handcrafting of new materials.
title: “J. R. Carpenter || a Handmade Web”
author: “luckysoap.com”
url: ”http://luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
J. R. Carpenter || a Handmade Web
Metadata
Highlights
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.
- bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer… it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.
- If a radio from a museum collection is reactivated to play broadcast channels of the present, it changes its status: it is not a historical object anymore but actively generates sensual and informational presence.” Similarly, when viewing old web pages in modern browsers we are confronted with a temporal paradox. Layer upon layer of dated web-design aesthetics overlap and peel like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Pages optimised for lower resolutions now take less than a third of the screen. Ghosts of browsers past mingle with occasional page errors, dead links, and missing images. Sound files play automatically. Warnings abound, issued from earlier eras, addressed to readers who are not us.
- These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.
I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.
- The booming size of today’s mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate… We’re nostalgic for the close-knit, DIY nature of the early web, where everything was smaller…
- I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a ‘manual’, a ‘handbook’, a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
- In February 2015, Matthew Rothberg created a website called Unindexed which continuously searched Google for itself. It survived for 22 days before being indexed, at which point it was permanently deleted. Rothberg has since shared the source code on GitHub, so you too can create a website which self-destructs the moment Google indexes it.
- Reading the web on an iPhone, iPad, or similar device, readers do not have the option of viewing the page source. The iPad provides consumers with access to materials created by others, but cannot easily be used as a tool in the handcrafting of new materials.