2025/SD/concrete
What is the "concrete" of the IndieWeb? was a session at IndieWebCamp San Diego 2025.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/concrete
TODO: add video once archived
IndieWebCamp San Diego 2025
Session: What is the concret of the IndieWeb?
When: 2025-12-13 15:50
Hashtag: #concrete
Participants
Notes
3:45pm - 4:25pm
- Refs / prior art
- longevity from principles
- anti-fragile
User story
- As an indieweb publisher, I would like tools / interfaces / materials I can learn once with expertise and use for as long as possible.
Goals
- persistence of *tooling* and/or *materials*
- once you've made it, it's not changing
- persistence of archives
- avoid churn of tooling
Recommendations
- Develop expertise in _writing_ in a chosen language ( English , Chinese , etc. )
- Prefer "core web" features ( html, gif, jpeg )
- Capture the context
- e.g. Archive your sources with archive.org / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive_your_sources
- Graceful downgrades ( e.g. Markdown with optional styling that can disappear )
- Teach and study subjects / tooling / interfaces that are persistent in utility
- e.g. Language, open source, publishing ideas ( recipes, photos, observations )
- e.g. Driving a vehicle is now a temporary skill
- Identify what is valuable to store & maintain
- Encourage multigenerational expertise
- Include experimentation as core value and skillset alongside ideas of stable tooling
Tooling vs materials
- Tooling
- Typewriter
- Text editor
- Web browser / html spec
- Screens / printers
- Materials
- English / multi-language
- Plaintext
- Html / markdown / ...
Concrete as a metaphor
- Primary qualities
- "permanence" horizon ( ~100-1000 years vs 10,000+ years? )
- strength
- Optional qualities
- heavy
- resistent to change
- uniformity of material
- Uncertain qualities
- low-fidelity / precision
- slow to create
- cheap / expensive
Similar materials
- Longer range - observed from Long Now 10,000 year context
- Special grades of stainless steel - Used for large components like gears and other structural parts.
- Titanium - Chosen for its strength and corrosion resistance.
- Ceramics - Specifically, dry-running ceramic ball bearings are used in the mechanism to reduce friction and wear.
- Quartz and Sapphire - These materials are used for precision components like the clock's timing mechanism and displays due to their hardness and stability.
Related discussions
- "The grain of the web" - https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain/
- 100 year plans
- Letting go of "pixel perfect" design
- Responsiveness is key
- Semantic HTML is key
- Hand rolled sites typically are simpler (mayby not as legible)
- Some tooling is helpful for repeated parts of pages (e.g. headers/footers)
- If a tooling falls out of maintenance, a site could be un-buildable
- A statically built site's content should theoretically still be hostable
- A website is just a folder
- Overlap with personal card catalog - If I can't find a photo, it doesn't exist.
Anti-patterns
- Compiled / pre-processed patterns
- Javascript dependencies ( e.g. npm )