Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of communication.
by ploum＠mailfence.com 17 Nov '22
by ploum＠mailfence.com 17 Nov '22
17 Nov '22
RENDERING THE WEB WITH PICTURES IN YOUR TERMINAL : MORE THAN YOU WOULD
LIKE TO KNOW ABOUT HTML, ANSI AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION.
by Ploum on 2022-03-24
https://ploum.be/2022-03-24-ansi_html.html
I’ve often been baffled by the productivity of Open Source developers.
But I may have found the secret. Having something else to do. As soon as
you need to do something urgently, something non-computer related,
programming open source seems really important.
So, in a new episode of "I should really have done something else with
my life", please welcome the "Offpunk got a new HTML rendering" story, a
long meditation on reading HTML and starting meaningful, philosophical
discussions.
Discovering ANSI Codes
======================
When I started using AV-98 as a Gemini client, I thought it was simple
because it simply displayed the Gemtext content on the screen, only
replacing URLs with numbers. I didn’t realise consciously that titles
had to be coloured. But how can you send colours to a terminal? Isn’t
that only white lines on black background ?
The answer is ANSI codes. ANSI codes are special characters that, when
passed to a terminal, change the "mode" of the terminal. If you type
"\e" followed by "[", the terminal understands it as the "Control
Sequence Indicator". You can then type different numbers (separated by
";") and end with "m". The different numbers correspond to different
modes. So typing "\e [1m" switch to bold and "\e [1;35m" (without the
space) switch to bold and magenta. You can close all opened modes with
"\e [0m".
It is limited to 8 background/foreground colours and a few other modes
like bold, faint, italic, underline, …
It’s all fun until you realise that those 8 colours can be customised
using another special code. So, in essence, your terminal can display
any Unicode character with any background and foreground colour. (Not
all terminals have the same colouring capabilities but, still…)
As I was discovering that through reading AV-98 code, I also wondered
how hard it would be to display HTML pages in what was already called
Offpunk. If I could display a gemtext page with blue title, how hard
would it be to display some HTML? I would only need to transform HTML
tags into ANSI codes. Right?
Why HTML is a Bad Way of Communicating
======================================
I hacked a first version displaying links in blue and, yes, it was
working! This had been surprisingly easy! But the more I kept trying
webpages, the more I realised how bad the situation was.
First of all, HTML is really hard to parse for a simple single reason:
space and return characters may act completely differently depending on
where they are in the page. In fact, except in <PRE>, one could say that
you could drop returns. Except that, sometimes, they should be
considered as a whitespace (if you don’t, some pages will
havetheirtextgarbledwithoutspace).
But that’s only when the HTML is good. Most of the time, it isn’t. My
initial HTML2ANSI routine started to grow organically to handle all the
cases I was finding. It was try and error: add a space there, reload,
see if it looks good, add another strip() there. No architecture, pure
random code.
When looking at the source code, I found myself multiple times pondering
if I should display what the people obviously intended to say or if
I should display what the HTML told. One very small but obvious example:
Wordpress websites using Jetpack have some of their picture duplicated.
The reason is that one of the pictures is behind a "lazyloading"
attribute while the other is in a "<noscript>" tag. Offpunk should
obviously display the "<noscript>" because it doesn’t do JS but also
displays the first one because it doesn’t parse the lazyloading CSS
attribute. I don’t see how I can correctly not display the picture
twice.
Tools are simply bad and produce awful HTML. If you are not convinced,
look at the source of a page generated by the pseudo-minimalist Medium.
When trying to parse HTML, it becomes obvious how we lost any meaning.
People wrote, tools transformed it in a meaningless mumbo jumbo and
I was trying to write a tool to find the original meaning back.
But tools are not the only ones to blame…
People are Bad at Writing
=========================
When I added support for bold and italic, something strange appeared.
I realised the test pages I’ve been using since the beginning were now
less readable. The text alone was good but people are somehow forced to
add many fancy stuff over it. It’s like they fear not being remarked.
Every HTML webpage looks like a child doing stupid stuff to attract his
parent’s attention.
Open a book. Open 10 books around you. Try to find how many instances of
bold sentences, varying styles and coloured words you have. Except in
some very modern technical books, there’s none. You can sometimes find
some italics to indicate a citation. It’s quite rare. I am, of course,
referring to books that were published before writers started to use
MS Word.
As Neal Stephenson said in "In the Beginnings was the command line",
bold was at first only used for the title. Then MS Word came without any
support for formal title/subtitle styling. The bold button was put
prominently and people were expected to make their titles manually. But
something else happened: people started to put bold and italics
everywhere. Because they could.
When reading through so many webpages, it struck me how all this styling
was looking like insecurity. Fear of not being read. Fear of not being
cool. Fear of being boring. Fear of losing your audience. And how much
better most of the texts were without any styling.
As I was reading "L’Âge des low-tech", by Philippe Bihouix, I came
across one of those insecurities. The author put the word "NEVER" in all
caps, probably hoping to make a point. It looks like the author felt
insecure about his argument, felt that it was weak and tried to
compensate. The point was something like "3D printing is not a solution
because true constructions like houses can NEVER be 3D printed". Which
is obviously false (or at least it should be explained why current
3D-printed buildings are not trully 3D-printed). Without the all cap, it
would have been an error in a book, something understandable. With the
all cap, the author lost a lot of credibility for many pages.
Any Mistake That Can Be Made…
=============================
So, in essence, people are using crappy tools that produce shitty code
and they are using it as badly as they can. We can safely say that any
error that can be done will be done.
The same is true for Gemini. Hopefully, Gemtext is so simple that
there’s no tool, reducing the error surface. Errors can only be done on
a line-by-line basis. Like that case when someone was speaking about a
hashtag and the hashtag appeared at the beginning on the line, turning
the line into a title.
But there’s one true error still possible with gemtext : Preformatted.
I’ve seen them all : people missing one preformatted line and thus
inverting formatted/preformatted, people not closing an opened
preformatted or, the worse : some gemlogs switching between
formatted/preformatted for each paragraph. The only explanation I found
was that it was looking cool in their test client. What if their client
was switching the background colour for preformatted? Then their posts
would render as a nice patchwork of colours.
This is a huge problem as Offpunk doesn’t wrap preformatted texts,
assuming they are some sort of ASCIIART. Those paragraphs were thus
displayed as a long non-wrapped line.
If a mistake can be made, it will be made.
About Wrapping
==============
It seems obvious when you are reading texts but, once a line is longer
than your screen, that line should be wrapped. The line should continue
on the next line. Wrapping is far from trivial if you don’t want to wrap
in the middle of words. You need to count characters then, once a
threshold has been reached, cut at the nearest word separation.
But remember what I told you about ANSI codes and colours. When you see
a coloured line on a terminal, there are some invisible characters. Many
of them. So the wrapping is confused and may wrap too soon.
If you have a Gemini title you want to be bold blue, the ANSI sequences
to open and close everything will amount to 12 characters. Your wrap
will be really short.
Not a huge problem until you start dealing with HTML lines where you can
have 4 or 5 links per line. You may start to wrap before displaying any
character at all!
ANSI modes should be conserved to the next line but I observed many
singularities and, from what I’ve seen, it is a good practice to close
all ANSI codes before the end of a line. That makes the wrap even
harder: you need to identify all opened ANSI sequences, close them and
reopen them on the next line.
That’s exactly the problem that python-ansiwrap is solving. And they did
quite a good job with it.
Displaying Images
=================
As I was reading webpages with Offpunk, I realised once that I was
really missing an important information. I loaded the page in Firefox
and, yes, a whole paragraph, a citation, was missing. What happened? It
took me the source code to realise that the citation was not a text but
a picture.
The easy solution to avoid such problem was to render pictures as links.
If you wanted to see a picture, you would simply follow the link and the
picture would be displayed in your picture viewer (feh, in my case).
But, quickly, I started to open all the pictures, curious to see what
they were. Most pictures on the web are useless. They serve to get a
sense of "feeling". Like bold and styling, they only serve to attract
attention to the content. I’m guilty as everyone. For years, I tried to
find a catchy picture for every article on my blog. This was reinforced
by the fact that a link without a picture has no chance to thrive on
Twitter nor Facebook. It even became some sort of artistic ritual to
pair a finished blog post with a totally unrelated picture.
As I discovered the console, more than 20 years ago, I started to play
with libcaca, which was transforming pictures into asciiart. I did a
little experiment but, on the small size of a website, a libcaca picture
does not help at all. It is fun but there’s no way you could recognise
anything.
At that point, the universe told be about Chafa. For the anecdote, I was
removing unused packages from my computer when I found one called
neofetch. I did a "apt-cache show neofetch" to see what it was and was
intrigued by a dependency called "chafa").
Remember that your terminal can display any Unicode character with a
custom foreground and background colour? Well, chafa uses that to
transform any picture into a configurable block of coloured text. What
is really interesting is that most pictures are recognisable. I also
found "timg", which is doing exactly the same as chafa albeit slower.
I thought it would be fun to have chafa rendering pictures in Offpunk
and tried it. It was just a proof of concept. But I was quickly
convinced. It was working so well that I could easily tell if a picture
was an important one I should open or a decorative one I could skip. In
a word, it was "useful". One more tool to extract information that
people are deliberately burying while trying to promote it.
A webpage with pictures rendered in Offpunk. Notice how you can
recognize that IMG 11 is a meme while IMG 15 is a screenshot.
https://ploum.be/files/offpunk_gtg06.png
With the 1.8 version, Chafa added support for a kind of "kitty-image-
protocol", something I don’t understand but which allows the Terminal
Kitty to display pixel-perfect pictures. Timg already had support for
that. Pixel perfect pictures cannot be integrated into text but this
meant that I could directly display pictures into Offpunk. And, yes, it
works when you access the picture directly.
Offpunk displaying a picture from a gemlog you should follow
https://ploum.be/files/frosty_bjorn.png
For best result, use Kitty terminal and Chafa 1.10. If you have an older
Chafa, also install Timg to have the best of both worlds.
Rewriting All From Scratch
==========================
All this hacked-together plate of spaghetti was working quite well but
was unmaintainable. The HTML rendering code was pure random guessing.
Ansiwrap sometimes gave very strange results and the performances were
horrible. A 40 characters wide line produced by chafa could contain up
to 1000 characters, which were parsed by ansiwrap.
When reading the Ansiwrap source code, I realised that one hard task was
to first identify ANSI codes in a text. Something I could avoid as I was
doing it myself.
So, in essence, I was making a text full of ANSI codes then wrapping it
with ansiwrap. Could I do it the other way?
I started a new renderer that would save the position of every future
ANSI code without inserting them. Then, I would wrap it, line by line,
inserting ANSI codes only after wrapping while being smart enough to
close them before the end of the line and reopening them.
Chafa pictures would be inserted without being wrapped at all.
This was not an easy task and I even added a BETA switch to keep the old
rendering engine while I was working on the new. But, quickly,
I realised it was doing a better job. Instead of transforming HTML to
ANSI, I was first trying to understand HTML then building a meaningful
representation. For example, newparagraph() and newline() are two
different functions because they have a different meaning. For the
anecdote, the first rendering engine was adding so many blank lines that
I needed to remove every block of more than three blank lines before
displaying the result.
So, starting with 1.2, Offpunk as a whole new rendering engine, also
used for Gemini, Gopher and RSS. Please test your favourite capsules and
websites and report any problems.
Download Offpunk
https://tildegit.org/ploum/AV-98-offline
Send me an email about Offpunk
mailto:offpunk@ploum.eu
Subscribe to the offpunk mailing list to discuss
mailto:~lioploum/offpunk-devel+subscribe@lists.sr.ht
Using the renderer without Offpunk
==================================
An HTML2ANSI renderer seems very useful and I’m wondering if I should
release it as a standalone tool. You can already test it quite easily
with the following python script within the same folder as Offpunk.
!/usr/bin/env python3
=====================
from offpunk import HtmlRenderer
f = open("index.html")
content = f.read()
f.close()
rend = HtmlRenderer(content,"www.test.com")
display the result in less
==========================
rend.display()
or put it in a variable
=======================
body = rend.get_body()
print(body)
Making the Web Readable
=======================
I’m proud to say that my first objectives have been met: removing any
dependency to python-ansiwrap, improving performance with pictures and
making the code more maintainable.
Outside of ansiwrap, Offpunk uses two libraries to parse the web: the
venerable BeautifulSoup 4 (python-bs4), which does an outstanding job of
parsing the HTML. Parsing is the act of transforming a text into an
usable computer representation. Rendering is the opposite : transforming
the computer representation into something an user can read/watch. The
best the parsing, the easiest the rendering.
The other is python-readability which removes unwanted cruft from an
HTML page. Python-readability transforms HTML into HTML but with less
thing. Most of the time, it works really well, allowing Offpunk to
display only the article that I want to read.
Sometimes, it removes too much. In that case, Offpunk allows bypassing
readability with the command "view full" (or "v full"). Starting with
1.2, you can bookmark a page and its mode, so you automatically switch
to "full" for some pages. This is done with a very naughty hack (adding
"##offpunk_mode=full" at the end of the URL and crossing fingers for no
URL having this string in their URL in real life).
Without python-readability, I could not have added web support to
Offpunk. It would have been discouraging. But now that I have an
improved HTML renderer, I’m starting to wonder if I could make python-
readability an optional dependency. Would it be useful for anyone not to
install python-readability?
There’s one good reason not to allow running Offpunk without python-
readability. With readability enabled, most webpages have between 0 and
20 or 30 links. When running "offpunk --sync", this means making that
many requests to prefetch contents and pictures.
But in "full" mode, most webpages have between 100 and 500 links. Most
of them completely useless, of course. Using Offpunk to surf the web
without readability might be a nightmare.
Starting a Discussion
=====================
I created my first website in 1998 and started my still active blog in
2004. For all those years, I was publishing to attract attention,
readership. I was looking for some "success". I got some. Published
books, was invited to give conferences, was offered jobs, was even twice
recognized by strangers because of my blog. But it was never enough. It
is still not enough. I don’t feel particularly successful.
For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to become a successful writer by doing
anything that could attract attention to my writing. In the last years,
I’ve been slowly evolving toward writing more, publishing less and doing
marketing even less.
By being forced to parse all the greasy cruft that others put around
their writing, I was forced to realise how I did (and might still do)
the same. How the appearance is detrimental to the content. Anyone
suggesting that gemtext should support colours should be forced to write
an ANSI parser first. Anyone suggesting that Gemtext formatting is not
enough to express correctly what they want to express should open an old
book. Most people are trying to work around the fact that writing is
hard. Really hard. They hope to share emotions and non-verbal clues
through emojis, colours, boldening. The problem is that, unlike the
written language, those expressions are not explicit. You don’t convey
what you want to convey, you make it less understandable. If you can’t
write without colours and emojis, it is probably because you don’t
really know what you want to say. That’s why writing is so hard. It is
hard but it pays off. When writing with only words, you not only
communicate better with others, you also communicate with your present
and future self.
« Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire
viennent aisément. » (Boileau)
I’m still astonished by the emptiness of most successful webpages once
displayed in Offpunk. Offpunk made the front page of Hackernews which
led me to break my disconnection temporarily because I was curious about
other links with more votes. They were shallow, empty and rarely had
more than 200 words. A search about Offpunk on Google that same day
revealed that the top pages were mostly computer remixes of the Offpunk
README. The web is full of automatic content trying to mimic what has
been successful. There were even two Youtube videos in the first Google
results. Both of which are computer reading of the README while the
website is displayed. The real Offpunk website was only on the second
page, demonstrating how the web is buried in shitty auto-generated
content and how bad the leading search engine is.
I did not receive more emails that day than when I post on this gemlog.
That success everybody is running after is fake, short-lived. It is not
even finished that you must already run for the next shot.
With Offpunk, I still can read people I like on the web. I follow their
RSS feeds. It makes me feel like I’m still on Gemini or Gopher. It’s
funny how, each time I find something deep and meaningful to read on the
web, it renders well in Offpunk. It feels a bit like meaning and
technical presentation are somehow connected.
I also like to write on Gemini because I know that it can’t be
successful. I can write long stuff like this one. It will be read by
people that find it interesting. Not many. Maybe none. But if you made
it until now, then it certainly had an impact on you. I’ve shared my
thoughts with you. You will, consciously or not, process them. You may
even one day produce something that will have been impacted by what
you’ve read today. I may read you later without knowing that.
This whole post has been influenced heavily by a lot of people in the
Gemini space. They made me think. You probably made me think. I’ve
evolved thanks to what I’ve read. Sometimes, when reading you, I wanted
to reply. But there was no short and easy way to reply. So my reply
either got lost, which means it was not important, or got carried with
my thinking and crystallised into this post or the following one.
We have started a long, slow and meaningful conversation. The kind of
conversation upon which every human breakthrough was conceived. Thank
you for participating in it.
This is just the beginning of our conversation.
1
0
Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of communication.
by ploum＠mailfence.com 11 Nov '22
by ploum＠mailfence.com 11 Nov '22
11 Nov '22
RENDERING THE WEB WITH PICTURES IN YOUR TERMINAL : MORE THAN YOU WOULD
LIKE TO KNOW ABOUT HTML, ANSI AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION.
by Ploum on 2022-03-24
https://ploum.be/2022-03-24-ansi_html.html
I’ve often been baffled by the productivity of Open Source developers.
But I may have found the secret. Having something else to do. As soon as
you need to do something urgently, something non-computer related,
programming open source seems really important.
So, in a new episode of "I should really have done something else with
my life", please welcome the "Offpunk got a new HTML rendering" story, a
long meditation on reading HTML and starting meaningful, philosophical
discussions.
Discovering ANSI Codes
======================
When I started using AV-98 as a Gemini client, I thought it was simple
because it simply displayed the Gemtext content on the screen, only
replacing URLs with numbers. I didn’t realise consciously that titles
had to be coloured. But how can you send colours to a terminal? Isn’t
that only white lines on black background ?
The answer is ANSI codes. ANSI codes are special characters that, when
passed to a terminal, change the "mode" of the terminal. If you type
"\e" followed by "[", the terminal understands it as the "Control
Sequence Indicator". You can then type different numbers (separated by
";") and end with "m". The different numbers correspond to different
modes. So typing "\e [1m" switch to bold and "\e [1;35m" (without the
space) switch to bold and magenta. You can close all opened modes with
"\e [0m".
It is limited to 8 background/foreground colours and a few other modes
like bold, faint, italic, underline, …
It’s all fun until you realise that those 8 colours can be customised
using another special code. So, in essence, your terminal can display
any Unicode character with any background and foreground colour. (Not
all terminals have the same colouring capabilities but, still…)
As I was discovering that through reading AV-98 code, I also wondered
how hard it would be to display HTML pages in what was already called
Offpunk. If I could display a gemtext page with blue title, how hard
would it be to display some HTML? I would only need to transform HTML
tags into ANSI codes. Right?
Why HTML is a Bad Way of Communicating
======================================
I hacked a first version displaying links in blue and, yes, it was
working! This had been surprisingly easy! But the more I kept trying
webpages, the more I realised how bad the situation was.
First of all, HTML is really hard to parse for a simple single reason:
space and return characters may act completely differently depending on
where they are in the page. In fact, except in <PRE>, one could say that
you could drop returns. Except that, sometimes, they should be
considered as a whitespace (if you don’t, some pages will
havetheirtextgarbledwithoutspace).
But that’s only when the HTML is good. Most of the time, it isn’t. My
initial HTML2ANSI routine started to grow organically to handle all the
cases I was finding. It was try and error: add a space there, reload,
see if it looks good, add another strip() there. No architecture, pure
random code.
When looking at the source code, I found myself multiple times pondering
if I should display what the people obviously intended to say or if
I should display what the HTML told. One very small but obvious example:
Wordpress websites using Jetpack have some of their picture duplicated.
The reason is that one of the pictures is behind a "lazyloading"
attribute while the other is in a "<noscript>" tag. Offpunk should
obviously display the "<noscript>" because it doesn’t do JS but also
displays the first one because it doesn’t parse the lazyloading CSS
attribute. I don’t see how I can correctly not display the picture
twice.
Tools are simply bad and produce awful HTML. If you are not convinced,
look at the source of a page generated by the pseudo-minimalist Medium.
When trying to parse HTML, it becomes obvious how we lost any meaning.
People wrote, tools transformed it in a meaningless mumbo jumbo and
I was trying to write a tool to find the original meaning back.
But tools are not the only ones to blame…
People are Bad at Writing
=========================
When I added support for bold and italic, something strange appeared.
I realised the test pages I’ve been using since the beginning were now
less readable. The text alone was good but people are somehow forced to
add many fancy stuff over it. It’s like they fear not being remarked.
Every HTML webpage looks like a child doing stupid stuff to attract his
parent’s attention.
Open a book. Open 10 books around you. Try to find how many instances of
bold sentences, varying styles and coloured words you have. Except in
some very modern technical books, there’s none. You can sometimes find
some italics to indicate a citation. It’s quite rare. I am, of course,
referring to books that were published before writers started to use
MS Word.
As Neal Stephenson said in "In the Beginnings was the command line",
bold was at first only used for the title. Then MS Word came without any
support for formal title/subtitle styling. The bold button was put
prominently and people were expected to make their titles manually. But
something else happened: people started to put bold and italics
everywhere. Because they could.
When reading through so many webpages, it struck me how all this styling
was looking like insecurity. Fear of not being read. Fear of not being
cool. Fear of being boring. Fear of losing your audience. And how much
better most of the texts were without any styling.
As I was reading "L’Âge des low-tech", by Philippe Bihouix, I came
across one of those insecurities. The author put the word "NEVER" in all
caps, probably hoping to make a point. It looks like the author felt
insecure about his argument, felt that it was weak and tried to
compensate. The point was something like "3D printing is not a solution
because true constructions like houses can NEVER be 3D printed". Which
is obviously false (or at least it should be explained why current
3D-printed buildings are not trully 3D-printed). Without the all cap, it
would have been an error in a book, something understandable. With the
all cap, the author lost a lot of credibility for many pages.
Any Mistake That Can Be Made…
=============================
So, in essence, people are using crappy tools that produce shitty code
and they are using it as badly as they can. We can safely say that any
error that can be done will be done.
The same is true for Gemini. Hopefully, Gemtext is so simple that
there’s no tool, reducing the error surface. Errors can only be done on
a line-by-line basis. Like that case when someone was speaking about a
hashtag and the hashtag appeared at the beginning on the line, turning
the line into a title.
But there’s one true error still possible with gemtext : Preformatted.
I’ve seen them all : people missing one preformatted line and thus
inverting formatted/preformatted, people not closing an opened
preformatted or, the worse : some gemlogs switching between
formatted/preformatted for each paragraph. The only explanation I found
was that it was looking cool in their test client. What if their client
was switching the background colour for preformatted? Then their posts
would render as a nice patchwork of colours.
This is a huge problem as Offpunk doesn’t wrap preformatted texts,
assuming they are some sort of ASCIIART. Those paragraphs were thus
displayed as a long non-wrapped line.
If a mistake can be made, it will be made.
About Wrapping
==============
It seems obvious when you are reading texts but, once a line is longer
than your screen, that line should be wrapped. The line should continue
on the next line. Wrapping is far from trivial if you don’t want to wrap
in the middle of words. You need to count characters then, once a
threshold has been reached, cut at the nearest word separation.
But remember what I told you about ANSI codes and colours. When you see
a coloured line on a terminal, there are some invisible characters. Many
of them. So the wrapping is confused and may wrap too soon.
If you have a Gemini title you want to be bold blue, the ANSI sequences
to open and close everything will amount to 12 characters. Your wrap
will be really short.
Not a huge problem until you start dealing with HTML lines where you can
have 4 or 5 links per line. You may start to wrap before displaying any
character at all!
ANSI modes should be conserved to the next line but I observed many
singularities and, from what I’ve seen, it is a good practice to close
all ANSI codes before the end of a line. That makes the wrap even
harder: you need to identify all opened ANSI sequences, close them and
reopen them on the next line.
That’s exactly the problem that python-ansiwrap is solving. And they did
quite a good job with it.
Displaying Images
=================
As I was reading webpages with Offpunk, I realised once that I was
really missing an important information. I loaded the page in Firefox
and, yes, a whole paragraph, a citation, was missing. What happened? It
took me the source code to realise that the citation was not a text but
a picture.
The easy solution to avoid such problem was to render pictures as links.
If you wanted to see a picture, you would simply follow the link and the
picture would be displayed in your picture viewer (feh, in my case).
But, quickly, I started to open all the pictures, curious to see what
they were. Most pictures on the web are useless. They serve to get a
sense of "feeling". Like bold and styling, they only serve to attract
attention to the content. I’m guilty as everyone. For years, I tried to
find a catchy picture for every article on my blog. This was reinforced
by the fact that a link without a picture has no chance to thrive on
Twitter nor Facebook. It even became some sort of artistic ritual to
pair a finished blog post with a totally unrelated picture.
As I discovered the console, more than 20 years ago, I started to play
with libcaca, which was transforming pictures into asciiart. I did a
little experiment but, on the small size of a website, a libcaca picture
does not help at all. It is fun but there’s no way you could recognise
anything.
At that point, the universe told be about Chafa. For the anecdote, I was
removing unused packages from my computer when I found one called
neofetch. I did a "apt-cache show neofetch" to see what it was and was
intrigued by a dependency called "chafa").
Remember that your terminal can display any Unicode character with a
custom foreground and background colour? Well, chafa uses that to
transform any picture into a configurable block of coloured text. What
is really interesting is that most pictures are recognisable. I also
found "timg", which is doing exactly the same as chafa albeit slower.
I thought it would be fun to have chafa rendering pictures in Offpunk
and tried it. It was just a proof of concept. But I was quickly
convinced. It was working so well that I could easily tell if a picture
was an important one I should open or a decorative one I could skip. In
a word, it was "useful". One more tool to extract information that
people are deliberately burying while trying to promote it.
A webpage with pictures rendered in Offpunk. Notice how you can
recognize that IMG 11 is a meme while IMG 15 is a screenshot.
https://ploum.be/files/offpunk_gtg06.png
With the 1.8 version, Chafa added support for a kind of "kitty-image-
protocol", something I don’t understand but which allows the Terminal
Kitty to display pixel-perfect pictures. Timg already had support for
that. Pixel perfect pictures cannot be integrated into text but this
meant that I could directly display pictures into Offpunk. And, yes, it
works when you access the picture directly.
Offpunk displaying a picture from a gemlog you should follow
https://ploum.be/files/frosty_bjorn.png
For best result, use Kitty terminal and Chafa 1.10. If you have an older
Chafa, also install Timg to have the best of both worlds.
Rewriting All From Scratch
==========================
All this hacked-together plate of spaghetti was working quite well but
was unmaintainable. The HTML rendering code was pure random guessing.
Ansiwrap sometimes gave very strange results and the performances were
horrible. A 40 characters wide line produced by chafa could contain up
to 1000 characters, which were parsed by ansiwrap.
When reading the Ansiwrap source code, I realised that one hard task was
to first identify ANSI codes in a text. Something I could avoid as I was
doing it myself.
So, in essence, I was making a text full of ANSI codes then wrapping it
with ansiwrap. Could I do it the other way?
I started a new renderer that would save the position of every future
ANSI code without inserting them. Then, I would wrap it, line by line,
inserting ANSI codes only after wrapping while being smart enough to
close them before the end of the line and reopening them.
Chafa pictures would be inserted without being wrapped at all.
This was not an easy task and I even added a BETA switch to keep the old
rendering engine while I was working on the new. But, quickly,
I realised it was doing a better job. Instead of transforming HTML to
ANSI, I was first trying to understand HTML then building a meaningful
representation. For example, newparagraph() and newline() are two
different functions because they have a different meaning. For the
anecdote, the first rendering engine was adding so many blank lines that
I needed to remove every block of more than three blank lines before
displaying the result.
So, starting with 1.2, Offpunk as a whole new rendering engine, also
used for Gemini, Gopher and RSS. Please test your favourite capsules and
websites and report any problems.
Download Offpunk
https://tildegit.org/ploum/AV-98-offline
Send me an email about Offpunk
mailto:offpunk@ploum.eu
Subscribe to the offpunk mailing list to discuss
mailto:~lioploum/offpunk-devel+subscribe@lists.sr.ht
Using the renderer without Offpunk
==================================
An HTML2ANSI renderer seems very useful and I’m wondering if I should
release it as a standalone tool. You can already test it quite easily
with the following python script within the same folder as Offpunk.
!/usr/bin/env python3
=====================
from offpunk import HtmlRenderer
f = open("index.html")
content = f.read()
f.close()
rend = HtmlRenderer(content,"www.test.com")
display the result in less
==========================
rend.display()
or put it in a variable
=======================
body = rend.get_body()
print(body)
Making the Web Readable
=======================
I’m proud to say that my first objectives have been met: removing any
dependency to python-ansiwrap, improving performance with pictures and
making the code more maintainable.
Outside of ansiwrap, Offpunk uses two libraries to parse the web: the
venerable BeautifulSoup 4 (python-bs4), which does an outstanding job of
parsing the HTML. Parsing is the act of transforming a text into an
usable computer representation. Rendering is the opposite : transforming
the computer representation into something an user can read/watch. The
best the parsing, the easiest the rendering.
The other is python-readability which removes unwanted cruft from an
HTML page. Python-readability transforms HTML into HTML but with less
thing. Most of the time, it works really well, allowing Offpunk to
display only the article that I want to read.
Sometimes, it removes too much. In that case, Offpunk allows bypassing
readability with the command "view full" (or "v full"). Starting with
1.2, you can bookmark a page and its mode, so you automatically switch
to "full" for some pages. This is done with a very naughty hack (adding
"##offpunk_mode=full" at the end of the URL and crossing fingers for no
URL having this string in their URL in real life).
Without python-readability, I could not have added web support to
Offpunk. It would have been discouraging. But now that I have an
improved HTML renderer, I’m starting to wonder if I could make python-
readability an optional dependency. Would it be useful for anyone not to
install python-readability?
There’s one good reason not to allow running Offpunk without python-
readability. With readability enabled, most webpages have between 0 and
20 or 30 links. When running "offpunk --sync", this means making that
many requests to prefetch contents and pictures.
But in "full" mode, most webpages have between 100 and 500 links. Most
of them completely useless, of course. Using Offpunk to surf the web
without readability might be a nightmare.
Starting a Discussion
=====================
I created my first website in 1998 and started my still active blog in
2004. For all those years, I was publishing to attract attention,
readership. I was looking for some "success". I got some. Published
books, was invited to give conferences, was offered jobs, was even twice
recognized by strangers because of my blog. But it was never enough. It
is still not enough. I don’t feel particularly successful.
For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to become a successful writer by doing
anything that could attract attention to my writing. In the last years,
I’ve been slowly evolving toward writing more, publishing less and doing
marketing even less.
By being forced to parse all the greasy cruft that others put around
their writing, I was forced to realise how I did (and might still do)
the same. How the appearance is detrimental to the content. Anyone
suggesting that gemtext should support colours should be forced to write
an ANSI parser first. Anyone suggesting that Gemtext formatting is not
enough to express correctly what they want to express should open an old
book. Most people are trying to work around the fact that writing is
hard. Really hard. They hope to share emotions and non-verbal clues
through emojis, colours, boldening. The problem is that, unlike the
written language, those expressions are not explicit. You don’t convey
what you want to convey, you make it less understandable. If you can’t
write without colours and emojis, it is probably because you don’t
really know what you want to say. That’s why writing is so hard. It is
hard but it pays off. When writing with only words, you not only
communicate better with others, you also communicate with your present
and future self.
« Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le dire
viennent aisément. » (Boileau)
I’m still astonished by the emptiness of most successful webpages once
displayed in Offpunk. Offpunk made the front page of Hackernews which
led me to break my disconnection temporarily because I was curious about
other links with more votes. They were shallow, empty and rarely had
more than 200 words. A search about Offpunk on Google that same day
revealed that the top pages were mostly computer remixes of the Offpunk
README. The web is full of automatic content trying to mimic what has
been successful. There were even two Youtube videos in the first Google
results. Both of which are computer reading of the README while the
website is displayed. The real Offpunk website was only on the second
page, demonstrating how the web is buried in shitty auto-generated
content and how bad the leading search engine is.
I did not receive more emails that day than when I post on this gemlog.
That success everybody is running after is fake, short-lived. It is not
even finished that you must already run for the next shot.
With Offpunk, I still can read people I like on the web. I follow their
RSS feeds. It makes me feel like I’m still on Gemini or Gopher. It’s
funny how, each time I find something deep and meaningful to read on the
web, it renders well in Offpunk. It feels a bit like meaning and
technical presentation are somehow connected.
I also like to write on Gemini because I know that it can’t be
successful. I can write long stuff like this one. It will be read by
people that find it interesting. Not many. Maybe none. But if you made
it until now, then it certainly had an impact on you. I’ve shared my
thoughts with you. You will, consciously or not, process them. You may
even one day produce something that will have been impacted by what
you’ve read today. I may read you later without knowing that.
This whole post has been influenced heavily by a lot of people in the
Gemini space. They made me think. You probably made me think. I’ve
evolved thanks to what I’ve read. Sometimes, when reading you, I wanted
to reply. But there was no short and easy way to reply. So my reply
either got lost, which means it was not important, or got carried with
my thinking and crystallised into this post or the following one.
We have started a long, slow and meaningful conversation. The kind of
conversation upon which every human breakthrough was conceived. Thank
you for participating in it.
This is just the beginning of our conversation.
1
0
Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of communication.
by ploum＠mailfence.com 06 Nov '22
by ploum＠mailfence.com 06 Nov '22
06 Nov '22
TEXT VERSION :
Rendering the Web with Pictures in Your Terminal : more than you
----------------------------------------------------------------
would like to know about HTML, ANSI and the philosophy of
---------------------------------------------------------
communication.
--------------
I’ve often been baffled by the productivity of Open Source
developers. But I may have found the secret. Having something else
to do. As soon as you need to do something urgently, something non-
computer related, programming open source seems really important.
So, in a new episode of "I should really have done something else
with my life", please welcome the "Offpunk got a new HTML rendering"
story, a long meditation on reading HTML and starting meaningful,
philosophical discussions.
Discovering ANSI Codes
----------------------
When I started using AV-98 as a Gemini client, I thought it was
simple because it simply displayed the Gemtext content on the
screen, only replacing URLs with numbers. I didn’t realise
consciously that titles had to be coloured. But how can you send
colours to a terminal? Isn’t that only white lines on black
background ?
The answer is ANSI codes. ANSI codes are special characters that,
when passed to a terminal, change the "mode" of the terminal. If you
type "\e" followed by "[", the terminal understands it as the
"Control Sequence Indicator". You can then type different numbers
(separated by ";") and end with "m". The different numbers
correspond to different modes. So typing "\e [1m" switch to bold and
"\e [1;35m" (without the space) switch to bold and magenta. You can
close all opened modes with "\e [0m".
It is limited to 8 background/foreground colours and a few other
modes like bold, faint, italic, underline, …
It’s all fun until you realise that those 8 colours can be
customised using another special code. So, in essence, your terminal
can display any Unicode character with any background and foreground
colour. (Not all terminals have the same colouring capabilities but,
still…)
As I was discovering that through reading AV-98 code, I also
wondered how hard it would be to display HTML pages in what was
already called Offpunk. If I could display a gemtext page with blue
title, how hard would it be to display some HTML? I would only need
to transform HTML tags into ANSI codes. Right?
Why HTML is a Bad Way of Communicating
--------------------------------------
I hacked a first version displaying links in blue and, yes, it was
working! This had been surprisingly easy! But the more I kept trying
webpages, the more I realised how bad the situation was.
First of all, HTML is really hard to parse for a simple single
reason: space and return characters may act completely differently
depending on where they are in the page. In fact, except in <PRE>,
one could say that you could drop returns. Except that, sometimes,
they should be considered as a whitespace (if you don’t, some pages
will havetheirtextgarbledwithoutspace).
But that’s only when the HTML is good. Most of the time, it isn’t.
My initial HTML2ANSI routine started to grow organically to handle
all the cases I was finding. It was try and error: add a space
there, reload, see if it looks good, add another strip() there. No
architecture, pure random code.
When looking at the source code, I found myself multiple times
pondering if I should display what the people obviously intended to
say or if I should display what the HTML told. One very small but
obvious example: Wordpress websites using Jetpack have some of their
picture duplicated. The reason is that one of the pictures is behind
a "lazyloading" attribute while the other is in a "<noscript>" tag.
Offpunk should obviously display the "<noscript>" because it doesn’t
do JS but also displays the first one because it doesn’t parse the
lazyloading CSS attribute. I don’t see how I can correctly not
display the picture twice.
Tools are simply bad and produce awful HTML. If you are not
convinced, look at the source of a page generated by the pseudo-
minimalist Medium. When trying to parse HTML, it becomes obvious how
we lost any meaning. People wrote, tools transformed it in a
meaningless mumbo jumbo and I was trying to write a tool to find the
original meaning back.
But tools are not the only ones to blame…
People are Bad at Writing
-------------------------
When I added support for bold and italic, something strange
appeared. I realised the test pages I’ve been using since the
beginning were now less readable. The text alone was good but people
are somehow forced to add many fancy stuff over it. It’s like they
fear not being remarked. Every HTML webpage looks like a child doing
stupid stuff to attract his parent’s attention.
Open a book. Open 10 books around you. Try to find how many
instances of bold sentences, varying styles and coloured words you
have. Except in some very modern technical books, there’s none. You
can sometimes find some italics to indicate a citation. It’s quite
rare. I am, of course, referring to books that were published before
writers started to use MS Word.
As Neal Stephenson said in "In the Beginnings was the command line",
bold was at first only used for the title. Then MS Word came without
any support for formal title/subtitle styling. The bold button was
put prominently and people were expected to make their titles
manually. But something else happened: people started to put bold
and italics everywhere. Because they could.
When reading through so many webpages, it struck me how all this
styling was looking like insecurity. Fear of not being read. Fear of
not being cool. Fear of being boring. Fear of losing your audience.
And how much better most of the texts were without any styling.
As I was reading "L’Âge des low-tech", by Philippe Bihouix, I came
across one of those insecurities. The author put the word "NEVER" in
all caps, probably hoping to make a point. It looks like the author
felt insecure about his argument, felt that it was weak and tried to
compensate. The point was something like "3D printing is not a
solution because true constructions like houses can NEVER be 3D
printed". Which is obviously false (or at least it should be
explained why current 3D-printed buildings are not trully
3D-printed). Without the all cap, it would have been an error in a
book, something understandable. With the all cap, the author lost a
lot of credibility for many pages.
Any Mistake That Can Be Made…
-----------------------------
So, in essence, people are using crappy tools that produce shitty
code and they are using it as badly as they can. We can safely say
that any error that can be done will be done.
The same is true for Gemini. Hopefully, Gemtext is so simple that
there’s no tool, reducing the error surface. Errors can only be done
on a line-by-line basis. Like that case when someone was speaking
about a hashtag and the hashtag appeared at the beginning on the
line, turning the line into a title.
But there’s one true error still possible with gemtext
: Preformatted.
I’ve seen them all : people missing one preformatted line and thus
inverting formatted/preformatted, people not closing an opened
preformatted or, the worse : some gemlogs switching between
formatted/preformatted for each paragraph. The only explanation I
found was that it was looking cool in their test client. What if
their client was switching the background colour for preformatted?
Then their posts would render as a nice patchwork of colours.
This is a huge problem as Offpunk doesn’t wrap preformatted texts,
assuming they are some sort of ASCIIART. Those paragraphs were thus
displayed as a long non-wrapped line.
If a mistake can be made, it will be made.
About Wrapping
--------------
It seems obvious when you are reading texts but, once a line is
longer than your screen, that line should be wrapped. The line
should continue on the next line. Wrapping is far from trivial if
you don’t want to wrap in the middle of words. You need to count
characters then, once a threshold has been reached, cut at the
nearest word separation.
But remember what I told you about ANSI codes and colours. When you
see a coloured line on a terminal, there are some invisible
characters. Many of them. So the wrapping is confused and may wrap
too soon.
If you have a Gemini title you want to be bold blue, the ANSI
sequences to open and close everything will amount to 12 characters.
Your wrap will be really short.
Not a huge problem until you start dealing with HTML lines where you
can have 4 or 5 links per line. You may start to wrap before
displaying any character at all!
ANSI modes should be conserved to the next line but I observed many
singularities and, from what I’ve seen, it is a good practice to
close all ANSI codes before the end of a line. That makes the wrap
even harder: you need to identify all opened ANSI sequences, close
them and reopen them on the next line.
That’s exactly the problem that python-ansiwrap is solving. And they
did quite a good job with it.
Displaying Images
-----------------
As I was reading webpages with Offpunk, I realised once that I was
really missing an important information. I loaded the page in
Firefox and, yes, a whole paragraph, a citation, was missing. What
happened? It took me the source code to realise that the citation
was not a text but a picture.
The easy solution to avoid such problem was to render pictures as
links. If you wanted to see a picture, you would simply follow the
link and the picture would be displayed in your picture viewer (feh,
in my case).
But, quickly, I started to open all the pictures, curious to see
what they were. Most pictures on the web are useless. They serve to
get a sense of "feeling". Like bold and styling, they only serve to
attract attention to the content. I’m guilty as everyone. For years,
I tried to find a catchy picture for every article on my blog. This
was reinforced by the fact that a link without a picture has no
chance to thrive on Twitter nor Facebook. It even became some sort
of artistic ritual to pair a finished blog post with a totally
unrelated picture.
As I discovered the console, more than 20 years ago, I started to
play with libcaca, which was transforming pictures into asciiart. I
did a little experiment but, on the small size of a website, a
libcaca picture does not help at all. It is fun but there’s no way
you could recognise anything.
At that point, the universe told be about Chafa. For the anecdote, I
was removing unused packages from my computer when I found one
called neofetch. I did a "apt-cache show neofetch" to see what it
was and was intrigued by a dependency called "chafa").
Remember that your terminal can display any Unicode character with a
custom foreground and background colour? Well, chafa uses that to
transform any picture into a configurable block of coloured text.
What is really interesting is that most pictures are recognisable. I
also found "timg", which is doing exactly the same as chafa albeit
slower.
I thought it would be fun to have chafa rendering pictures in
Offpunk and tried it. It was just a proof of concept. But I was
quickly convinced. It was working so well that I could easily tell
if a picture was an important one I should open or a decorative one
I could skip. In a word, it was "useful". One more tool to extract
information that people are deliberately burying while trying to
promote it.
=> files/offpunk_gtg06.png A webpage with pictures rendered in
Offpunk. Notice how you can recognize that IMG 11 is a meme while
IMG 15 is a screenshot.
With the 1.8 version, Chafa added support for a kind of "kitty-
image-protocol", something I don’t understand but which allows the
Terminal Kitty to display pixel-perfect pictures. Timg already had
support for that. Pixel perfect pictures cannot be integrated into
text but this meant that I could directly display pictures into
Offpunk. And, yes, it works when you access the picture directly.
=> files/frosty_bjorn.png Offpunk displaying a picture from a gemlog
you should follow
For best result, use Kitty terminal and Chafa 1.10. If you have an
older Chafa, also install Timg to have the best of both worlds.
Rewriting All From Scratch
--------------------------
All this hacked-together plate of spaghetti was working quite well
but was unmaintainable. The HTML rendering code was pure random
guessing. Ansiwrap sometimes gave very strange results and the
performances were horrible. A 40 characters wide line produced by
chafa could contain up to 1000 characters, which were parsed by
ansiwrap.
When reading the Ansiwrap source code, I realised that one hard task
was to first identify ANSI codes in a text. Something I could avoid
as I was doing it myself.
So, in essence, I was making a text full of ANSI codes then wrapping
it with ansiwrap. Could I do it the other way?
I started a new renderer that would save the position of every
future ANSI code without inserting them. Then, I would wrap it, line
by line, inserting ANSI codes only after wrapping while being smart
enough to close them before the end of the line and reopening them.
Chafa pictures would be inserted without being wrapped at all.
This was not an easy task and I even added a BETA switch to keep the
old rendering engine while I was working on the new. But, quickly,
I realised it was doing a better job. Instead of transforming HTML
to ANSI, I was first trying to understand HTML then building a
meaningful representation. For example, newparagraph() and newline()
are two different functions because they have a different meaning.
For the anecdote, the first rendering engine was adding so many
blank lines that I needed to remove every block of more than three
blank lines before displaying the result.
So, starting with 1.2, Offpunk as a whole new rendering engine, also
used for Gemini, Gopher and RSS. Please test your favourite capsules
and websites and report any problems.
=> https://tildegit.org/ploum/AV-98-offline Download Offpunk
=> mailto:offpunk@ploum.eu Send me an email about Offpunk
=> mailto:~lioploum/offpunk-devel+subscribe@lists.sr.ht Subscribe to
the offpunk mailing list to discuss
Using the renderer without Offpunk
----------------------------------
An HTML2ANSI renderer seems very useful and I’m wondering if I
should release it as a standalone tool. You can already test it
quite easily with the following python script within the same folder
as Offpunk.
```
!/usr/bin/env python3
---------------------
from offpunk import HtmlRenderer
f = open("index.html")
content = f.read()
f.close()
rend = HtmlRenderer(content,"www.test.com")
display the result in less
--------------------------
rend.display()
or put it in a variable
-----------------------
body = rend.get_body()
print(body)
```
Making the Web Readable
-----------------------
I’m proud to say that my first objectives have been met: removing
any dependency to python-ansiwrap, improving performance with
pictures and making the code more maintainable.
Outside of ansiwrap, Offpunk uses two libraries to parse the web:
the venerable BeautifulSoup 4 (python-bs4), which does an
outstanding job of parsing the HTML. Parsing is the act of
transforming a text into an usable computer representation.
Rendering is the opposite : transforming the computer representation
into something an user can read/watch. The best the parsing, the
easiest the rendering.
The other is python-readability which removes unwanted cruft from an
HTML page. Python-readability transforms HTML into HTML but with
less thing. Most of the time, it works really well, allowing Offpunk
to display only the article that I want to read.
Sometimes, it removes too much. In that case, Offpunk allows
bypassing readability with the command "view full" (or "v full").
Starting with 1.2, you can bookmark a page and its mode, so you
automatically switch to "full" for some pages. This is done with a
very naughty hack (adding "##offpunk_mode=full" at the end of the
URL and crossing fingers for no URL having this string in their URL
in real life).
Without python-readability, I could not have added web support to
Offpunk. It would have been discouraging. But now that I have an
improved HTML renderer, I’m starting to wonder if I could make
python-readability an optional dependency. Would it be useful for
anyone not to install python-readability?
There’s one good reason not to allow running Offpunk without python-
readability. With readability enabled, most webpages have between 0
and 20 or 30 links. When running "offpunk --sync", this means making
that many requests to prefetch contents and pictures.
But in "full" mode, most webpages have between 100 and 500 links.
Most of them completely useless, of course. Using Offpunk to surf
the web without readability might be a nightmare.
Starting a Discussion
---------------------
I created my first website in 1998 and started my still active blog
in 2004. For all those years, I was publishing to attract attention,
readership. I was looking for some "success". I got some. Published
books, was invited to give conferences, was offered jobs, was even
twice recognized by strangers because of my blog. But it was never
enough. It is still not enough. I don’t feel particularly
successful.
For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to become a successful writer by
doing anything that could attract attention to my writing. In the
last years, I’ve been slowly evolving toward writing more,
publishing less and doing marketing even less.
By being forced to parse all the greasy cruft that others put around
their writing, I was forced to realise how I did (and might still
do) the same. How the appearance is detrimental to the content.
Anyone suggesting that gemtext should support colours should be
forced to write an ANSI parser first. Anyone suggesting that Gemtext
formatting is not enough to express correctly what they want to
express should open an old book. Most people are trying to work
around the fact that writing is hard. Really hard. They hope to
share emotions and non-verbal clues through emojis, colours,
boldening. The problem is that, unlike the written language, those
expressions are not explicit. You don’t convey what you want to
convey, you make it less understandable. If you can’t write without
colours and emojis, it is probably because you don’t really know
what you want to say. That’s why writing is so hard. It is hard but
it pays off. When writing with only words, you not only communicate
better with others, you also communicate with your present and
future self.
« Ce qui se conçoit bien s’énonce clairement et les mots pour le
dire viennent aisément. » (Boileau)
I’m still astonished by the emptiness of most successful webpages
once displayed in Offpunk. Offpunk made the front page of Hackernews
which led me to break my disconnection temporarily because I was
curious about other links with more votes. They were shallow, empty
and rarely had more than 200 words. A search about Offpunk on Google
that same day revealed that the top pages were mostly computer
remixes of the Offpunk README. The web is full of automatic content
trying to mimic what has been successful. There were even two
Youtube videos in the first Google results. Both of which are
computer reading of the README while the website is displayed. The
real Offpunk website was only on the second page, demonstrating how
the web is buried in shitty auto-generated content and how bad the
leading search engine is.
I did not receive more emails that day than when I post on this
gemlog.
That success everybody is running after is fake, short-lived. It is
not even finished that you must already run for the next shot.
With Offpunk, I still can read people I like on the web. I follow
their RSS feeds. It makes me feel like I’m still on Gemini or
Gopher. It’s funny how, each time I find something deep and
meaningful to read on the web, it renders well in Offpunk. It feels
a bit like meaning and technical presentation are somehow connected.
I also like to write on Gemini because I know that it can’t be
successful. I can write long stuff like this one. It will be read by
people that find it interesting. Not many. Maybe none. But if you
made it until now, then it certainly had an impact on you. I’ve
shared my thoughts with you. You will, consciously or not, process
them. You may even one day produce something that will have been
impacted by what you’ve read today. I may read you later without
knowing that.
This whole post has been influenced heavily by a lot of people in
the Gemini space. They made me think. You probably made me think.
I’ve evolved thanks to what I’ve read. Sometimes, when reading you,
I wanted to reply. But there was no short and easy way to reply. So
my reply either got lost, which means it was not important, or got
carried with my thinking and crystallised into this post or the
following one.
We have started a long, slow and meaningful conversation. The kind
of conversation upon which every human breakthrough was conceived.
Thank you for participating in it.
This is just the beginning of our conversation.
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La légèreté d’un monde sans Twitter
-----------------------------------
Il y a un peu moins d’un an, j’ai supprimé mon compte Twitter. Un
compte vérifié avec la célèbre icône bleue, suivi par près de 7000
autres comptes Twitter.
Si ce n’est pas exceptionnel, ce compte n’en était pas moins
relativement "influent" sur l’échelle Twitter. J’ai pourtant décidé
de tenter l’expérience de m’en passer complètement, pour voir. Je
savais que j’avais un an pour faire marche arrière. Durant un an,
mon compte serait "réactivable" avant d’être définitivement
supprimé. Il me reste donc quelques semaines pour changer d’avis.
Et pourtant, cela ne me viendrait pas à l’esprit.
Un sentiment de liberté
-----------------------
Je m’étais déjà déconnecté de mon compte Twitter pendant des
périodes plus ou moins longues, jusqu’à trois mois. Mais la
suppression est complètement différente. En quelques jours, j’ai
tout simplement arrêté de penser à ce qui se passait sur Twitter.
J’ai arrêté de penser que ce réseau existait. L’expérience a été la
même que pour Facebook et LinkedIn : en supprimant le compte, je me
suis ôté un poids énorme. C’est pour Twitter, le réseau auquel
j’étais le plus accroc, que la sensation a été la plus forte.
Il est simple de se retirer des réseaux que l’on n’aime pas ou qu’on
utilise peu. Le réel changement vient d’accepter de se retirer d’un
réseau dont on connait la nocivité, pour soi et pour le monde, sans
pourtant pouvoir s’en passer. Parce qu’on est persuadé d’en tirer
plus de bien que de mal.
Je suis un blogueur et écrivain qui cherche la gloire. Qui cherche
le buzz. Qui cherche à vendre des livres, à être lu, à toucher des
lecteurs. Les réseaux sociaux sont littéralement conçus pour les
gens comme moi. Et pourtant, ils me prennent beaucoup en m’apportant
bien peu. Les pseudobénéfices ne sont que du vent. Une icône bleue à
côté de mon nom ? La belle affaire ! Un nombre à quatre chiffres
sous la marque "abonnés" ? Un simple attrape-nigaud pour que je
tente à tout prix de le faire augmenter.
Twitter ne me manque pas. Au contraire. Je me demande sans cesse
pourquoi je ne l’ai pas quitté plus tôt. Pourquoi ceux qui, comme
moi, ont la conscience de la nocivité de cette plateforme la
crédibilisent en restant dessus. (je ne vais pas leur jeter la
pierre, j’en faisais partie il y a moins d’un an).
La migration vers Mastodon
--------------------------
Je souris de la naïveté de certains utilisateurs qui s’indignent de
l’arrivée d’Elon Musk à la tête de Twitter. C’était pourtant clair
depuis le début, non ? Vous êtes des "utilisateurs". Vous êtes une
marchandise, vous créez la valeur de l’entreprise, que ce soit pour
Elon Musk ou un autre. Vous êtes les pigeons et votre indignation ne
fait qu’alimenter les débats, les interactions et donc les intérêts
publicitaires.
Il n’y a pas de bonne manière d’utiliser un réseau propriétaire. En
créant un compte, nous acceptons d’être utilisés, manipulé et que
chacune de nos interactions y soit désormais monétisée.
Il y a déjà 5 ans, je tentais de promouvoir Mastodon, une
alternative libre et décentralisée à Twitter. Je lis souvent des
remarques comme quoi c’est beaucoup plus compliqué.
Non.
C’est juste différent. Si tu n’arrives pas à utiliser Mastodon,
c’est que tu n’en as tout simplement pas envie.
C’est plus facile de manger un burger au Macdo qu’un plat équilibré
avec des légumes. C’est plus facile de balancer ses déchets dans un
parc plutôt que de faire du tri. L’argument de la facilité n’en est
pas un. Le monde se modèle selon l’énergie que nous y mettons.
Il faut créer un compte avec un mot de passe et tout ? Sur Twitter
aussi. C’est juste que tu as l’habitude. C’est juste que tu t’es
connecté sur un serveur Mastodon, que tu as découvert que tu avais 0
follower, que tu n’avais plus la petite icône bleue, que tu ne
savais plus "promouvoir tes tweets", que tu ne voyais plus des likes
s’afficher en direct sous tes messages. Que tu n’es plus revenu et
que donc tu as oublié ton mot de passe. Que c’est plus facile
d’accuser le logiciel libre d’être compliqué plutôt que d’affronter
sa propre vacuité.
Si tu n’as pas l’envie d’apprendre à utiliser Mastodon, c’est
compréhensible. Personne ne te force. Mais n’accuse pas la
plateforme.
Twitter est très bon pour te faire croire que tu es un utilisateur
important. Mais sur le Fediverse, le réseau décentralisé auquel
participent les serveurs Mastodon, il n’y a pas d’utilisateurs,
encore moins des importants. Il y a juste des personnes qui sont
toutes sur le même pied d’égalité.
La plateforme ne peut pas remplacer l’introspection
---------------------------------------------------
C’est peut-être ça le plus difficile à accepter : ce n’est pas
Mastodon ni le logiciel libre le problème. C’est toi. C’est toi qui
cherches à te sentir important, à être valorisé. En achetant des
vêtements chers, le dernier iPhone le jour de sa sortie, une grosse
voiture ou une icône bleue à côté de ton pseudo Twitter. Ou tout
simplement en ayant beaucoup de retweets, en étant beaucoup cité
dans les débats.
La question n’est pas de faire un Twitter-sans-Elon-Musk. La
question est de savoir ce que nous voulons, ce que nous cherchons.
De faire la part entre ce que nous prétendons ("communiquer") et ce
que nous voulons réellement ("être valorisé","avoir le sentiment
d’exister").
J’ai plusieurs fois suggéré de supprimer dans Mastodon l’affichage
public du nombre de followers pour couper court à toute potentielle
spéculation sur cet indicateur. Si je me rends compte qu’un compte à
beaucoup de followers, j’ai tendance instinctivement à penser que
cette personne est importante, que son avis vaut la peine d’être
écouté. Je ne pense pas être le seul.
Tentez l’expérience
-------------------
Si votre morale personnelle réprouve ce qu’est ou ce que devient
Twitter, je ne peux que vous inviter à tenter l’expérience de
supprimer votre compte. Rappelez-vous : vous avez un an pour changer
d’avis.
Faites fi de ces conversations tellement importantes, de cette
communauté que vous ne pouvez pas "abandonner", de ces ennemis
virtuels qui verront votre départ comme une victoire. Tentez
simplement de vous aligner avec vos propres valeurs morales. Juste
pour voir.
Supprimer votre compte est également la seule et unique manière de
protester, de toucher l’entreprise là où ça lui fait mal.
Bien sûr, vous pouvez aussi venir sur Mastodon. Mais ce n’est pas
nécessaire. C’est même peut-être contreproductif. Si vous étiez
accroc à Twitter, vous serez tenté de voir dans Mastodon un
substitut. Il est sans doute préférable de se sevrer de Twitter
avant de découvrir autre chose.
Bonus
-----
Installez l’extension libredirect dans votre navigateur, de manière
à pouvoir continuer à consulter Twitter à travers l’interface Nitter
(vous pouvez même suivre les comptes Twitter dans votre lecteur
RSS). Sur Android, utilisez Fritter.
=> https://libredirect.codeberg.page/ Libredirect pour
Chrome/Firefox
=> https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jonjomckay.fritter/ Fritter
pour Android
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