Reflecting on HTML As A Canvas

For as long as my “internet brain remembers,” I’ve always had some kind of weird web projects happening. Weirdly, or maybe per my nature, it’s usually been about pushing HTML use in ways which make sense eventually, but are hard to explain while crafting…

…when I swapped life from a Dell laptop to a Palm Treo & keyboard, it was HTML docs because “Office docs” were cumbersome, slow, and ultimately got converted to web formats anyways.

…on the Nokia N75, N95 NAM, and N97 it was the mobile web server and the shape of federated info. I could squeeze the viewport to do some neat things via python, while also learning how the very backend parts of the internet worked and were pulled far out of my control.

…there were wikis, SVG play, and HTML docs before and after the HTML5 draft spec. I’m no expert or anything; I just have routes and decide to slow play a lot. It made for a neat window and cabinet for many hyperlinked things. Probably influencing the bits about Muse you see here more than anything else.

The most recent projects have been around a personal identity portal and a “handshake” kinda business card. I’m liking the concept and the play. And with the parts of LLMs which are solid, I like the help and feedback to what’s being iterated upon. The result has been this canvas which augments connections, versus advertising them.

To me… HTML has always been a canvas. Perhaps this cannot be how the majority of folks “use” the web. But for some of us, this expressed connectivity just might be a canvas to obscure ideas which might amount to nothing much at all… or amount to a branch that changes the trajectory of several realities.

Given the other experiments on deck, I wonder how this canvas will evolve for me once more 🥸