SI26: Difference between revisions
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==== Scrapping the standard ==== | ==== Scrapping the standard ==== | ||
A tentative to scrap implementation of CSS property by crawling the standard draft pages. | A tentative to scrap implementation of CSS property by crawling the standard draft pages. [[A css who done it]] | ||
==== Inspector Extensions ==== | ==== Inspector Extensions ==== | ||
Revision as of 12:39, 3 March 2025
Declarations
Declarations is an ongoing trans-disciplinary artistic research project into the poetic materiality of the CSS web-standard and its echoes on design and artistic practices.
A presentation of the declarations research project, with quotes and some illustrations of how the research is looking at declarative web-languages. It is important to read the first and second part (what is CSS, and the research questions).
We will watch the video essay by Miriam Suzanne Why is CSS so weird as an starting point to untangle some questions of the research together.
So far what is CSS:
- if HTML is the structure of the house, CSS is interior design (paints, textiles, flooring, etc.), how we feel in a room? (laurel's pdf)
- as an interface, CSS is the infinitessimely thin shared boundary that mediate our relation with the web, that is very close to us, individuals, in the vaste ecosystem of the web, also called front-end. (doriane's scheme)
- as a declarative language, CSS is giving up control and designing in a device-agnostic manner for unknown canvases, similarly to a script for theater piece, that will always be re-interpeted in its context of execution (miriam video)
An evolving selection of declarations experiment, Doriane will present some of those progressively through the sessions.
Reader
A selection of references to go further.
| Author | Title | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Nolwenn Maudet | Tactical Design | 2023 |
| J. R. CARPENTER | A Handmade Web | 2015 |
| Zach Mandeville | Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion! | 2016 |
| Laurel Schwulst | My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? | 2018 |
| Femke Snelting | Dividing & Sharing | 2008 |
| Frank Chimero | The web's grain | 2015 |
| Olia Lialina | A Vernacular Web 1,2,3 | 2005, 207, 2010 |
| John Allsopp | A Dao of Web Design | 2000 |
Special issue: display and position
In the context this XPUB special issue, Declarations will focus on something quite specific. The idea is to take a weird angle on the learning of CSS: to be linguists at the same time than learning the language.
The special issue is structured in 3 chapters:
- exploring the linguistic aspect of web-languages
- investigating & documenting cultural uses of specific CSS properties
- speculation as a tool to think about it differently
Two CSS property have been choosing in that regard: display and position.
They are interesting because they show how CSS is a language, notably by the use of non-numeric value and keyword with meaning. They also both have been subject to many change in the standard: unfolding a whole cultural history of the web that lies in the words it uses.
By reading the standard it appears that this is a rather complex properties. For example for display we can ask ourselves:
- What does it mean for certain things to be block and other the be inline? what does it mean to be inline-block?
- How and why where table, flex and grid invented? Do we need more? What are the motivations and by who was it done?
- How are they implemented, what complexities or differences are often unseen in those processes?
- What does the words "block" and "line" means outside of CSS but through design history?
The subject of becoming CSS linguists will be introduced and expended in its dedicated page .
Chapt.1 Words are events, they do things, change things (Entering CSS linguistics)
Monday 6 January
morning:
- A presentation of the declarations research project, with quotes and some illustrations of how the research is looking at declarative web-languages. It is important to read the first and second part (what is CSS, and the research questions).
- We will watch the video essay by Miriam Suzanne Why is CSS so weird as an starting point to untangle some questions of the research together.
afternoon:
a first declarative warmup exercise Declarative companion.
Monday 13 January
morning:
- sharing moment about the Declarative companions made last time.
- presentation of the special issue, through becoming CSS linguists
- meeting Display and Position, the two CSS properties we are going to dive in
afternoon:
- trying to complete the prompt for both Display and Position
Monday 20 January
todo:
- ✓ read Tactical Design, Nolwenn maudet
morning:
(Notes are being taken on our main pad, https://pad.xpub.nl/p/declarative-companions)
- second round of presentation on declarative companions
- collective sharing moment on display and position
- introduction to browser extension, the tactical interest of browser extension, and how they work
- install Scratch together
afternoon:
- making extensions
Chapt.2 Every language has a grain (CSS Deep dive in ethymology & cultural usages)
Proposal was to divide in two groups: one group focusing on `display` and `position`. groups will have moment to share back to the rest of the students their research progress. But through the previous sessions together, differents individual/group projects appeared, it was judged more interesting to pursue those diverse initiatives than to force it into a more theoretical research on web-standard.
Monday 27 January
No Class Meeting
Doriane in Berlin for a Declarations workshop
Monday 3 February
morning
- sharing of the Berlin workshop
- introducing the various declarations references text, in order to be read in smaller group through Lidya' writing / methodology class
- sharing of the position property, see pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/declarative-companions
- a moment to slowly gather our notes on position and display so far
morning/afternoon
- finished the declarative companions
- pursuing websites fabulations (browser extensions)
- accumulative cascade
- revealing the <head> or other invisible tags
- specific lens for display / position
- some aesthetic swap (manually translating styles from one website to another)
- other projects appearing
- iframe quilting
- "the tiger ... in the forest"
- a website made for the nintendo 3Ds
Monday 10 February
morning
- we planned in a advance a sharing moment of a discussion that had been had internally between the students about what they want do produce from that special issue
- the following tracks came out
HYPERVISUAL SUPER ZINE
a zine of screenshots of modified website, like a documentary of lots of CSS tweaking. Screenshots started to be taken on everybody's computer as soon as we started to play with web-extensions. There is a folder here: https://cloud.nubo.coop/s/6oX4DCWjMLHsjxn, to collect those screenshot.
- by taking a lot of screenshots in the process of editing CSS, extension aren't a fix thing, but a process of manual bending and tweaking, always changing.
- a screenshot shouldn't pretend to be a website, it's a fixed image, a situated recording that stays
- once freed from the "objective, representative" goal of screenshot, they can become more creative: very zoomed in, a photo of the screen itself, or of a beamed website on a wall, etc...
- an additionnal idea was to print parts on transparent paper (snippets of codes?)
QUILTING WEBRING
after a discussion on what's a webring, there was a wish to create web-mazes. it sounded an opportunity for iframe quilting. we would make a page that visualize the webring through CSS iframe quilting.
- https://tedium.co/2020/11/20/webring-history/
- https://foldoc.org/europa.html
- https://thehtml.review/03/ this but with iframes Wiki page:
- User:Sevgi/Special Issue 26/Quilting p
TIGER POEM
a generative story book but both css and html are the book, it changes dynamically when you resize the page.
↘︎ its wiki page
RE: poetry
A collection of poetical sounding email subject from the w3c mailing list. To be turned in a fanzine? W3C Mailing List Archive (search) https://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search collect here: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/re_poetry
Timeline
We started a (rather informal) timeline of events around the creation of css properties we researched ... some interesting moments from the mailing list. this could be one timeline per 'Display' and one per 'Block' or even more specific e.g. a timeline only focused on 'sticky'.
We figured out a format for the timeline to be able to encode event collaboratively on a pad (using YAML) TIMELINE LINK : https://pad.xpub.nl/p/timeline
Alternative Browsers (Nintendo 3DS, kindle)
Nintendo 3DS, kindle, PSP https://pad.xpub.nl/p/SI26_nintendo_DS-3DS https://pad.xpub.nl/p/3DS_Browser_Investigation
Making a website that is only Nintendo 3DS accessible, after seeing a message from facebook saying: "Sorry, this browser is not longer supported."
Making an acid test, to figure out what works and what doesn't work on the Nintendo 3DS in terms of CSS, but also 3D images, and other functionalities? Being able to compare it with the kindle? There is a question of scope that is important to understand when something doesn't work, is it CSS2 (official support documentation)? webkit? netfront? netfront for the nintendo 3DS? the device itself?
One of the possible outcome will be to create website(s) that are only readable through the 3DS browser by reverse engineering the CSS2 functionalities as well as the netfront browser's specificities, such as the pre-defined font, positions, units etc..
Monday 17 February
we took the full day to continue the different workshop started last time with two new tracks
FRACTAL DOM
from experimental with fractal in different programming languages, came the challenge to do fractal with html/css. what would be a web-fractal? you can do it with canvas and javascript, but the DOM of an HTML document already is a tree (with nesting acting as node and branches). if you generate a fractal just by inserting div into div, it's appearance is a matter of CSS. by making each div into a single line, with it's child possitionned relatively at one side of the line and with an angle, we find back the "usual" representation of fractals.
would it be possible to generate such trees but following the structure of existing website?
https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Shoebby/Webby_Sprouts
Scrapping the standard
A tentative to scrap implementation of CSS property by crawling the standard draft pages. A css who done it
Inspector Extensions
A bundle of browser extensions investigating different website meta data User:Kim/Special Issue 26/Inspector Extensions
Specific Lens
A browser extension to highlight the display and position values used on the various elements of a webpage.
https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/Specific_Lens