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In light of this week’s announcement by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads, etc), I have been pondering this question: Why am I, a person that has long been a staunch advocate of free speech and encryption, leery of sites that talk about being free speech-oriented? And, more to the point, why an I — a person … Continue reading Censorship Is Complicated: What Internet History Says about Meta/Facebook →
I last reviewed email services in 2019. That review focused a lot of attention on privacy. At the time, I selected mailbox.org as my provider, and have been using them for these 5 years since. However, both their service and their support have gone significantly downhill since, so it is time for me to look … Continue reading Review of Reputable, Functional, and Secure Email Service →
I’ve been using E Ink-based ereaders for quite a number of years now. I’ve had my Kobo Libra 2 for a few years, and was looking forward to the Kobo Libra Colour — the first color E Ink display in a mainstream ereader line. I found the display to be a mixed bag; contrast seemed … Continue reading Photographic comparison: Is the Kobo Libra Colour display worse than the Kobo Libra 2? →
It is, sadly, not entirely surprising that Facebook is censoring articles critical of Meta. The Kansas Reflector published an artical about Meta censoring environmental articles about climate change — deeming them “too controversial”. Facebook then censored the article about Facebook censorship, and then after an independent site published a copy of the climate change article, … Continue reading Facebook is Censoring Stories about Climate Change and Illegal Raid in Marion, Kansas →
More in programming
Ever used a website where you toggle from light mode to dark mode and the web site changes but the chrome around the browser doesn’t? To illustrate, take a look at this capture of my blog on an iPhone. When you toggle the theme from light to dark, note how the website turns white but status bar stays black. Only once I refresh the page or navigate does the status bar then turn white. When the user changes the theme on my site, I want it to propagate all the way to the surrounding context of the browser. In this case, to the status bar on the iPhone. Like this: There we go! That’s what I want. So what was wrong? A popular way to indicate the active theme is to put a class on the root of the document, e.g. <html class="dark"> <style> html { background: white } html.dark { background: black } </style> </html> Then we simply add/remove the dark class when the user toggles the theme. But that will only change the in-page styles. It won’t tell the browser to update the color of whatever ambient user interface elements its drawing. For that, you’ll need the meta theme-color tag: The theme-color value for the name attribute of the <meta> element indicates a suggested color that user agents should use to customize the display of the page or of the surrounding user interface. So when you respond to the user changing their theme, don’t forget to update the <meta name='theme-color'> tag in addition to whatever you do to modify the in-page styles. That’ll give you the effect you want in the surrounding browser UI (for browsers that support it). Oh, and it’s worth pointing out: don’t forget the color-scheme property either. That’s what will tell the browser to update other in-page UI elements it draws. So, when responding to a user preference to update a website’s theme: Toggle some global attribute that triggers style changes for all your custom, in-page elements. Set the color-scheme property so the browser draws the things its responsible for correctly (form controls, scroll bars, etc.). Set the <meta name='theme-color'> value appropriately so contextual browser UI can adapt to your site’s styles. I wrote this post as a friendly reminder, because friends don’t let friends forget the meta theme-color tag. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I have added syntax highlighting to my blog using tree-sitter. Here are some notes about what I learned, with some complaining. static site generator markdown ingestion highlighting incompatible?! highlight names class names styling code results future work frontmatter templates feed style highlight quality static site generator I moved my blog to my own web site a few years ago. It is produced using a scruffy Rust program that converts a bunch of Markdown files to HTML using pulldown-cmark, and produces complete pages from Handlebars templates. Why did I write another static site generator? Well, partly as an exercise when learning Rust. Partly, since I wrote my own page templates, I’m not going to benefit from a library of existing templates. On the contrary, it’s harder to create new templates that work with a general-purpose SSG than write my own simpler site-specific SSG. It’s miserable to write programs in template languages. My SSG can keep the logic in the templates to a minimum, and do all the fiddly stuff in Rust. (Which is not very fiddly, because my site doesn’t have complicated navigation – compared to the multilevel menus on www.dns.cam.ac.uk for instance.) markdown ingestion There are a few things to do to each Markdown file: split off and deserialize the YAML frontmatter find the <cut> or <toc> marker that indicates the end of the teaser / where the table of contents should be inserted augment headings with self-linking anchors (which are also used by the ToC) Before this work I was using regexes to do all these jobs, because that allowed me to treat pulldown-cmark as a black box: Markdown in, HTML out. But for syntax highlighting I had to be able to find fenced code blocks. It was time to put some code into the pipeline between pulldown-cmark’s parser and renderer. And if I’m using a proper parser I can get rid of a few regexes: after some hacking, now only the YAML frontmatter is handled with a regex. Sub-heading linkification and ToC construction are fiddly and more complicated than they were before. But they are also less buggy: markup in headings actually works now! Compared to the ToC, it’s fairly simple to detect code blocks and pass them through a highlighter. You can look at my Markdown munger here. (I am not very happy with the way it uses state, but it works.) highlighting As well as the tree-sitter-highlight documentation I used femark as an example implementation. I encountered a few problems. incompatible?! I could not get the latest tree-sitter-highlight to work as described in its documentation. I thought the current tree-sitter crates were incompatible with each other! For a while I downgraded to an earlier version, but eventually I solved the problem. Where the docs say, let javascript_language = tree_sitter_javascript::language(); They should say: let javascript_language = tree_sitter::Language::new( tree_sitter_javascript::LANGUAGE ); highlight names I was offended that tree-sitter-highlight seems to expect me to hardcode a list of highlight names, without explaining where they come from or what they mean. I was doubly offended that there’s an array of STANDARD_CAPTURE_NAMES but it isn’t exported, and doesn’t match the list in the docs. You mean I have to copy and paste it? Which one?! There’s some discussion of highlight names in the tree-sitter manual’s “syntax highlighting” chapter, but that is aimed at people who are writing a tree-sitter grammar, not people who are using one. Eventually I worked out that tree_sitter_javascript::HIGHLIGHT_QUERY in the tree-sitter-highlight example corresponds to the contents of a highlights.scm file. Each @name in highlights.scm is a highlight name that I might be interested in. In principle I guess different tree-sitter grammars should use similar highlight names in their highlights.scm files? (Only to a limited extent, it turns out.) I decided the obviously correct list of highlight names is the list of every name defined in the HIGHLIGHT_QUERY. The query is just a string so I can throw a regex at it and build an array of the matches. This should make the highlighter produce <span> wrappers for as many tokens as possible in my code, which might be more than necessary but I don’t have to style them all. class names The tree-sitter-highlight crate comes with a lightly-documented HtmlRenderer, which does much of the job fairly straightforwardly. The fun part is the attribute_callback. When the HtmlRenderer is wrapping a token, it emits the start of a <span then expects the callback to append whatever HTML attributes it thinks might be appropriate. Uh, I guess I want a class="..." here? Well, the highlight names work a little bit like class names: they have dot-separated parts which tree-sitter-highlight can match more or less specifically. (However I am telling it to match all of them.) So I decided to turn each dot-separated highlight name into a space-separated class attribute. The nice thing about this is that my Rust code doesn’t need to know anything about a language’s tree-sitter grammar or its highlight query. The grammar’s highlight names become CSS class names automatically. styling code Now I can write some simple CSS to add some colours to my code. I can make type names green, code span.hilite.type { color: #aca; } If I decide builtin types should be cyan like keywords I can write, code span.hilite.type.builtin, code span.hilite.keyword { color: #9cc; } results You can look at my tree-sitter-highlight wrapper here. Getting it to work required a bit more creativity than I would have preferred, but it turned out OK. I can add support for a new language by adding a crate to Cargo.toml and a couple of lines to hilite.rs – and maybe some CSS if I have not yet covered its highlight names. (Like I just did to highlight the CSS above!) future work While writing this blog post I found myself complaining about things that I really ought to fix instead. frontmatter I might simplify the per-page source format knob so that I can use pulldown-cmark’s support for YAML frontmatter instead of a separate regex pass. This change will be easier if I can treat the html pages as Markdown without mangling them too much (is Markdown even supposed to be idempotent?). More tricky are a couple of special case pages whose source is Handlebars instead of Markdown. templates I’m not entirely happy with Handlebars. It’s a more powerful language than I need – I chose Handlebars instead of Mustache because Handlebars works neatly with serde. But it has a dynamic type system that makes the templates more error-prone than I would like. Perhaps I can find a more static Rust template system that takes advantage of the close coupling between my templates and the data structure that describes the web site. However, I like my templates to be primarily HTML with a sprinkling of insertions, not something weird that’s neither HTML nor Rust. feed style There’s no CSS in my Atom feed, so code blocks there will remain unstyled. I don’t know if feed readers accept <style> tags or if it has to be inline styles. (That would make a mess of my neat setup!) highlight quality I’m not entirely satisfied with the level of detail and consistency provided by the tree-sitter language grammars and highlight queries. For instance, in the CSS above the class names and property names have the same colour because the CSS highlights.scm gives them the same highlight name. The C grammar is good at identifying variables, but the Rust grammar is not. Oh well, I guess it’s good enough for now. At least it doesn’t involve Javascript.
Simplify complex decisions by separating upsides from downsides, investing in upsides, vetoing with downsides, and using an appropriate decision framework.
I've been running Linux, Neovim, and Framework for a year now, but it easily feels like a decade or more. That's the funny thing about habits: They can be so hard to break, but once you do, they're also easily forgotten. That's how it feels having left the Apple realm after two decades inside the walled garden. It was hard for the first couple of weeks, but since then, it’s rarely crossed my mind. Humans are rigid in the short term, but flexible in the long term. Blessed are the few who can retain the grit to push through that early mental resistance and reach new maxima. That is something that gets harder with age. I can feel it. It takes more of me now to wipe a mental slate clean and start over. To go back to being a beginner. But the reward for learning something new is as satisfying as ever. But it's also why I've tried to be modest with the advocacy. I don't know if most developers are better off on Linux. I mean, I believe they are, at some utopian level, especially if they work for the web, using open source tooling. But I don't know if they are as humans with limited will or capacity for change. Of course, it's fair to say that one doesn't want to. Either because one remain a fan of Apple, in dire need of the remaining edge MacBooks retain on efficiency/battery, or simply content inside the ecosystem. There are plenty of reasons why someone might not want to change. It's not just about rigidity. Besides, it's a dead end trying to convince anyone of an alternative with the sharp end of a religious argument. That kind of crusading just seeds resentment and stubbornness. I know that all too well. What I've found to work much better is planting seeds and showing off your plowshare. Let whatever curiosity that blooms find its own way towards your blue sky. The mimetic engine of persuasion runs much cleaner anyway. And for me, it's primarily about my personal computing workbench regardless of what the world does or doesn't. It was the same with finding Ruby. It's great when others come along for the ride, but I'd also be happy taking the trip solo too. So consider this a postcard from a year into the Linux, Neovim, and Framework journey. The sun is still shining, the wind is in my hair, and the smile on my lips hasn't been this big since the earliest days of OS X.
