11ty Conference Thoughts

10 May 2024 by cthos
About 4 min

The International Symposium on Making Web Sites Real good is now over and I watched it live. All of the talks are watchable up on Youtube.

Overall I really enjoyed all of the talks, especially the ones that made me think a lot more about what the internet is about. The whole conference is well worth watching, but I'm just going to call out a few big highlights that I especially enjoyed.

Here's the full video:

And the highlights:

This was an amazing talk all around, and discusses how the web was originally designed to protect content over other concerns and how styling came to exist in a way that respects that end goal. The overall discussion around the history of the web and how browsers preserve and protect the content and then how that interacts with authorial intent on a webpage is just fascinating. There are a bunch of links to old web RFCs as well.

Henry was an extremely enthusiastic and energetic presenter and clearly loves the stuff he's talking about. He goes into a speedrun of IndieWeb concepts (which is great because he also does Elden Ring challenge runs), and I really recommend jotting down some of the things he talks about in here. Here are some links to some of the concepts / tech he talks about in the talk.

• IndieWeb Micropub
• IndieAuth
• Quill
• POSSE

I especially loved how all of these concepts work together and don't require a major commercial entity to work. You can roll everything yourself. I especially like IndieAuth (even though I do prefer other authentication techniques).

This talk was really fun to watch. Dan talks at length about creating a meta-web interactive story which spans 40 websites, at least one Instagram page, and a bunch of different plot lines of a fictional city. It gives Welcome to Nightvale vibes, and is really reminiscent of some of the best parts of the early web.

That's a lot of domains to keep registered!

It's also thought provoking for me because they did make use of Generative AI (apparently more than they thought they would have) in order to make the site happen. Dan didn't go into detail in the talk about just how they did that, but it would appear that it was largely in the image generation space with some of the "general site copy" being LLM generated.

On one hand, I appreciate that making a project of this size would have been impossible for a team of 2 writers to do previously if you don't want to resort to stock art or other licensed images. Being able to generate fictional people enhanced the story they wanted to tell. They managed to create art, where the focus of the art is the story and not the imagery. The imagery does help sell the fiction of the story, especially when it's a little "weird".

On the other hand, I kinda still think this is a borderline unethical use of the technology since I think it's using a model trained on copyrighted data. This is mitigated somewhat from this not being a directly commercial endeavor, but it still kinda makes me feel weird, ya know?

Note, I'm making an assumption here, I can't find what models they used to do this but I think it's Midjourney rather than something like Firefly.

I'd love to see a discussion of the ethical considerations of undertaking a project like Question Mark, Ohio using generative AI.

Chris talks about a concept called "HTML Web Components" which is essentially "use regular HTML until it hits its limits and then enhance those with web components.

If you know anything about me, you know that I love web components. Love them. I love the concepts behind this talk, and it really gives the vibes of "we used to do this with jQuery but we have better tools now" vibes. Definitely worth a watch.

Chris is an excellent presenter and sticks to VanillaJS rather than using something like Stencil, which is great for learning the actual component API. Also the cadence and tenor of his talk is quite soothing.

This is just fascinating - he dives into the history of Chinese Type Systems and ties them to the web beautifully. I study Japanese (which uses a lot of Chinese characters) and so it was fun to understand how these fonts get rendered, how you optimize for them, and a bunch of other neat things I'd never have thought of.

Go give it a watch.

That's it! I enjoyed the whole conference and really appreciate the community / 11ty / CloudCannon for putting it together. Thanks to all the presenters for their time, and thanks to the chat for awesome commentary.

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