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| title = "The #RightClick Affordance" | ||
| date = 2023-09-21 | ||
| updated = 2023-09-21 | ||
| [taxonomies] | ||
| author = ["Carson Gross"] | ||
| +++ | ||
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| > Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "#ViewSource" affordance, which allowed people to copy, | ||
| > modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful. This affordance was later adapted | ||
| > by other human-centered projects like #Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against #enshittification. | ||
| > | ||
| > \-\-[Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr](https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1701934607732810208) | ||
| ## Open Culture & The Web | ||
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| When people talk about open source software, that conversation is often dominated by | ||
| [the Free Software Foundation's notion of free software](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html): | ||
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| > “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the | ||
| > freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software." | ||
| This definition of free software has been a useful one and, through advocating for it, the FSF has gifted the world a | ||
| lot of wonderful open source software. | ||
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| Web applications, however, have always been an uncomfortable fit for this definition of free. This is mainly | ||
| for technical reasons: web applications involve a web browser interacting with a web server that is, typically, running | ||
| on a remote system. | ||
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| At a fundamental level, the REST-ful architecture of the web was built around _hypermedia representations_ of remote | ||
| resources: browsers deal only with hypermedia representations provided by the server and, thus, have no visibility into | ||
| the actual source of the code executing on the server side. | ||
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| Now, the web has certainly _leveraged_ free and open source software in its growth: browsers are typically (at least mostly) | ||
| open source, server software is often open source, and so on. And there are, of course, open source web applications | ||
| that users may run for things like forums and so forth. | ||
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| However, from the standpoint of typical web application users, web applications are not free in the FSF sense of that | ||
| term: the users are unable to see and modify the source of the server code that is being executed as they interact with | ||
| the application via the browser. | ||
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| ### Right-Click-View-Source As Culture | ||
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| Despite the fact that the web has a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with the notion of free software, the early web | ||
| none-the-less had radically open _developer culture_. | ||
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| In fact, in some important and practical ways, the early web had a _more_ open developer culture than what was achieved | ||
| by the free software movement. | ||
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| The [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) affordance available in browsers allowed people | ||
| to understand and "own", at least in an informal way, the web in a way that even most FSF-conforming applications could | ||
| not: you had direct access to the "source", or at least _part_ of the source, of the application available, from | ||
| _within_ the application itself. | ||
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| You could copy-and-paste (or save) the "source" (HTML, JavaScript & CSS) and start modifying it, without a complicated | ||
| build tool chain or, indeed, without any tool chain at all. | ||
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| This radical openness of the web allowed many people, often not formally trained computer programmers, to learn how to | ||
| create web pages and applications in an ad hoc and informal way. | ||
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| In strict free software terms, this was, of course, a compromise: as a user of a web application, you had no visibility | ||
| into how a server was constructing a given hypermedia response. | ||
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| But you could see _what_ the server was responding with: you could download and tweak it, poke and prod at it. You could, | ||
| if you were an advanced user, use browser tools to modify the application in place. | ||
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| And, most importantly, you could _learn from it_, even if you couldn't see how the HTML was being produced. | ||
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| This radical openness of the client and network protocol, and the culture it produced, was a big part of the success | ||
| of the early web. | ||
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| ## Digital Enclosure & Technical Enclosure | ||
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| The [Enclosure Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure) was a period in English history when what were | ||
| previously [commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons) were privatized. | ||
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| This was a traumatic event in English history, as evidenced by this poem by an 18th century anon: | ||
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| > The law locks up the man or woman | ||
| > Who steals the goose from off the common, | ||
| > But lets the greater felon loose | ||
| > Who steals the common from the goose. | ||
| > | ||
| > 18th century anon | ||
| In the last decade, the web has gone through a period of "Digital Enclosure", where ["Walled Gardens"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_platform), | ||
| such as Facebook & Twitter, have replaced the earlier, more open and more chaotic blogs and internet forums. | ||
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| Many (most?) developers have decried this trend. However, despite recognizing the danger of an increasingly closed internet, | ||
| many web developers don't consider their own technical decisions and how those decisions can also contribute to the | ||
| disappearance of web's _culture_ of openness. | ||
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| Inadvertently, for the most part, technical trends and decisions in web development in the last two decades has lead | ||
| to what we term a "Technical Enclosure" of the web, a processes whereby technical decisions chip away at the #ViewSource | ||
| affordance that Cory Doctrow discusses in the opening quote of this article. | ||
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| ### Technical Enclosure | ||
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| To see a stark example of the decline of the [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) affordance | ||
| in web development and Technical Enclosure in action, we can look at what is perhaps the most popular web page on the | ||
| internet, [The Google Homepage](https://google.com). | ||
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| Here is the nearly complete source of that page from the year 2000, taken from | ||
| [the wayback machine](http://web.archive.org/web/20000229040250/http://www.google.com/): | ||
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| ### Google in 2000 | ||
|  | ||
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| In contrast, here is a random snapshot of roughly 1/100th of the current source code for the website: | ||
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| ### Google in 2023 | ||
|  | ||
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| These two screenshots dramatically demonstrate the decline in the effectiveness of the [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) affordance over time: | ||
| yes, you can still right-click the page and view its underlying source, but making sense of the latter code would be | ||
| challenging for even the most seasoned web developer. | ||
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| A new web developer would have almost no chance of deriving any value from doing so. | ||
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| Now, this is not to criticize the google engineer's technical decisions that lead to this situation _as technical | ||
| decisions_: obviously, despite similar appearances, the google homepage of 2023 is far more sophisticated than the one | ||
| available in 2000. | ||
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| The 2023 google homepage is going to be a lot more complicated than the 2000 page and, given the zietgiest, it is going to | ||
| involve a lot of JavaScript. | ||
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| However, this is to point out that something deeply important has been lost, almost certainly unintentionally, along the way: | ||
| the ability to view the source of the page, make sense of what it is doing and, most importantly, to learn from it. | ||
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| ## Right-Click-View-Source Extremism | ||
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| Both [htmx](/) and [hyperscript](https://hyperscript.org) adhere to the [Locality of Behavior](@/essays/locality-of-behaviour.md) | ||
| design principle. | ||
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| This principle states that: | ||
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| > The behaviour of a unit of code should be as obvious as possible by looking only at that unit of code | ||
| The main technical advantage of Locality of Behavior is ease of maintenance, as outlined in the essay above. | ||
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| However, there is an important cultural benefit to Locality of Behavior as well: it restores the power of | ||
| the [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) affordance. | ||
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| Consider [Hyperwordle](https://arhamjain.com/hyperwordle/), a hyperscript-based clone of the popular | ||
| [Wordle](https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html) game, now owned by the New York Times. | ||
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| You can visit Hyperwordle, right click and view the source of it, and you will be presented with some HTML and hyperscript, | ||
| all of which is, with a bit of effort, understandable. The [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) | ||
| affordance is effective in this case. | ||
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| Contrast this with the view-source experience of the Wordle implementation at the New York Times. | ||
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| Now, this is of course a bit unfair: the NYTimes version has a lot more functionality and is heavily optimized. Hyperwordle | ||
| is a proof of concept and not being hammered by millions of users every day. | ||
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| Despite that qualification, however, Hyperwordle demonstrates a potential future for the web, where a culture of openness, | ||
| of view-source politeness, is once again a touchstone. | ||
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| Engineers who care about the open culture of the web should recognize the _non-technical_ value of the | ||
| [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme) affordance and start thinking about making it a | ||
| priority in their technical decisions. This may involve trading off against other technical and even functional | ||
| priorities during application development. | ||
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| If we don't stand up for [#ViewSource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-source_URI_scheme), no one else will. | ||
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| <br/> | ||
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