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+title = "Digital Enclosure & Right-Click-View-Source Extremism"
+date = 2023-04-06
+updated = 2023-04-06
+[taxonomies]
+author = ["Carson Gross"]
++++
+
+> 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)
+
+A driving idea behind projects like [htmx](/) and [hyperscript](https://hyperscript.org) is the idea that the "code"
+for a thing should be "on" the thing.  This is in part driven by a preference for [Locality of Behavior](@essays/locality_of_behavior.md),
+a technical design decision which helps ease the maintenance of software.  
+
+But another major driver is the conviction that, on the web, people should be able to view the source of a page and see
+what the page is doing, the #ViewSource affordance Cory mentions above.
+
+## Free Software vs. Open Culture
+
+This later factor isn't a technical design consideration, rather, it is a moral position, or, as we will see, more of
+a cultural position.
+
+The idea that you should be able to view the source of a web page is in the spirit of 
+[the Free Software Foundation's notion of free software](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html):
+
+> “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."
+
+However, there are some important distinctions between the #ViewSource affordance of the web and the FSF's definition of
+free software above.
+
+Web applications have always been an uncomfortable fit for this stricter definition of free for technical reasons:
+the server for a web application is typically remote and, at a fundamental level, the operations occurring on the server 
+are opaque to the hypermedia client (i.e. the browser).
+
+The client deals only with hypermedia representations provided by the server, and has no visibility into the actual 
+source of the code executing on the server side.
+
+There are, of course, open source web applications, but running an open source web application is typically much less 
+convenient than other types of applications due to the operational complexity that they often entail.
+
+### Right-Click-View-Source As Culture
+
+However, despite this less pure adherence to the idea of free software, the early web none-the-less had radically
+_open_ culture, in some practical ways a _more_ open culture than even that achieved by the free software movement.
+
+The #ViewSource affordance available in browsers allowed people to understand and "own" the web in a way that even most 
+FSF-conforming applications could not: you had direct access to the "source" of the application available, _within_
+the application itself.  
+
+You could copy-and-paste (or save) that "source" (HTML, JavaScript & CSS) and start modifying it, without a complicated
+build tool chain or, indeed, without any tool chain at all. This radical openness of the web allowed many people, often
+not formally trained computer scientists, to learn how to create web pages and applications in an ad hoc and informal way.  
+
+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.
+
+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.  And, most importantly, you could
+_learn from it_, even if you couldn't see how the HTML was being produced.
+
+## Digital Enclosure & Right-Click-View-Source Extremism
+
+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.  This was a traumatic event in English 
+history, as evidenced by this poem by an 18th century anon:
+
+
+> 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 chaotic blogs and internet forums.
+
+Many developers have decried this trend, and rightly, in our opinion.  But, despite recognizing the danger of an increasingly
+closed internet, many web developers don't consider their own technical decisions and how those also influence the 
+culture of openness that is rapidly disappearing.
+
+### Two Wordle Implementations
+