HWC Edinburgh picks up new attendees, with a record breaking 6 people today!

A few of the topic we touched:

Emojis everywhere, they are now part of everyday chat communication. Somehow though, they feel wrong in long form text. They are big thing on work Slack and similar, and different companies develop a different emoji-culture with custom sets and habits. What's the custom emoji per capita ratio in your workplace?

Easter eggs on websites: James used to have a scavenger hunt on his website (a mix of javascript and back end) but became tricky to maintain; Alistair was thinking about building a similar thing, based on triggering unusual media queries: aspect ratio, animation preferences, etc.

Easter eggs are a thing, do we need Halloween eggs? Would they come from some kind of bat-platypus?

Paul has been playing with Wordpress again, and has now 1.5 posts on his blog. Maybe he'll set up an integration with Mastodon soon, to publish links there? Have a look at https://paulguz.co.uk/

@Fran is planning to add a "This page is left intentionally blank" page to his website, to keep with the print traditions.

@capjamesg has been writing a few blogposts: he's thinking about browsers' address/search bars and search plugins. Note: browsers might have an option to "Add keyword for this search..." if you right click on a search field.

Colin has recovered his 1995 website and other files from old floppy discs, using with a greaseweasel. Word documents have change format, but the HTML pages render without trouble — he had them up on his phone. Read about it on his new blog: https://pointinthecloud.com/

He has also collected 600 cover arts from his CD collection: turns out browsers, including mobile ones, have no trouble showing all of them on a page, and they load pretty fast.

That works very well for blog archives too: you can list everything in one page, and the resulting HTML file will be smaller than many images.

Alistair is thinking about accessibility overlays, and working on a blog post about them—not done yet! He's also slowly working on a map-based redesign for his website. Or it might become a Fringe show for 2025, not sure how this is evolving.

There's an odd HTTP status code out there: 203 Non-authoritative information. That is, here's a page, but we give no guarantees about its content.

"How is this website so fast" is a click-baity YouTube video, but with useful actionable tips.

Colin is wondering how content could span over and connect different websites, which maybe contribute to a common topic with a central index. Concerns about trust when linking on embedding contents from other pages.

The Web could have more "graphy" feeling, rather than the "big node (Google, Facebook) → small site, repeat" patterns we see today. Browsers could do more to create the graph for you. Mention of the 2022 "Journeys" feature in Chrome, which seems mostly forgotten?

Browser history and bookmarks are still fiddly.

I think that's it, next HWC Edinburgh on the last Tuesday of November, the 26th 👋