Day: 3 May 2024

Terence Eden wrote about his recent experience of IndieWebCamp Brighton, in which he mentioned that somebody – probably Jeremy Keith – had said, presumably to provoke discussion:

A blog post doesn’t need a title.

Terence disagrees, saying:

In a literal sense, he was wrong. The HTML specification makes it clear that the <title> element is mandatory. All documents have title.

But I think that’s an overreach. After all, where is it written that a blog must be presented in HTML?

Non-HTML blogs

There are plenty of counter-examples already in existence, of course:

• Terence’s own no-ht.ml (now offline) demonstrated that a website needn’t use HTML¹. This inspired my own “page with no code”, which worked by hiding content in CSS and loading the CSS using HTTP headers².
• theunderground.blog‘s content, with the exception of its homepage, is delivered entirely through an XML Atom feed. Atom feed entries do require <title>s, of course, so that’s not the strongest counterexample!
• This blog is available over several media other than the Web. For example, you can read this blog post:
  • in Gemtext³
    • via Gemini at gemini://danq.me/posts/does-a-blog-have-to-be-html
    • via Spartan at spartan://danq.me/posts/does-a-blog-have-to-be-html
  • in plain text⁴
    • via Gopher at gopher://danq.me/1/posts/does-a-blog-have-to-be-html
    • via Finger at finger://does-a-blog-have-to-be-html@danq.me

But perhaps we can do better…

A totally text/plain blog

We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is:

1. A webserver configured to deliver plain text files by preference, e.g. by adding directives like index index.txt; (for Nginx).⁵
2. An index page listing posts by date and URL. Most browser won’t render these as “links” so users will have to copy-paste or re-type them, so let’s keep them short,
3. Pages for each post at those URLs, presumably without any kind of “title” (just to prove a point), and
4. An RSS feed: usually I use RSS as shorthand for all feed types, but this time I really do mean RSS and not e.g. Atom because RSS, strangely, doesn’t require that an <item> has a <title>!

I’ve implemented it! it’s at textplain.blog.

In the end I decided it’d benefit from being automated as sort-of a basic flat-file CMS, so I wrote it in PHP. All requests are routed by the webserver to the program, which determines whether they’re a request for the homepage, the RSS feed, or a valid individual post, and responds accordingly.

It annoys me that feed discovery doesn’t work nicely when using a Link: header, at least not in any reader I tried. But apart from that, it seems pretty solid, despite its limitations. Is this, perhaps, an argument for my .well-known/feeds proposal?

Anyway, I’ve open-sourced the entire thing in case it’s of any use to anybody at all, which is admittedly unlikely! Here’s the code.