Web

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Restore dead websites that don't exist anymore: Archivarix
Luigi Canali De Rossi, Robin Good, 2019/04/11
While the Internet Archive (IA) is a great service, it's not really meant for day-to-day use. It's an archive, not a production website. If you want to restore a site from the archived copy, that can be a lot of work, since IA changes all the links and adds a header. Archivarix acts like a reverse archiver - it extracts the site from IA, cleans it up, and presents it to you in a zip file ready for mounting on a web server where it can resume its former life as a real web site. It won't be perfect - things IA couldn't harvest, like CGI scripts and some background files, will not work. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Who is going to help build a pro-social web?
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2019/04/08
Dave Cormier calls on all of use to help build a better internet. "Please participate. Do it well. Put your values on the internet. Our society is literally being shaped by the internet right now, and will be for the foreseeable future." I'm all for that. But as I commented: " No amount of human posting will be sufficient to counter bot-driven (or mechanical-turk-driven) counter-content. No amount of careful contributions will turn off the surveillance and targeted advertising". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The People's Web
Anil Dash, 2019/12/27
"We don't have to imagine what that more human, more expressive, more valuable web could look like," writes Anil Dash. "We just have to pay attention to the fact that we visit it every day." He cites examples like IMDB, Wikipedia, Snopes and Stack Overflow, and his focus is on "massive, collectively-maintained, curated and organized libraries of communal culture," but I think the vast network of individual web sites (like my own!) are what make these collections possible (just as one of our MOOCs wouldn't exist without all the individual contributions). More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Web 2.0 Technologies Supporting Problem-Based Learning: A Systematic Literature Review
Erhan Ünal, Journal of Problem Based Learning in Higher Education, 2019/12/24
The more I see systematic literature reviews, the less reliable I think they are. In the current case (26 page PDF), the author surveys the literature between the years 2004-2018 to find articles investigating the use of web 2.0 technology in problem-based learning (PBL) and finds only 18 articles to include in the review, the vast majority of which use the wiki in PBL. It's hard to believe that the academic record on this topic is so sparse, even if the selection is limited to "only high quality peer-reviewed published articles". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Using Chrome as a Local Web Server
Justin Mathews, Medium, 2020/01/17
I'm setting up a new machine in the office, which includes installing browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, etc). Normally when I install Chrome, I get the browser and that's it. But this time, for whatever reason, I also got the 'Web Server for Chrome'. You can also get it on the Chrome web store. First of all, it just works. Click on the icon, select a starting directory, enter http://127.0.0.1:8887 into your browser, and view your files. It can also act as a network web server, or it can try to acquire an internet address, so you can access it remotely. What the indieweb needs is a quick way to set up a personal web server. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Truly Reusable Design Systems in Practice: Web Components
Ilya Lyamkin, HackerNoon, 2020/01/17
Web development over the last few years has been dominated by frameworks like jQuery, Angular and React. We're now moving into the next phase of web development: web components. This article is an introduction, giving an overview and then a rationale, then diving into a toolchain called StencilJS. Here's another intro, again with a fair bit of technical detail. Here's an intro slide deck. Here's a whole set of bookmarks. Here's a toolset called Smart. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. EducationalOccupationalCredential
Schema.org, 2019/04/02
Phil Barker writes, "schema.org v 3.5 is now released, with EducationalOccupationalCredential 'proposed for full integration into Schema.org, pending implementation feedback and adoption from applications and websites'." The specification is pretty minimal, with 90% of it being imported from CreativeWork and from Thing. Note the uses described: "educational background needed for the position or occupation; a description of the qualification, award, certificate, diploma or other educational credential awarded as a consequence of successful completion of this course; or specific qualifications required for a role or occupation. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Embed Flickr Notes In Other Web Pages!
Some people - like Alan Levine - love Flickr notes. "In Flickr, we can add notes on a photo to explan details of it. This scriptlet can display not only your flickr photo in your web pages or blog articles, but also the notes you made on it. In other words, you can embed a flickr photo with its notes in your own website." me, I'm less enamoured - I find the note popups to be clumsy and inelegant, and they needlessly cover the very thing I want to be looking at. Still, the idea of embedding content within content is inherently cool. More...