This website is part of the HTML network experiment.
The HTML network or link network is created by connecting a webpage to another webpage with a rel=friend link.
The experiment is about building a JavaScript app that crawls and indexes web pages connected by rel=friend links,
providing local discovery without central coordination and with all processing taking place in the browser.
To participate one must sign up for web hosting or set up ones own server 1. The software is static HTML and a JavaScript client app running in the users' browsers.
1 Any HTML file serving web server will work, provided it can set CORS and CSP headers.
Individual HTML network nodes are static HTML webpages.
When a network node is added to the network by an existing network member, all the apps in the network will automatically begin to display updates to the new node in the app stream.
Updates can be HTML and CSS, images, video, or whatever one can come up with.
Webpages that contain HTML describe a local context of metadata and outgoing
rel=friend links besides body content and inline css.
All webpages are public, so any person who knows a webpage URL that is in a network can read that network and all future updates in it.
The system does provide some privacy. Since discovery happens without a search engines or other discovery services, webpages are not discoverable outside the network by default.
To publish to the HTML network one must allow the web to read ones HTML network webpage URLs by setting the
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * HTTP header2.
2 Maybe your hosting provider does this automatically. You can have many HTML network webpage URLs, but it's not recommended to set this header for your entire site.
Each update to a HTML network webpage overwrites the previous. Archiving happens in the client app.
Some documentation is available at /net.html. It is also possible to read the code. It's free software.
My HTML network URL is the index.html page on this website, where I test features of the app. The HTML code of those updates, and their history, is also a way to learn about what the app can do.
To try out the web app, go to the web app and follow a site with rel=friend links (e.g. https://lofihi.fi) to get started
(or click this link).
My name is Espen.
My PGP key has the following fingerprint:
ee41 0f69 7e87 760e 608d 8083 8a32 eeda 3e70 e82aThe index.html page is where I post updates and experiment with web app features.
I have a RSS feed that is like an archive of the index page.
There is also an actual archive of pages generated from the RSS file.
Sometimes I write longer texts about the local.html web app:
This website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. IP addresses and HTTP request metadata may be processed by the infrastructure provider as part of serving the website.
This website does not handle personal data beyond what is processed by infrastructure providers.
This website hosts a demo of the local.html link network app.
The app runs entirely in the browser. It processes data locally and does not transmit user data except when making requests to third-party sites.
There is a difference between the privacy characteristics of publishing and reading:
All content and relationships are based on publicly accessible URLs. As a result, relationships and activity may be observed by others with access to the same URLs.
Users may choose to publish or link to personal information. The system cannot prevent such disclosure.
If a CORS proxy is configured, that proxy has full visibility into all fetched content and requests made through that proxy.