The first time I wrote HTML code it was by hand, on paper, on a break working night shift as an RT.
I was left to imagine what the resulting code would look like.
But once I entered it into a computer at the UCLA Extension computer labs I could see it! It was amazing. Most of the work I’ve done was about making web pages communicate visually.
I learned later that parts of an HTML page are INVISIBLE.
I remember reading RFC 2731 in 1999. And I remember adding code to web pages to define authorship information:
<meta name="DC.Creator" content = "Crawford, Joe">
Why add something invisible? I did it for some audience: in the case of a Dublin Core Creator tag because I think the now defunct Altavista search engine recommended adding such tags. I did this for myself, I did this for clients, for employers and submitted my sites for crawling.
Accessibility for readers who are blind requires invisible code. I remember well cajoling designers to add ALT attributes to IMG tags.
Over the years I used many tools to make the invisible visible: HTML validators, WCAG checkers and others.
Open Graph metadata is an open standard launched by Facebook. It was released in 2010 and soon thereafter I created a WordPress plugin to add such metadata. Over the years it’s had improvements but it continues to do the required: it adds metadata that will be parsed to figure out how to display a web page preview when it’s shared to Facebook. To test whether the code works Facebook provides a tool at developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ which makes the invisible, visible.
On the indieweb we have similar kind of tools to check for how a page might be repurposed, mentioned, linked to: IndieWebify.me is an excellent tool for making that invisible code visible. It is a tool I used a few weeks ago to doublecheck the invisible code for indieweb on my site for hCard and hEntry.
Open Graph Publishing was a session at IndieWebCamp San Diego 2023 was a great and rich conversation about Open Graph and led to great conversations about different metadata. I have a goal to check out and help improve the functionality of the IndieWebify.me to improve it – the one that appeals to me is to add link previews. Because the code is in PHP I have a chance to be productive.
