OPEN LETTER TO WEBMASTERS

I do not feel comfortable using Firefox or Chromium. Both of those
browsers are huge and are corporate spyware. In tests they send back
MASSIVE amounts of personal data and otherwise phone home. In addition
to that, those browsers do not have as strong as tracking protection or
audited code base and they are impossible to audit externally given how
large and fast their code base moves. [1][2] Try to git clone
chromium.git sometime. You will find yourself downloading over 18
gigabytes of code.

Those browsers, especially Firefox are incredibly difficult to bootstrap
and compile on many platforms due to it's Rust dependencies and poorly
written C++ code; Requiring many downstream fixes and porting before
they can be run by users such as myself.

In addition to that the web pseudo-standards you have chosen in your new
websites are not vendor neutral. They are made by WhatWG which consists
of mainly just google [7], front organizations that are 96% funded by
Google [3], and monopolistic anti-freedom anti-competition anti-open-web
corporations who push DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) into the
web via the pseudo-standards body WhatWG [4][5] causing the Electronic
Frontier Foundation to leave the W3C [5], which tongue-in-cheekily
just snapshots the Whatwg's HTML5. The WhatWG is not a independent
conflict of interest free standards body it is a "working group".

Websites relying on JavaScript features that are
only available in the latest version of these corporate spyware
browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox is harmful.

ECMA is bad design. "Let release a new "standard" every year" --
they are so disconnected from people actually implementing all of this.
Just because a committee approves it, doesn't mean it'll be adopted any
time soon, if at all.

A lot of these ""standards"" are probably done this way on purpose to
racketeer so nobody besides Google can implement them.

Please keep this in mind for future projects. What I would suggest is having
Graceful Degradation in your design like the previous websites had.
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Graceful_degradation_versus_progressive_enhancement

Please keep in mind that differently-abled people need to access your
website and many such people use browsers other than google chrome or
Firefox to do so, such as W3M and WB.

Please do not rely on features only available in the latest version of
ECMA. Please do use polyfills and graceful degradation. Please use
XHTML1.1 and XHTML1.1 BASIC wherever possible instead of HTML5. With
XHTML1.1 you actually can run an XML validation tool such as the one at
https://validator.w3.org/ and it will tell you if your site is valid
and will work on every browser or it's malformed. There is no
in-between with XHTML. It's either correct or it's not, unlike HTML. See
https://anybrowser.org/campaign/ for more information on this and
examples of more sites using XHTML.

Just a wild suggestion that I thought would be pretty cool. Could you
offer something in addition to a web interface like
a ssh based terminal interface? That would be easier to program and
very portable as well as comfortable to use and easy for people with
disabilities to interface with. Not everything has to be web. For some
reference telnet into bbs.dmine.net or ssh into
[email protected] or [email protected] sometime.

[1] https://www.spywarewatchdog.org/articles/chrome.html
[2] https://www.spywarewatchdog.org/articles/firefox.html
[3] https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html#finances
[4] https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
[5] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-
director-ceo-team-and-membership
[7] https://whatwg.org/sg-agreement

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