demos & docs
is a website being built to help everyone build her/his/their own web applications (web apps). To make it simple to create a web app, as it always should have been— so simple that practically anyone can do it— very unique technology is being developed and premiered on this website. Let’s repeat that. We’re not just talking about creating websites. There are plenty of easy to use services for that. We’re talking about full-fledged web apps. While the definition of web app is not clear cut, what we mean by it is a highly interactive web-based application, not just a few web pages that query databases hidden behind web servers.
We hope that Mashweb.club and its technology will empower many people who understand the importance of the IndieWeb movement and its important principle, POSSE— Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The IndieWeb and POSSE will help to foster educated democracy, common ground, and shared perspective, which are being destroyed by the influence of the corporate algorithms of social media and web search engines. For further reading, read “Why Indie Web” and “How to decentralize social media”.
Mashweb.club is in its pre-alpha stage of development. Zen is a major part of its development plan; Zen is the name of the unique technology being developed for Mashweb.club. Zen’s purpose will be to enable the evolution of websites and web applications in a profoundly personal, easy, and adaptable way. The source code of various prototypes of Zen will be migrated onto Mashweb.club and will be made available in the Mashweb.club code repository. As of now, the best documentation on Zen can be found in its white paper.
The demos & docs section of Mashweb.club has a few experimental prototypes of some user interfaces that might be used by Mashweb.club when the website’s unique technology is finally realized. It also presents some of the inspirations behind the prototypes:
a demo of a unique capability being developed for Mashweb.club: sequential programming of a web app,
a very simple demonstration that the blocks making up a web page can be manipulated by simply sliding them,
a prototype of the same demo installed in the web browser to manipulate a Facebook page,
the inspiration behind the block-sliding demo,
a more freeform demo to explore the issues that crop up when designing a user interface to move any block on a page,
an exploration of cursors to explore the hints about the functions of a user interface that they can give the user,
a very simple and limited demo of repositioning an inline block,
a prototype of element highlighting, and
a prototype of element highlighting showing what it might look like if all web page elements were showed distinctly.