April 2023
An Internet Canvas
An Internet Canvas
Wouldn’t you want a digital medium with the expressive ease of paper?
paper.mmm.dev
Websites are the most expressive medium I know, but they’re used today in such a tiny narrow way.
The thing is, they could be like digital paper: back-of-napkin notes, moodboards, journaling, letters, toy apps, lists, sprawling canvases.
Something with the ease of paper, but the expressiveness and capabilities of software.
Here are a few ideals…
1
Intuitive as paper. It shouldn’t require a manual or tutorial. Poke around. No coding knowledge required.
2
Genuinely mixed media. Add anything you want: images, text, videos. Embed services too: maps, music, IDEs, iFrames of other websites. Even draw directly on it.
🥹
3
Easy to reference. The URL is the pointer. Short and memorable. Let people name pages within their namespace so it becomes a portable handle.
“Why are you spending so much time making a website builder?”
“Uh… well, I put some thoughts down at notes.mmm.page/paper”
4
Flexible for any use. It should feel natural for a wide variety of uses. The medium itself shouldn’t imply any use. E.g., the same 8.5”×11” can be a handwritten note, or a flyer, or scratch paper.
5
Preservable and lasting. Serious art requires serious labor, but why spend years on something if it’s not guaranteed to last? Link rot, dead embeds, broken dependencies, etc.
Ideal: ability to export the entire file as a single .html. Inline styles, scripts, images, assets, even localized copies of tweets, YouTube videos, etc. And it needs to be easy to do so, not just possible.
Also, don’t invent a new set of protocols. Rely on web technologies: imperfect, but inertial.
"PICO-8 cartridges can be saved in a special .png format and sent directly to other users."
6
Interactive and dynamic. Every block has properties. A small library that handles reactive state. Script using Javascript with live reloading.
Something like a Flash/HyperCard/Visual Basic lite. Easier said than done, of course.
+
Let people pop the hood. Peek underneath. Shouldn’t you be able to “view source” and see how websites are made? Like this page itself?
Like this spur-of-the-moment moodboard?
Anyway.
Right now I’m translating these loosey-goosey ideals into real tools that are fun to use, feel good, & create the conditions for people to make internet canvases. As it turns out, it’s a lot of work…
Feel free to reach out if you have ideas.
P.S. Sorry if this page downloads too many files. I haven’t gotten around to the performance/bundle optimization part of the project yet…