varx @varx@infosec.exchange

What are the the most important things that you feel are missing from a plain-text world? For me, it would be:

- Image or file embedding
- Code blocks (block and inline)
- Maybe links, since autolinkers suck

As a sighted person, I can *mostly* get away with not having emphasis tags, blockquotes, headings, and lists since I can just use indentation and ** «» # - characters, but I'm sure those create problems for screenreaders, so throw those in as well.

What are the other essentials?

Does anyone know the reasoning behind the <p> vs. <br> distinction in HTML?

(I understand how to use them, but I'm having trouble coming up with a good explanation for *why* HTML has this design choice.)

The second map now has keybindings for both phone and keyboard, as described on the About page: https://lab.brainonfire.net/classicmap/about.html

It might be nice to add "one last tweak", which is to keep the old tiles in place until the new ones have loaded, and to pre-zoom them to create a progressive-refinement look. (This, again, was a property of the original Google Maps.)

First pass on a social semantic markup language:

https://gitlab.com/timmc/cavern/-/blob/master/doc/ideas.md#social-semantic-markup-language

Goals:

- Does not prescribe consistent rendering across clients
- Actively discourages use of semantic tags for formatting
- Easy to write (but expect most users to use a graphical interface)
- Easy to parse
- Can be displayed to users that *don't* have a graphical interface
- Room for evolution and, conversely, graceful fallback when a client doesn't understand a newer tag

Would love to hear feedback.

I'm tempted to make the first map support query parameters, server-side HTML generation, and therefore JS-less navigation, but this is good enough for my needs at the moment, since the phone *does* have JS.

OK, fixed the main issues! It uses 4 tiles and offsets them as appropriate, uses 1/3 panning steps, and has more compact controls designed *precisely* for my phone's screen size, heh.

I also ended up writing another version that fills the screen and has overlaid controls, like the original Google Maps: https://lab.brainonfire.net/classicmap/

It's barely functional and has huge usability issues such as "rounding errors" (zooms to/from upper left, sort of) and overly large navigation steps, but this isn't supposed to be pleasant to use -- it's supposed to get me un-lost if I've screwed up.

This morning's project: An interactive map web page that works on my "dumb smartphone":

https://lab.brainonfire.net/minimap/

(It uses old-ass Javascript that the seven year old embedded Android browser can understand. Most of the web doesn't work, which is fine by me.)

@BirdsiteLIVE Question about birdsite.live -- you use the adjective "ethical" in a few places to describe it, but I don't understand why. Can you enlighten me?

Anyone else seen weird behavior from the first.org CVSS calculator?

Here, load this up: https://www.first.org/cvss/calculator/3.1#CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N/CR:H/IR:H

Then drop the Integrity Requirement down from high to medium to low and watch the environmental score *rise*.

For comparison: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln-metrics/cvss/v3-calculator?vector=AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N/CR:H/IR:H/AR:H/MAV:X/MAC:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MS:X/MC:X/MI:X/MA:X&version=3.1