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The medium with which you choose to express a message shapes that message — be careful it doesn’t contradict it.

Case in point: A Rational Web Platform (via @brucel)

  • hosted on google silo
  • long complex ugly URL
  • presentation tied to paged dead-tree media with ugly results: text breaks across artificial “pages”
  • no author URL, just corporate silo email, and email != web
  • javascript required
  • no microformats2 or even semantic HTML article markup — even js-generated markup is predictably disgusting with vast quantities of nested divs and spans with inline styles
  • Redirecting to different (non-canonical? difficult to tell due to ugliness) URL due to large amounts of traffic, likely indicative of infrastructural problems or incorrect medium
  • Broken on mobile devices:
    the body text is tiny and does not wrap, the high-traffic warning is truncated and unreadable

Everything about this is anti-web, practically screaming “ignore me”.

Improvements:

  • Host on personal site or project commons with CC license
  • Short, consistent, readable URI
  • Static semantic HTML with microformats2 h-entry for easy citations, archival and replying, no JS required — this would also solve infrastructural problems as HTML is pretty easy to serve and much faster than JS-rendered DOM-heavy “documents”applications
  • Author attributed by name+personal (non-silo) URL, with profile photo/logo for quick human association
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