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Facebook's Instant Articles does NOT help the Open Web

Nor the #Indieweb which is the term that I prefer.

I enjoy reading Dave Winer's blog posts that are related to blogging and other technology. I don't have to agree with him all the time.

Two recent DW posts:

I think that Instant Articles only works when viewing Facebook on the phone.

I tested this last spring when Facebook made the initial announcement, and NatGeo had their bee article in IA format. I think that was the reason why I installed the Facebook app on my phone. I have since deleted the app.

Facebook's Instant Articles feature does not work when viewing Facebook with a web browser on a desktop/laptop. And IA does not work when using a mobile web browser.

IA only works when using a mobile app on a phone. I'm unsure about a tablet.

A native app is not the open web.

The web and the internet are not the same. The internet is the network, and the web is one of the many "programs" or protocols that use the internet.

The internet is the highway. The web is one of the automobiles, riding on the highway.

A native app uses the internet. The web uses the internet.

My May 2015 post about IA:

http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/blogpost/54151/18May2015/Facebook-Instant-Articles-May-2015

Instant Articles is only a mobile app.

More Instant Articles :

When viewing those IA links within a desktop/laptop web browser or a phone web browser, the info gets displayed like a normal article post. Nothing special happens. When clicked, I'm taken to the publisher's website.

An internet-based native mobile app is required to view Instant Articles. This is not the open web.

I read the contents of DW's "normal" RSS feed within JotHut by using this site's feed command

Scripting News - 2026-03-02T16:11:00Z

- 2026-03-02T15:03:13Z
Very happy to welcome my old friend, John Palfrey, back to the web. I added his feed to my blogroll on scripting.com. His first new piece is about his experience at the AI Action Summit in February, in Delhi. He was executive director at Berkman when I was there in the early 00s. It feels like the old band is getting back together. ;-)

I tuned into the Fediforum - 2026-03-02T16:11:00Z

I like the way they organized it.

They asked for "position papers," and chose a set of them to be presented.

Inbetween, they had a set of "tables" where six people could join and have a conversation.

It wasn't boring. And that's the first requirement for a conference.

- 2026-03-01T17:33:57Z
If you followed me on Twitter, please follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon. As far as I'm concerned Twitter is gone. Not because I'm religious about this stuff, but my account got hijacked and I can't get it back, so let's close that chapter. It was a great innovative product that also held back progress on the web for 20 years, and it made some people I knew a long time ago fabulously rich, and it would have been nice of them to not do this to us, but what the f, it is what it is. One more thing, guys -- pay your taxes.

- 2026-03-01T15:35:30Z
A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you're not careful it'll quickly start giving you orders.

opmlProjectEditor format - 2026-03-01T14:33:12Z

Some time in 2013 I started editing all my JavaScript projects in the Frontier outliner, and in doing so I designed a format that could contain a whole project. And it worked, I continued building it, and to this day I edit all my projects in this format. It does a lot of work for me automatically, making it possible for me to build more complex stuff.

It turns out you can put a lot of code into an outline on today's computers. The outliner in Frontier was designed to perform well on a 1990 Macintosh with 1MB of memory, so you have to do a lot of writing to overload it.

I am doing a project with Claude.ai which I'm editing of course in OPE format. So I had to teach it how they work so I could give it one of these files, and it would not only be able to understand it, it could make mods and send it back to me in the same format, and with the code more or less formatted the way I like (still working on that).

Yesterday we started the project. I asked Claude to document the format which I called opmlProjectEditor format, which I am now publishing for future reference by myself, other AI bots, and anyone else interested in this.

Here's a link to the opmlProjectEditor docs on GitHub.

I started a this.how page so I can add more links as this develops.

Every source.opml file in my projects on GitHub is in this format. Here's an example file in OPML, and here's a link that opens the file in Drummer to give you an idea what it's like to work in this format.

- 2026-03-01T14:11:59Z
Archive for Scripting News in February 2026, in OPML, as always.

The "desc" is optional. Without it, only the titles are displayed. Some publishers put the entire contents of their articles

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current date: Mar 2, 2026 - 2:58 p.m. EST