One thing I like about the indieweb, and trying as an individual to make a website that is accessible to groups up to and including mobile browsers, mouseless keyboard-only users, and people with javascript totally disabled, is that it really makes me think through and clarify my priorities for the space.

"W3 compliance check: set metadata" has been on my to-do list for this website for a long while, but I haven't been able to actually find a list from w3schools that says "this is the bare minimum you should ever set for your website". It just explains that <meta> tags contain machine-readable information about your website, and gives some examples focused around search engine optimization.

This blog welcomes cyborgs with open arms, but aside from declaring the language the page is written in, I haven't found much discussion of metadata that's useful for assistive technologies that aren't search engines. So... what kind of cyborgs are we accepting, via which roads? Am I actually trying to make the knowledge that my website exists at all more visible and accessible to people outside of the indie web bubble, or am I just trying to make sure that any kind of person who makes their way here has a nice time navigating it?

An interesting question! And one that led me to this fascinating 20 year-old criticism of standardized machine-readable metadata, or "metacrap", by Cory Doctorow. It peddles (sarcastically) in the language of laziness-as-negative-individual-failing that I don't really believe in, and I suspect Cory doesn't really either these days. But it's pretty fascinating to me because I have coworkers right now trying to get me on board with more or less exactly this kind of machine-readable-metadata-utopia, and even in 2001 there were politically incorrect internet humorists pointing out that no categorization schema is value-neutral, useful to all people forever, or objective.

And that includes, I guess, whoever at the w3 consortium would've put together the list of Most Important Metadata that I never found. It's all decisions made by people about what the web should look like, based on all those sneaky values they're carrying around.

So, since I'm in the business of having messy human thoughts here without trying to cram them into frameworked boxes, and I'm not really trying to summon google with my siren song of what I think people might get out of this site, I'm probably going to skip most of the <meta> tags. But maybe this can be a heads up to both of us that you should be specifying the "lang" attribute in your html tag for anybody using a screen-reader.

Interestingly, I've also found some newer pages from the early indie web reviving this concept. I pinched the title from one of them that hints at boring twitter beef I can almost hear. Another one is currently suggesting that the solution to the mostly-philosophical issues raised by the metacrap essay is to use little semantic HTML tags throughout the page that signal important pieces of information (separate from the semantic HTML5 tags for quantities, citations, dates, and the like, as well as the semantic XML flavors I'm passingly familiar with). Meanwhile, the actual conclusion of Cory's original post reads more like a nascent preview of the system the current categorization-averse, hyperlinks-only Zettelkasten/digital garden fanatics have settled on.

It certainly does feel more at home to me, but I'm also starting to feel like this is a pendulum quietly swinging back and forth every five years or so among people who get really into thinking about thinking. Is there a way out of this dichotomy altogether or just an eternal balancing act?