Half a Decade
Half a Decade
Tianyu Fang, Kaloyan Kolev, The HTML Review and milestones
Dear reader
“Look, the moon,” demands Uno. The moon is rising in complete shape from behind the flat Athenian roofs. It resembles the sun. Before Uno was born, and before Ana and I lived together, we communicated with moon emoji, those with faces: One dark and one bright, always in that order. Two moons smiling at each other, circling in the digital space, and about to collide: Transforming two to one, and three.
“But where are the stars?” Uno continues. It is the blue hour, not yet dark. Questions about space make me dizzy, like walking the ridgeline of the sunken Santorini volcano: The cliffs are steep, the wind screams, and thousands of years ago, the Minoan settlement was destroyed in an eruption so brutal it left marks on Greenland and China.
Today, Santorini is plastered with white Cycladic houses. The shapes are soft and round, made by hand. Before they became white, they were earth-colored, made to blend in with the landscape, hiding themselves from pirates at sea, but in an attempt to stop a Cholera outbreak, a law was passed to whitewash all houses in the Cyclades. Eighty-five years later, they are picture postcards, symbols of Greece, and the domains of tourism.
“The stars are still there. You just can’t see them yet,” I answer Uno. We stand on the balcony. Uno calls our home “Grækenland doma,” combining the Danish word for Greece with the Slovene word for home. Uno feels at home here. When people ask him where he is from, he answers: “Greece.” In Greek, “doma” means roof or gift. It is a gift to write this newsletter. It is my internet shelter. As of this week, I have written it for five years: hundreds of editions, the stars of an urban night sky, or a watermelon full of seeds.
With care
Kristoffer
Wayside flowers
Love letters to places I’ll never meet.
Interdimensional void is a generative web class project.
Glyphs is a language maker tool.
Field notes
In 1985, the domain name system launched with six top-level domains (.com, .net, edu, .org, .gov, and .mil). It was intended as a practical system with no economic value. Fast forward to 2023, there are more than 1500 top-level domains and countries where domain sales revenue is measured in single-digits of total exports. It is business and politics, and Tianyu Fang covers it with width and depth.
The life and death of domain suffixes are products of revolutions, warfare, diplomacy, and displacement. They are born out of new regimes and die of political dissolutions. (…) The Yugoslavian extension officially retired in 2010; all existing domains were phased out. — Tianyu Fang
Dreams come true. When I read Tianyu’s article about domain names, I wished for Kalo to write a deep-dive about the .yu top-level domain, which was erased from the internet in 2010. And here it is! We forget that domains rely on human maintenance work and collaboration. Kalo’s article is as timely as ever.
With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments. — Kaloyan Kolev
Everyone should be aware that The HTML Review is now open for submissions.
The HTML Review, is officially open for submissions until Dec 1st for our third issue, which will come out in late March! We publish all sorts of poetic, narrative, and artistic experiments that utilize the web as a medium. In addition to completed work, we also welcome submissions of works-in-progress and pitched ideas. We pay $500 per contribution, and all contributors own their own work in perpetuity. To submit, send us an email with your pitch and a bit about yourself to submissions@thehtml.review
Collections
Last postcard was sent to 2483 inboxes. Currently, thirty-nine people support me with a voluntarily paid subscription. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Photograph by Ana Šantl.