iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 02/05/2026

@orionreed.com distills a bunch of the learnings we've been exploring in @folkjs.org over the last 2 years and how its being applied to @inkandswitch.com's Patchwork www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/no...

inkandswitch.com

Breadboard

Making the invisible seen

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 02/05/2026

The nascent HTML-in-Canvas API is exciting to me not because of flashy effects, but because it extends the semantics that the DOM can (tractably) represent — as a tiny example, it's possible to show an element in multiple places, cheaply, under arbitrary transforms. folkjs.org/demos/html-i...

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Saleh @mskayyali.com · 23/04/2026

New video on Interface Studies: The Happy Path Doesn't Exist: Notes on Software Fluidity youtu.be/VzjvBYaGHgA

youtu.be

The Happy Path Doesn't Exist: Notes on Software Fluidity

YouTube video by Interface Studies

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 26/02/2026

Wrote a mini-essay, "Digital Topology & Economic Power", on how the file went from a site of user agency to one of enclosure — through proprietary formats, data internalization, then the cloud. Each step bundling real gains with a quiet transfer of power. www.orionreed.com/posts/app-fi...

orionreed.com

Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, ...

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Orion Reed @orionreed.com · 16/02/2026

What are your favorite visual critiques of software? On my mind right now are: 1. "The long tail of user needs" 2. diSessa's monolithic apps vs computational media 3. (a recent favorite by @todepond.com) "wish these apps could talk to each other"

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 10/02/2026

collaborative HTML spreadsheets

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JauntyWunderKind @jauntywunderkind.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

It's so so wild what a weird universal man machine interface the world has actually gotten: ARIA tags in DOM. And it should come as little surprise (given the engineers inability to abstract their own universal communication protocols) that it becomes the #m2m system too.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 09/10/2025

contrarian bet: html-first sync engine bsky.app/profile/chri...

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 21/10/2025

What would it look like if accessibility infrastructure became the foundation of malleable computing? Here's a demo by @orionreed.com that adversarially adds find and replace functionality to a hermetically sealed messaging app.

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 01/09/2025

Our paper called “Live Programming in Hostile Territory”, was accepted by the LIVE 2025 workshop (liveprog.org)! It’s the first paper we’ve both written, so we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. folkjs.org/live-2025/

The abstract of the paper:
“Live programming research gravitates towards the creation of isolated environments whose success is measured by domination: achieving adoption by displacing rather than integrating with existing tools and practices. To counter this tendency, we advocate that live programming research broaden its purview from the creation of new environments to the augmenting of existing ones and, through a selection of prototypes, explore three adversarial strategies for introducing programmatic capabilities into existing environments which are unfriendly or antagonistic to modification. We discuss how these strategies might promote more pluralistic futures and avoid aggregation into siloed platforms.”

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Patrick Dubroy @dubroy.com · 13/08/2025

Really enjoyed "Live Programming in Hostile Territory" by @chrisshank.com and @orionreed.com: folkjs.org/live-2025/ They are doing some great stuff with @folkjs.org, y'all should check it out.

We believe free addressability—a term we adopt from Basman et al. 8—is key to enabling outward-facing integration and moving beyond success-by-domination strategies. Free addressability embraces transparent, publicly addressable state through queries, selectors, names, or other mechanisms that make parts of a running system targetable from the outside without requiring permission or coordination from the original creators, seeking to "maximally advertise the structure of the application via a transparent addressing scheme" 8.

Our adversarial strategies exploit the fact that user interfaces often expose more addressable surfaces than the underlying program—through DOM elements, accessibility trees, and visual components. This disparity creates crucial leverage points for live programming interventions, allowing us to exploit addressability where it exists and demonstrating where additional addressability would be beneficial. These addressable surfaces provide the basis for working in hostile territory by offering ways to situate live programming capabilities within environments that were never designed to accommodate them.

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 08/08/2025

I quite like the framing that my research explores what HTML6 would look like if HTML had computational media instead of limiting itself to just being hypermedia. Check out what that looks like in our latest research notes for @folkjs.org!

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 08/08/2025

Notes from the Lab - June & July 2025 github.com/folk-js/folk... A packed month of explorations, we wrote a paper, DOM sync, Desktop Interlay, DOM interactions and instruments, HTML pipes, HTML attributes for syntax highlighting, LSPs, and reordering lists, and much more!

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 08/08/2025

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𝕮 @chrisshank.com · 08/08/2025

some thoughts on browser metaphors and the same-origin paradigm! 🧶

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 16/07/2025

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 [Better late than never!] github.com/folk-js/folk... Adversarial malleability was on our mind this month... canvasifying web pages, network indications, peer presence on any web page, and much more.

github.com

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 · folk-js folkjs · Discussion #39

This month is all about adversarial malleability and ways to do this on the web! Orion's Talk on "User Agency in Other People's Websites" Recently Orion gave a talk at J On The Beach summarized as:...

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 16/07/2025

github.com

Notes from the Lab - May 2025 · folk-js folkjs · Discussion #39

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 13/05/2025

Our sponsorship page is live! Your support helps keeps our research open source, permissively licensed, and actively maintained! Our goal is to be able to work on this research full-time and, if possible, sponsor future collaborators! github.com/sponsors/fol...

github.com

Sponsor @folk-js on GitHub Sponsors

folkjs is a research lab by Orion Reed and Chris Shank exploring radically different directions that we can interface with the web.

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 11/05/2025

Notes from the Lab - April 2025 A new name, sponsorships, and explored a bunch of explorations trying making the web a more editable medium! github.com/folk-js/folk...

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folkjs @folkjs.org · 31/03/2025

Notes from the Lab - March 2025 Custom HTML attributes, space transforms, peer-to-peer WebRTC + DOM sync, and much more! github.com/folk-systems...

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