Free Software, Standards, and Open Data

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 28, 2026

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Bob Monsour ☛ On not minifying CSS & JS (part 2)

    It was as long ago as yesterday when I wrote about how I had decided to not minify the CSS and JS bundles for the 11ty Bundle website. As stated in the update, the issue that was causing my long build times was not the minifying itself, but rather the way I had configured the CSS and JS bundling in the base layout file. This meant that for every page of the site, the CSS and JS bundles were being re-bundled and minified, leading to excessive build times. Eliminating the minification step dramatically reduced the build time.

    That said, what I was left with was the bundling process happening for every page, though it is far less expensive. This did not sit totally right with me and some members of the 11ty Discord community suggested that I look at configuring the bundling outside of the base layout file so that the bundling only happens once per build, rather than once per page.

    And so, here we are and here's how I've done exactly that.

• GNU Projects

  • LWN ☛ The GNU C Library is moving from Sourceware [Ed: IBM outsourcing to GAFAM]

    GNU C Library maintainer Carlos O'Donell has announced

    that the project will be moving its core services away from Sourceware in favor of services hosted

    at the 'Linux' Foundation.

• Licensing / Legal

  • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: GPL-compliant reasonable legal notices and author attributions

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ nycOpenData: A unified R interface to NYC Open Data APIs

      I am pleased to announce the release of nycOpenData, an R package providing convenient, tidy access to dozens of datasets from the New York City Open Data platform.

      The package is designed as part of an open-science and reproducible-research effort, with the goal of lowering the friction between public data and statistical analysis—especially for teaching, exploratory research, and applied civic work.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Eric Bailey ☛ How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app

      This is another window into the sometimes unglamorous-yet-vital tasks that being an accessibility designer demands.

      Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design. Most websites don’t have them, and that’s totally fine. However, it makes more sense for web apps to utilize them.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Runxi Yu ☛ It is incorrect to “normalize” // in HTTP URL paths

    Collapsing // to / inside an HTTP URL path is not normalization.

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ An anecdote about backward compatibility

    A long time ago I worked on a debugger program that our company used to debug software that it sold that ran on IBM System 370. We had IBM 3270 CRT terminals that could display (I think) eight colors (if you count black), but the debugger display was only in black and white. I thought I might be able to make it a little more usable by highlighting important items in color.

    I knew that the debugger used a macro called WRTERM to write text to the terminal, and I thought maybe the description of this macro in the manual might provide some hint about how to write colored text.