Highport orbital control
Tiles, from the outside
Much of what is docked here was built from a design somebody else published. Those are tiles, and this page is about what one can do while you read it, which turns out to be very little.
A tile is a finished design somebody built and published for other people to use. Anybody can take one, fill in their own name, their own words and their own pictures, and put the result at a domain they own. The author keeps the design. The person using it keeps what they wrote.
So a page you are looking at may have been assembled from a design somebody else published, and the layout under it may be the work of a person the owner has never met. That is ordinary here. It is still worth knowing exactly how far that arrangement goes, which is not very far.
Whose site it is
The site is the owner's. The person who made the tile has no access to it, cannot edit it, and cannot take it down. When somebody uses a tile they get the version it was at when they picked it, and it stays that way. Nothing the author does afterwards reaches them.
| The tile's author does this | What happens to a site already using it |
|---|---|
| Publishes a newer version of the design | Nothing. The site keeps serving the version its owner chose, until the owner decides to move |
| Deletes the tile entirely | Nothing. The site keeps working, and Highport keeps the files it needs |
| Wants to change what the site says | Not possible. There is no connection from the design back to the sites using it |
Why a stranger's design is safe to visit
Nothing on a site here runs on our servers, and a page served by Highport cannot load anything from another address. Those two facts are why a design by somebody you have never heard of is not a risk to open.
Every page is served under a security policy that Highport sets and a publisher cannot loosen: not through the tile, not through anything they upload, not through any setting. A page may ask for stricter rules than ours. It has no way to ask for weaker ones. The policy allows a page to talk to the address you are already on and to nowhere else. A tile you did not write cannot phone home, because nothing here can phone anywhere.
| A page here cannot | So |
|---|---|
| Contact any other address on the internet | No analytics, no tag manager, no "call home when somebody opens the page" |
| Load a script, a font or an image from somewhere else | Nothing arrives from a third party, so nothing third-party can watch you |
| Embed another site's page inside itself | What you see came from this site and only this site |
| Have a page built for you when you ask for it | There is no code running on our side. Everyone who opens a page here is sent the same files |
The last one is the one that surprises people. Highport does not run publisher code at all, neither the owner's nor the tile author's. A site is a set of files, checked when it was published and handed back unchanged.
A tile's own code does run in your browser, the way any web page's does. That part is ordinary. What is not ordinary is that it has nowhere to send anything and nowhere to fetch anything from. The policy itself, and the rest of what it fixes, are in Safety, and what cannot happen.
The tile browser
The list is at hub.highport.space/explore/tiles, under the heading Tile browser, and it holds every tile published here that is ready to use. No account, no sign-in, nothing to agree to.
Twenty to a page. Each entry carries the tile's name, an icon and a description when its author supplied them, and one line saying who made it. The pager says Page 3 and never page 3 of 9, because a list like this can say whether there is another page but never how many there are.
The line reading Made by shows a handle when that handle checks out against the account claiming it. When it does not, you get the account's own identifier, the string beginning did:. An identifier there is not a fault and not a warning. It usually means a handle changed recently, or a nameserver is having a bad minute.
If the listing cannot be loaded, the page says so, with The tile directory did not answer. It does not show you an empty list and let you conclude nothing exists. An empty list means the list is genuinely empty: Nothing on the board yet — no tiles have been published here.
A tile's own page
Each entry links to a page for that tile alone. It shows:
| Section | What is in it |
|---|---|
| What it is | The icon, the description, who made it, and, only when the tile is not ready to use, a short line saying so: Still loading its files, Missing files — not safe to use, or a single word such as Suspended |
| Parameters | A table of what the design asks the person using it to supply: the name of each thing, what kind of thing it is, whether it is required, and what it is for. A tile that asks for nothing says so |
| Sites using it | How many other people's sites are built from it, and, if you are signed in, which of your own |
| Technical details | Folded away unless you open it. The version identifiers, when it was indexed, how many files it holds and how large they are |
The parameters table is the most useful part if you are trying to work out what a tile actually does. It is the design's own list of everything it will ask you for.
Why there is no preview
The tile browser deliberately does not render the tile itself. Not in a frame, not as a thumbnail, not anywhere. A tile is somebody else's code, and the only place it runs is a site whose owner chose it.
To see one working, visit a site that uses it. hub.highport.space/explore/sites lists the addresses published here, and a site built from a tile names the one it was built from.
A tile is somebody's work, left on the board for anyone who wants it. Orbital Control keeps the list and has no opinion about which one you take.
If you want to use one
Every tile's page carries one action, Use this tile, and it asks you to sign in at that point and not before. It takes you to the screen for claiming an address. The tile is one you pick again in the editor once the address is yours.
Picking a tile, filling in what it asks for, and putting the result at your own domain is Using a tile on your site. What a tile is made of, how versions work, and how to build one are in Tiles.
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