Where is the sky of a website?

[Melooon]

Everything has an up and a down, everything has an under and an over, and there is always a place that you come from and go to

So is the sky of a website at the top of the page (with the ground in the footer)? Or are you in the sky looking down onto the site like a bird looking onto the earth? Or is the site the sky itself and visiting it is like looking up at the clouds?

Are websites skies that we look into and away from our world? Or the other way around? Or are they equal to us, sharing the same horizontal horizon we see when we look out over a sea?

And vice vera is code the underworld watching us, or are we the underworld looking into our browsers?     

[Dibs]

I propose another framework, as someone often dealing with things that do not in fact have ups and downs (space):

The main body is the ecliptic plane, the header and footer the stars clinging on, the taskbar and tabs the glimpses into the gas filaments between galaxies. The code is the dark matter which allows websites to self-gravitate and to collide with each other, all while being invisible to those not trained to spot it...

[wygolvillage]

I think of the "whitespace" (or any empty space) as the "sky". All the actual content of the site is the "land". To me, at least!

[schiavona]

I may have played way too many side-scrolling platformers in my day, but I kind of see the sky of a webpage to be the background, and the ground to be the foreground. It's interesting to think about.

[kurohaato]

A site to me is like a sub sandwich. The site itself is the bread you see and taste first, and the code is all the tasty fillings you put in to make it special. I guess with this view the sky would be the wrapper! A little atmosphere to keep your sandwich fresh that is all around the site in every direction.

Outgoing links are the little bit of olive that somehow landed in the lettuce.

If you expand it out further it means that the infinite void of (cyber)space is a sandwich shop. Would that make every webmaster our own little sun, with the sandwiches our planets? If you have a ton of sites, would that be a solar system? Or are you just a sandwich shop regular? And if we're ordering the sandwiches, who's running the register? Should I stop asking questions before my analogy breaks down? All I know is that this post makes me want a sandwich.

[Memory]

No sky in sight. All websites are holes with only one direction: Downwards. Like rabbitholes? The deeper you dig, the more mysterious material appears.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Your mention about always having a place to go to and come from resonates with me. It makes me think of my homepage, whether it's custom built or a search engine, or the place where I work etc., as the land. That would make the greater "cyberspace," "internet" or "cloud" the sky, and visiting a page is like coming to land somewhere else. I dunno, maybe that's too literal, but it fits the way I see it in my head.

[Melooon]

These are all really interesting interpretations! Thank you for posting them! It's fun to see how some people see the web as tunnels, or islands in the sky, or sandwiches apparently?! 

Skys have other meanings too since the sky is the edge of our world, you could say it's the end of our world (if you're flying up) - so it's intriguing to think about how your different interpretations of the sky could also be different ideas of where a website begins and ends too 

[tertiaryapocalypse]

to me the sky of a website is it's background! the text, the content, everything above that is like clouds or stars which drift across it

as an extension of that, the web itself is like the universe to me. individual websites are planets to themselves, and we're travelling through it in our own little space shuttles. when we visit specific sites we're 'on the ground', and things like search algorithms or link pages, anything meant as a directory, are transit centers!

[tarraxahum]

Allow me to throw another metaphor into the pot: to me websites are kinda like buildings I enter and look around (and personal websites are like people's homes? mine certainly is to me). So the sky would be... in the nebulous assumed space out of bounds of my screen, I guess.

Or, better yet, on my starting screen/search results page/neocities list/bookmarks and other spaces which serve as streets from which I choose to enter. The background of them, I'd say.

Now, a ceiling or a roof of the website is, to me, the top of the page, under which everything else is located 

[Onio]

I've played too many top-down games growing up, so I'd be inclined see the whole page as "ground" - as if I have a bird's eye view. Alternatively, the background is the sky.

[Nikodile]

Or are you in the sky looking down onto the site like a bird looking onto the earth?

I've always seen it like this to be honest. I see websites as a top-down kind of dimension where you're peering into.

[Paprika]

I see websites as planets. The areas of the site are the continents and I'm like a passing by satellite looking down at those tiny, surprising planets. In my mind they"re small balls floating in space and I travel among them while browsing.

[PurpleHello98]

I like the metaphor of the site as a house. Each page is like a different room in the house, and sometimes they all have a common paint colour or sometimes they all have different aesthetics. Either way, they each have their take on their particular purpose. A home is also a place where a person lives and which they customize to suit them; a personal site is the same, I believe.

I'm also a fan of the metaphor of a site as a portrait, as I talk about in my Thoughts on Neocities essay on my site. I could develop it more (and may later) but right now it's late and I'm too tired!

[Melooon]

I can see this has not been posted yet (I wondered if any of the workshop people would do it), but I REALLY wanna share there here! So I will!

When I was in Brussels at a web workshop, I shared this thread with the group there, and they converted it into a whole web narrative-less story, including peoples responses!

I think its a really beautiful way to explore the thread and I hope you enjoy it!       

https://tell.declarations.style/skies/

Id love to hear how people feel about it and how their posts were represented!