MySpace, Soundcloud, etc..
A place where artists and consumers could freely communicated and socialize without hazzle.
Died because of: Stupidity, commercialisation and walled-gardening.
Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
441–450 of 912 posts
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#442- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…
I love this mismatched list of grievances and I find myself agreeing with most of them. XHTML and proper CPU hypervisors in particular. People being too lazy to close the tag was apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem. Modern HTML is a cesspool. I would hate to have to write a parser that's tolerant enough to deal with all the garbage people throw at it. Is that part of the reason why we have so few browsers?
> People being too lazy to close the tag was apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem.
Your chronology is waaaaaaaaaaaay off.
came years before XML was invented. It was a tag that didn’t permit children, so writing it
would have been crazy, and inventing a new syntax like would have been crazy too. Spelling it
was the obvious and reasonable choice.
The or
spelling was added to HTML after XHTML had already basically lost, as a compatibility measure for porting back to HTML, since those enthusiastic about XHTML had taken to writing it and it was nice having a compatible spelling that did the same in both. (In XHTML you could also write
, but that was incorrect in HTML; and if you wrote in HTML it was equivalent to , giving you one attribute with name "/" and value "". There were a few growing pains there, such as how used to mean —it was actually the attribute name that was being omitted, not the value!—except… oh why am I even writing this, messy messy history stuff, engines doing their own thing blah blah blah, these days it’s .
Really, the whole thing is more an artefact of an arguably-misguided idea after a failed reform. The absolute mayhem came first, not last.
> I would hate to have to write a parser that's tolerant enough to deal with all the garbage people throw at it.
The HTML parser is magnificent, by far the best spec for something reasonably-sized that I know of. It’s exhaustively defined in terms of state machines. It’s huge, far larger than one would like it to be because of all this compatibility stuff, but genuinely easy to implement if you have the patience. Seriously, go read it some time, it’s really quite approachable.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you forget a closing quote on an attribute in html, all content until next quote is ignored and not rendered - even if it is the rest of the page. I dont think this is more helpful than an error message. It was just simpler to implement.
Let's say you forget to close a element. What happens? Even today, after years of better error messages, the strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says: Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified What is line 22? It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag. Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this…
You can have catastrophic parsing errors with the “lax” HTML too. For instance:
…
Important: Do come into the office tomorrow!
…
Important: Do NOT come into the office tomorrow!
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm still amused that they killed Google Notebook and then a few years later created Google Keep, an application with basically the same exact feature set.
You can say that for a fair few of the services mentioned by GP. Google killed a lot of things to consolidate them into more "integrated" (from their perspective) product offerings. Picasa -> Photos, Hangounts -> Meet, Music -> YT Premium. No idea what NFC Wallet was, other than the Wallet app on my phone that still exists and works? The only one I'm not sure about is Chromecast - a while back my ones had an "update"…
They stopped making the Chromecast hardware
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love this mismatched list of grievances and I find myself agreeing with most of them. XHTML and proper CPU hypervisors in particular. People being too lazy to close the tag was apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem. Modern HTML is a cesspool. I would hate to have to write a parser that's tolerant enough to deal with all the garbage people throw at it. Is that part of the reason why we have so few browsers?
> People being too lazy to close the tag was apparently a gateway drug into absolute mayhem. Your chronology is waaaaaaaaaaaay off. came years before XML was invented. It was a tag that didn’t permit children, so writing it would have been crazy, and inventing a new syntax like would have been crazy too. Spelling it was the obvious and reasonable choice. The or spelling was added to HTML after XHTML had already basic…
> The or
spelling was added to HTML after XHTML had already basically lost
spelling was added to HTML after XHTML had already basically lost
This is untrue. This is the first public draft of XHTML from 1998:
> Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. , and .
— https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-html-in-xml-19981205/#guidelin...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#446Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#447Namecoin and Decentralized DNS.
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#448Vine. It was already pretty big back in 2013 but Twitter had no idea what to do with it. TikTok actually launched just a few months before Vine was shut down and erased from the internet.
Whoever took the decision to kill Vine was an absolute moron, even without hindsight. It was square videos, how hard could it have been to shove an ads banner above it and call it a day? Incredible
There's an excellent write up at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/28/extreme...
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but what would be the benefit of having more pages fail to render? I think those benefits are quite similar to having more programs failing to run (due to static and strong typing, other static analysis, and/or elimination of undefined behavior, for instance), or more data failing to be read (due to integrity checks and simply strict parsing): as a user, you get documents closer to valid ones (at least in the rough…
Sure, authoring tools should help authors avoid mistakes and produce valid content. But the browser is a tool for the consumer of content, and there is no benefit for the user if it fails to to render some existing pages. It is like Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software. The interest of the customer is that the software runs.
> Windows jumping through hoops to support backwards compatibility even with buggy software
This was, maybe, true some 10 years ago. Now even old Windows programs (paint,wordpad) do not run on newer Windows
> The interest of the customer is that the software runs
Yes, but testing is expensive and we are Agile. /s
Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?
#450A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…
Google Reader: I will forever be salty about how Google killed something that likely required very little maintenance in the long run. It could have stayed exactly the same for a decade and I wouldn't have cared because I use an RSS reader exactly the same way I do that I did back in 2015.
Yes! I loved this product… it was our little social network for my friends and coworkers.