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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#481

Post by chrismorgan »

JimDabell wrote: post #445
chrismorgan wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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...

I said added to HTML.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#482

Post by bdangubic »

daxfohl wrote: post #121
bxparks wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was probably me, when I stopped using Google Search some years ago. :-) Got tired of the ads, the blog spam, and AI-generated content crap floating to the top of their results page.

That's more what I meant. Sure, lots of people still type stuff into the URL bar that takes them to www.google.com/search. But whatever you want to call that results page now, it's no longer Google Search in anything but name.

same can be said if you compare www.google.com search from 2012 and 2022, times are changing… I am not defending google search here, I haven’t used it except by accident in long time now but to say google search is “dying” like you often hear (especially here on HN) is a serious detachment from reality

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#483

Post by sen »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile.

It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#484

Post by kirubakaran »

bdangubic wrote: post #78
daxfohl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Search: Not officially dead yet, but....

yup, losing 0.000087% year-over-year so in 865 billion years it’ll be dead :)

How did you go bankrupt?

Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.

- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#485

Post by chrismorgan »

eterm wrote: post #476
chrismorgan wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference, observe what happens if you try opening this malformed document in a browser: save it with a .xhtml extension, or serve it with MIME type application/xhtml+xml. Firefox displays naught but the error: XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: . Location: file:///tmp/x.xhtml Line Number 22, Column 3: --^ Chromium displays this banner on top of the document up to the error: This page contains the follo…

Thanks for showing these. We can see Firefox matches the same style of accurate but unhelpful error message. Chromium is much more helpful in the error message, directing the user to both line 19 and 22. It also made the user-friendly choice to render up to the error. In the context of XHTML, we should also keep in mind that Chrome post-dates XHTML by almost a decade.

If, on the other hand, you have some sorts of XSLT errors, Firefox gives you a reasonably helpful error message in the dev tools, whereas Chromium gives you a blank document and nothing else… unless you ran it in a terminal. I’m still a little surprised that I managed to discover that it was emitting XSLT errors to stdout or stderr (don’t remember which).

Really, neither has particularly great handling of errors in anything XML. None of it is better than minimally maintained, a lot of it has simply been unmaintained for a decade or more.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#486

Post by cardanome »

ranma42 wrote: post #354
znpy wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so long ago there was a leak of windows’ source code, up to xp and 2003 server… the leak was so complete there are videos on YouTube about people building and booting (!!!) windows from there. And yet, no big leap in ReactOS (at least for now).

IIRC ReactOs forbids you from contributing if you had access to the windows source code in some way shape or form.

They need to train an LLM with the windows source code and ask it to write an windows clone.

Apparently copyright law only applies for humans, generative AI gets away with stealing because there is too much monetary interest involved in looking the other way.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#487

Post by bombcar »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s.

There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#488

Post by pessimizer »

snovymgodym wrote: post #2

ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation. It has been in existence in some form or another for nearly 30 years, but did not gain the traction it needed and as of writing it's still not in a usable state on real hardware. It's not abandoned, but progress on it is moving so slow that I doubt we'll ever see it be released in a state that's useful for real users. It's too bad, beca…

> I think people underestimate the difficulty involved in the project

I don't think people do, it sounds like a nearly impossible struggle, and at the end you get a Windows clone. I can't imagine hating yourself enough to work on it for an extended period of time for no money and putting yourself and your hard work in legal risk. It's a miracle we have Wine and serious luck that we have Proton.

People losing Windows 10 support need to move on. There's Linux if you want to be free, and Apple if you still prefer to be guided. You might lose some of your video games. You can still move to Windows 11 if you think that people should serve their operating systems rather than vice versa.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#489

Post by detaro »

le-mark wrote: post #477
Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.

Maybe not in the earliest versions, but by the late 90s, when I learned it, it certainly had those things.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#490

Post by raphman »

linguae wrote: post #156

I could think of many examples, but I'll talk about the top four that I have in mind, that I'd like to see re-evaluated for today's times. 1. When Windows Vista was being developed, there were plans to replace the file system with a database, allowing users to organize and search for files using database queries. This was known as WinFS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS ). I was looking forward to this in the mid…

> OpenDoc

For anyone interested in the Apple future that could have been, check out Jim Miller's articles, e.g. on LiveDoc (https://www.miramontes.com/writing/livedoc/index.php)

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