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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?

#671

Post by troupo »

giobox wrote: post #657
troupo wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and they were going to position it against Windows Mobile. When iOS was announced, Google scrambled to re-do the entire concept

Not so much Windows Mobile, which never achieved serious market share. It was originally more planned to be a Blackberry competitor, and the early Android handset prototype concepts were all blackberry knockoffs with similar physical keyboard layouts. It has always appeared though like you suggest, that the project quickly pivoted to candy bar touch phones following the release of the original iPhone. It's worthwhile…

I clean forgot about Blackberry :)

Android team ended up delaying Android release by a year: https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/19/googles-reaction-...

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

#672

Post by Rohansi »

motorest wrote: post #174
Rohansi wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner?

> Open web standards are great but consider where we could have been if competition drove them a different way? We're still stuck with JavaScript today (wasm still needs it). Layout/styling is caught up now but where would we be if that came sooner? Why do you think JavaScript is a problem? And a big enough problem to risk destroying open web standards.

It's not that it's a problem I just don't think it's the best place to be. It was not designed to be used like this. Yes, it's better now but it's still not great - you still ship JS as text blobs that need to be parsed and compiled by every browser.

I don't see how alternatives to JavaScript are a risk to open web standards. WebAssembly is itself a part of those same standards. It's just a shame that it was built as an extension of JavaScript instead of being an actual alternative.

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

#673

Post by crowdhailer »

veqq wrote: post #190
dunham wrote: post #75

The "Eve" programming language / IDE - https://witheve.com It was a series of experiments with new approaches to programming. Kind of reminded me of the research that gave us Smalltalk. It would have been interesting to see where they went with it, but they wound down the project.

https://eyg.run/ is heavily inspired by eve!

I certainly know and admire eve. However I don't think I consciously took that many features from it into EYG. I'd be curios what the crossover is

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

#675

Post by pixl97 »

crote wrote: post #405
jasode wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>- XHTML. [...] Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly? XHTML appeals to the intuition that there should be a Strict Right Way To Do Things ... but you can't use that unforgiving framework for web documents that are widely shared. The "real world" has 2 types of file formats: (1) file types where consumers cannot contact/control/punish the authors (open-loop) : HTML, pdf, zip, csv, etc. The common…

The problem is that group (1) results in a nightmarish race-to-the-bottom. File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files. In practice this means a large proportion of documents are going to end up corrupt. Does it open in Chrome? Great, ship it! The file format is no longer the specification, but it has now become a wild guess at whatever wei…

>File creators have zero incentive to create spec-compliant files, because there's no penalty for creating corrupted files

This depends. If you are a small creator with a unique corruption then you're likely out of luck. The problem with big creators is 'fuck you' I do what I want.

>"Chrome cannot guarantee the safety of your data on this website, as the website is malformed" warning message.

This would appear on pretty much every website. And it would appear on websites that are no longer updated and they'd functionally disappear from any updated browser. In addition the 10-20 year thing just won't work in US companies, simply put if they get too much pressure next quarter on it, it's gone.

>Your mistakes are painfully obvious during development,

Except this isn't how a huge number of websites work. They get html from many sources and possibly libraries. Simply put no one is going to follow your insanity, hence why xhtml never worked in the first place. They'll drop Chrome before they drop the massive amount of existing and potential bugs out there.

>And like it or not, Chrome is big enough that it can act as one for HTML.

And hopefully in a few years between the EU and US someone will bust parts of them up.

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

#676

Post by pixl97 »

JimDabell wrote: post #491
afavour wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue a good comparison here is HTTPS. Everyone decided it would be good for sites to move over to serving via HTTPS so browsers incentivised people to move by gating newer features to HTTPS only. They could have easily done the same with XHTML had they wanted.

The opportunities to fix this were pretty abundant. For instance, it would take exactly five words from Google to magically make a vast proportion of web pages valid XHTML: > We rank valid XHTML higher It doesn’t even have to be true!

Even more reason to break Google up.

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

#677

Post by ethbr1 »

le-mark wrote: post #466
Animats wrote: post #230

- 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…

CICS is still going strong as part of ZOS. There are industries where green screen, mainframe terminal apps still rule and CICS is driving them.

CICS seems perfectly fine in problem spaces where requirements change slowly enough than one can trade development time for reliability (read: finance and insurance).

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

#679

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

eloisant wrote: post #538
PaulRobinson wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice list. Some thoughts: - I think without the move to NeXT, even if Jobs had come back to Apple, they would never have been able to get to the iPhone. iOS was - and still is - a unix-like OS, using unix-like philosophy, and I think that philosophy allowed them to build something game-changing compared to the SOTA in mobile OS technology at the time. So much so, Android follows suit. It doesn't have a command line,…

They would have gotten another modern OS instead of Next as the base for MacOSX (then iOS). Another possibility they were exploring was buying BeOS, which would have been pretty interesting because it was an OS built from scratch in the 90's without any of the cruft from the 70's. Also, the only thing specific to Next that survived in MacOSX and iOS was ObjectiveC and the whole NextStep APIs, which honestly I don't t…

> without any of the cruft from the 70's

By "cruft" you mean "lessons learned", right?

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

#680

Post by [deleted] »

chrismorgan wrote: post #422
donatj wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On XHTML, I think there was room for both HTML and a proper XHTML that barks on errors. If you're a human typing HTML or using a language where you build your HTML by concatenation like early PHP, sure it makes sense to allow loosey goosey HTML but if you're using any sort of simple DOM builder which should preclude you from the possibility of outputting invalid HTML, strict XHTML makes a lot more sense. Honestly I'm…

> Honestly I'm disappointed the promised XHTML5 never materialized along side HTML5. I guess it just lost steam. The HTML Standard supports two syntaxes, HTML and XML. All browsers support XML syntax just fine—always have, and probably always will. Serve your file as application/xhtml+xml, and go ham.

[deleted]
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