31–40 of 47 posts
I sold my mobile maps startup to Google around the same time and worked closely with the where2 guys. This article sounds like the result of a casual conversation with Noel and not a well researched piece. A number of inaccuracies as far as I can remember. (not blaming Noel to be clear)
> A number of inaccuracies as far as I can remember. Do you mind clarify these?
Is there a way to block all medium articles from my feed?
Typical medium article. Scant and clickbaity (fell for it this time). Is there a way to block all medium articles from my feed?
Sorry for the irony... I hate medium too :)
I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.
Nah, the idea of realtime communication between browser and server is as old as javascript. I implemented my first version in 1997, using hidden iframes loading scripts, but I don't imagine I was the first to do so. Relevant to the article, I actually also implemented a draggable map that loaded tiles dynamically on demand for a little failed outdoor startup in 1998. The limiting factor back then was actually the ser…
Do you still feel confident that the server was an unsolvable limit? Like, the expectations for map resolution were not all that lofty in 1997, and it's still today pretty common to precompute tiles at different ranges/scales.
This story is told really well in one of my favorite podcasts, the Acquired Podcast: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google-maps . Highly recommended as are all of the other episodes.
I was hoping for a little more detail around the beginnings of AJAX. I know it was added to IE to support Outlook in IE but I thought Maps was the first big use of it outside of Outlook.
Whenever people talk about how IE ruined the internet, I think about AJAX. I actually thought IE was great for the web. A poignant example I remember was, if you got a /TR /TD out of order, Netscape wouldn't show the web page at all. It'd work fine in IE though. IE just made it so much easier to move fast in web development. People blast IE, but I really don't think the web would be as good as it is today without it.…
Anybody remember LAYER tags?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AJAX's origins are actually really cool. It started before XmlHttpRequest. If I recall correctly, when the user took an action that required a server response, the javascript would make a 1px by 1px iframe and load it to a specific URL with the important information in the query parameters. The response would look something like this someGlobalFunction({ searchResults: [ {"name": "Joseph Paul"}, {"name": "Joe McCray"…
A lot of early web apps heavily abused this pattern - I worked on a web framework that used iframes to manage widget state, and of course at that time everyone had to support IE5 and 6. But those browsers by default had this charming noise (an audible click) every time a page loaded or iframe loaded. When you would click a widget button you’d here this curious storm of clicks as the iframes all reloaded. That culmina…
Wow. I'd forgotten about that. And all these years later, now I know what was going on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, the idea of realtime communication between browser and server is as old as javascript. I implemented my first version in 1997, using hidden iframes loading scripts, but I don't imagine I was the first to do so. Relevant to the article, I actually also implemented a draggable map that loaded tiles dynamically on demand for a little failed outdoor startup in 1998. The limiting factor back then was actually the ser…
> The limiting factor back then was actually the server. Do you still feel confident that the server was an unsolvable limit? Like, the expectations for map resolution were not all that lofty in 1997, and it's still today pretty common to precompute tiles at different ranges/scales.