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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

311–320 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#311
I wanted to make a pre MVP leads landing page this week. Researched new static site builder and templates. Choose one, ran into a build problem, then saw that docs were not up to date... all in all half a day with no hard, ready to launch outcome.

Took a step back, what is the most minimal thing I needed.

Took html5 boilerplate, copy&pasted the index.html, put normalize.css inline.

Got rid of everything else. Minimal Html, an image, form mailer. Done and launched https://www.securrr.app on Netlify in less than an hour.

Overengineering is real. Choose a goal, use the most simplest solution to get there.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#312

I do believe that, usually, you should make it possible to be archived. (In one of a few cases where it isn't, consider if HTTP(S) is even the correct protocol for what you are doing; sometimes it isn't.) I agree that you can (almost always) write HTML without JavaScript codes (CSS is not always needed either, but nevertheless it can be helpful). This improves portability too. If you do want to use JavaScript to gene…

"monospace" is a property of a given font but is not (usually) a variant of a single font family as is "bold" (font weight). While bold text is often used for emphasis and setting it to "regular" doesn't change the meaning much, using a monospace font signals specific things (often, it's used to represent code snippets, but in some contexts it can mean "work in progress"). Changing that font to a proportional one str…

Honestly, in almost all places that monospaced fonts are used, they’re purely a stylistic choice. (The remainder is mostly ASCII art, or plain-text representations of tables—in which case alignment is important, not the font—or something where tabular figures are desirable for number alignment.) I don’t say that that makes it useless in any way, but honestly monospaced text in code editing is overrated. You can live without it easily, and will probably get used to it very quickly.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#313

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

> Only downside is I'm dependent on Evernote, but hopefully it manages to stick around in some form for a good while, and if it ever doesn't, I expect I'll be able to migrate to something similar.

I have used Evernote and OneNote, but have finally, after a long interim period, resorted to using only markdown.

I have a "Notes" root folder and organize section groups and sections in subfolders. VSCode (or Emacs), with some tweaks, shortcuts, and extensions, provides a good-enough markdown editing experience. Like an extension that allows you to paste in images, storing it in a resources folder in the note's current location (yes, I see small problems with this down the road when re-organizing, but nothing that can't be handled).

For Firefox, I use the markdown-clipper extension the few times I would like to copy a whole article, it works well enough. Or I copy/paste what I need; mostly, I take my own summarized notes.

For syncing, I use Nextcloud, which also makes the notes available both for reading and editing on Android and iOS (I use both).

Up until very recently, I used Joplin, which also uses markdown, but there were two things I could not live with: it does not store the markdown files with a readable filename, e.g., its title, and being tied to a specific editor.

If you are mostly clipping and not writing your own notes, I can imagine my setup won't work well, or be very efficient.

I want to use a format that has longevity, and storing in a format that I cannot grep is out of the question.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#314
post #264

When I studied media science one of the most lasting experiences I had was a talk with one lady of the viennese film museum (on of the few film museums that store actual films instead of film props). As a digital native I never gave it a thought, but she told me that there is a collective memory gap in films that have been shot or stored digitally. With stuff that has been stored on film, there was always soem copy i…

There is an old observation that I found striking at the time:

Newer methods of storing information tend to be progressively easier to write, and progressively less durable.

(The following is not really in chronological order)

You'll never look at stone tablets the same way again. As primitive as they are, their longevity can be amazing. Ancient emperors and tyrants knew what they were doing. Trajan's column from 113 AD is our main source on roman legionary's iconic equipment.

Cuneiform tablets were heavy and awkward, but they were 3D so there was no paint to worry about.

Parchment tends to be more durable than papyrus, and paper. Perhaps the best known among the Dead Sea Scrolls was made out of copper.

Iron Age culture artifacts are harder to find than Bronze Age one, because bronze is more resistant to corrosion.

CD's, especially(?) from home burners, are reported to oxidize after several years. That may still be better than tapes, hard drives and other magnetic media (SSD?) which can be wiped by an EMP pulse. The internet era information storage appears to come with an upkeep cost! Slack practically doesn't archive messages by default. Until Gmail, it was typical for email servers to delete old messages.

People get used to novelty and things being ephemeral. Capitalism supposedly requires low durability goods so people keep buying them, including tools and clothes. Houses are poorly built break down pretty quickly.

I find it amazing people used to decorate their homes, tools, clothes with ornaments, engravings etc. You'd be a fool to do that today, you don't even know how long that thing is going to last.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#315
post #133

HTML is a terrible authoring format. CSS is a terrible everything. If you want something to last, the thing that will last is the human-created source - probably markdown. I'm not worried about my blog posts sitting in their git repository being lost. The Jekyll pipeline that adds a Javascript header/footer might go away, as might the Javascript that pretifies my raw posts, but the markdown is durable, and a future a…

No, I trust HTML and CSS to stand the test of time far more than Markdown. Do you know how many different variants of Markdown there are, how they affect the interpretation and appearance of the content, how they can break surprisingly much? And when it comes down to it, as soon as you want to do anything even remotely interesting in Markdown, you have to drop straight HTML in there, and pray that the Markdown engine will do the right thing, since the rules of how it should all work are insanely complex, and vary widely by engine, for all that there’s a general trend towards CommonMark which at least specifies the madness and folly. (I’m sad that Markdown won over reStructuredText, which was actually designed.)

HTML is a quite acceptable authoring format, one that readily lets you do interesting things if you desire—though making it possible can certainly be a footgun. CSS is a reasonable styling language.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#316
post #268
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives. Will you still be allowed to do that in ten years? Or will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift?

> And directly quoting the information has been endangered by modern copyright directives. I guess paraphrasing or summarising hasn’t been prohibited. > will aggressive takedown policies have forced a shift? Shifting to prarphrasing or to summarising doesn’t sound too bad.

That's not always possible without changing the subtleties and basic meaning, or even intention as well as discussing and questionioning what the author wanted to say with their sentence or paragraph. This is particularly tricky if you write political commentary on your site. Blog post of a politician or social media posts can't be quoted where there's already vaguely stated and often said politician removes the post after backlash so you wouldn't be able to link it.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#317
post #133

HTML is a terrible authoring format. CSS is a terrible everything. If you want something to last, the thing that will last is the human-created source - probably markdown. I'm not worried about my blog posts sitting in their git repository being lost. The Jekyll pipeline that adds a Javascript header/footer might go away, as might the Javascript that pretifies my raw posts, but the markdown is durable, and a future a…

I would welcome the idea of browsers rendering markdown prettified by default (while offering to show raw plain text). Like they currently do with xml

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"monospace" is a property of a given font but is not (usually) a variant of a single font family as is "bold" (font weight). While bold text is often used for emphasis and setting it to "regular" doesn't change the meaning much, using a monospace font signals specific things (often, it's used to represent code snippets, but in some contexts it can mean "work in progress"). Changing that font to a proportional one str…

Honestly, in almost all places that monospaced fonts are used, they’re purely a stylistic choice. (The remainder is mostly ASCII art, or plain-text representations of tables—in which case alignment is important, not the font—or something where tabular figures are desirable for number alignment.) I don’t say that that makes it useless in any way, but honestly monospaced text in code editing is overrated. You can live…

I agree about monospaced text in code editing. I was thinking about uses such as code excerpts in literature (class names, inline bash commands, etc). Monospaced fonts[1] plays a major role in helping reading and understanding the content. This is more than a stylistic choice.

[1] actually the font doesn't need to be monospaced, but it must be very different than the font used for main copy.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#319
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Web Fonts are not an "or", here. Fonts have disappeared from it, and there is no reason to not expect Google to, at some point in the future, go: "you know what, this costs too much without any substantial return." And now it's just another killedbygoogle.com product. Just like images, self-hosting woff/woff2 should be step 1.

Fonts disappearing is not a big issue that will ultimately render your page useless. If the font is gone, the look of the page is slightly affected, but the content of the page remains. It's honestly not a big deal at all.

In that case just use sans-serif or a web-safe font and avoid the third-party dependency.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#320

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

I like the idea, but wanted to know how realistic it would be so I made a quick and dirty Python script to download all my bookmarks. If you want to make the same experiment, you can get it from here: https://gist.github.com/ksamuel/fb3af1345626cb66c474f38d8f03...

It requires Python 3.8 (just the stdlib) and wget.

I have 3633 bookmarks, for a total of 1.5 Go unziped, 1.0 Go zipped (and we know we can get more from better algo and using links to files with the same checksum like for JS and css deps).

This seems acceptable IMO, espacially since I used to consider myself a heavy bookmarker and I was stunned by how few I actually had and how little disk they occupied. Here are the types of the files:

   31396 text/plain
   3034 application/octet-stream
   1316 text/x-c++
   1123 text/x-po
    865 text/x-python
    384 text/html
    227 application/gzip
    218 inode/x-empty
    178 text/x-pascal
    113 image/png
     44 application/zlib
     29 text/x-c
     28 text/x-shellscript
     14 application/xml
     13 application/x-dosexec
     12 text/troff
      5 text/x-makefile
      4 text/x-asm
      3 application/zip
      2 image/jpeg
      2 image/gif
      2 application/x-elc
      1 text/x-ruby
      1 text/x-diff
      1 text/rtf
      1 image/x-xcf
      1 image/x-icon
      1 image/svg+xml
      1 application/x-shockwave-flash
      1 application/x-mach-binary
      1 application/x-executable
      1 application/x-dbf
      1 application/pdf
It should probably be opt-in though, like a double click on the "save as bookmark icon" to download the entire file, and the star becomes a different color. Mobile phones, chrome books and raspy may not want to use the spaces, not to mention there are some bookmark content that you don't want your OS to index, and show you preview of in every search.

But it would be fantastic: by doing this experiment I noticed that many bookmarks were 404 now, and I will never get their content back. Beside, searching bookmark, and referencing them is a huge pain.

So definitely something I wish mozilla would consider.

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