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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

411–420 of 458 posts

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#411
I love this! I was going to write something similar. The increasing prevalence of sites that shard their content over multiple pages to increase ad impressions seems beneficial to nobody; the consumer, producer, and advertiser all have degraded experiences. The problem is that the companies which are paying out for ads (Google) don't penalize this type of behavior, so it is financially beneficial to have super bloated websites which require 15 page refreshes to view all the content.

wikihow is a very good antipattern to follow. This site should be deindexed from google entirely.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#412
post #138

The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text. Any fancy bits that you need can also be text, and then you tangle and publish to whatever fancy viewing tool comes along in the future. I don't have a workflow for scraping and archiving snapshots of external links, but if someone hasn't already developed one for org I would be very s…

> The issues outlined here are one of the reasons that I am moving as many of my workflows to org-mode as possible. Everything is text. That works for some, even most people. Unfortunately, the content I create will inevitably cite material in languages other than the main document language. That means that I have to heavily use HTML span lang="XX" tags to set the right language for those passages, so that (among oth…

If it is for blocks of text then you could use #+BEGIN_VERSE in combination with #+ATTR_HTML, or possibly create a custom #+BEGIN_FRENCH block type, but I suspect that you are thinking about inline markup, in which case you have two options, one is to write a macro {{{lang(french,ju ne parle frances}}} and the other would be to hack the export-snippet functionality so you could write @@french:ju ne parle frances@@ and have it do the right thing when exporting to html. The macro is certainly easier, and if you know in advance what languages you need it shortens to {{{fr:ju ne parle frances}}} which is reasonably economical in terms of typing.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#413

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied…

It seems like in practice the biggest problem is "it got deleted", and everything else is about either preventing others from deleting your stuff or preventing yourself from deleting it out of laziness or frustration. Deploying a web site with (S)FTP works as well as it ever did... and is just as obscure to non-technical people as it ever was. Ease of use means loss of control.

> Ease of use means loss of control.

It'd be a cool challenge to build something so simple that even a non-tech person could use which allows them to maintain control and ownership. Any good examples of tech in general that is highly approachable like this? Even things like WordPress are too complicated for most - maybe if not self-hosted it's not so difficult, but still falls short in terms of being complex and not just simple text or html (at the most)..

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#414

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied…

Onionshare has this feature, but the website is only accessible over Tor.

Oh cool, didn't know about that. Be cool to see something like this which is more approachable for non-tech people. I think the tor part of this, at least in its current state, is too much for the average person.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#415
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's where they are not banned. Many pages simply won't load at all in the PRC because someone thought a Google analytics tracker or a hosted library should load before the content (which then never does).

Actually Google Analytics works fine in PRC. Google Fonts also isn’t blocked but I recall it being hit-and-miss in terms of responsiveness when I was working on a website that targeted Chinese audience a few years ago. However, I just tried resolving fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com on a Chinese server of mine, and they both resolve to a couple of Beijing IP addresses belonging to AS24424 Beijing Gu Xiang I…

Not sure "working fine in PRC" is really something you can say about anything web related.

I do occasional web dev from within China and had to eliminate external references to get manageable page load times. At least from where I work pulling in practically anything from outside the Great Firewall will have a high probability of killing page load time. Anything hosted by Google in particular will often have you staring at your screen for 30 seconds.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#416
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? One plus a bunch of non-standard extensions. Do you know how many different variants of HTML there are, how rare it is for real-world HTML to actually conform to any of them, and how many different interpretations of that there are. (To say nothing of…

Nope, definitely not one Markdown. Reddit uses three different engines with major mutual incompatibilities and mostly forbids all HTML (which frankly I deem enough to call it not real Markdown); Stack Overflow uses two with what used to be critical deficiencies and incompatibilities in the one used for comments, but I think they’re now mostly minor only; some things still use Markdown.pl which does many bizarre things; some, other weird engines with idiosyncrasies of their own; most more recent Markdown engines are only mostly CommonMark-compatible, regularly deviating in important places, and very often adding incompatible extensions. It’s a disaster at present, and I don’t expect it to get much better for at least a decade, if ever. (HTML got better with HTML5, but I don’t think Markdown is likely to unite so firmly, because people want more than non-HTML Markdown offers, and so will continue to extend it.)

HTML, though? Since the HTML5 spec about a decade ago, there has only been one HTML, with all browsers parsing and handling documents identically. CSS is similarly parsed and interpreted according to well-defined algorithms now. There are some visual rendering differences between browsers in how CSS is handled, but it is exceedingly rare for them to affect the content.

And for your complaints about CSS, it’s not intended as a single thing to implement in one piece—it’s deliberately designed as something that is extended over time. But if you write CSS that works in browsers now, then presuming you haven’t used vendor-prefixed stuff, it’s reasonable to expect it to work the same way indefinitely.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#417
post #368
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decades ago there was an amazing piece of software from lotus when I worked there called magellan. I remember the first time I saw someone search, and find results in text documents, spreadsheets and many other of the common formats of the day. That was in 1989 and today I mostly search my computer using find and grep commands, since that's what just keeps working.

I should try adopting find and grep, but on Windows I'm currently using this and I'm very happy with it: https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

I use Void Tools Everything to find files by name, and AstroGrep for finding information in them.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#418

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…

first I heard of web clipping. Looks like OneNote has web-clipper extensions, too. This is so great.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#419
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…

Obligatory xkcd entitled "Digital Resource Lifespan" https://www.xkcd.com/1909/

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#420
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most fonts picked by designers suck. Plain and simple. I override fonts for most websites I frequent.

Can you elaborate on why/how they suck? Do you have example links, to set a common ground for the conversation? I think most fonts that get your attention suck, the best ones are invisible and get you directly to the meaning of text, without getting in the way. So maybe there's a kind of bias (selection or sampling bias?) operating here?

Because they they are not the single system default sans-serif and single system default sans-serif-monospace fonts that all websites MUST use, period, no discussion. As you put it:

> fonts that get your attention suck

If I can tell the difference between your font and the system default font, your font sucks; if I can't tell the difference, what's the damned point?

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