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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

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Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#231

Post by martinald »

zeta0134 wrote: post #30
jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

I've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

I've had no problems with LG webOS. Media playback off usb and DLNA is flawless and supports every codec and container I've thrown at it, all the apps work well. I've had it playing 100mbit/sec H265 off network for example with no issues.

It's actually pretty hard to find a media player that supports Dolby Vision for example. No Android media box does, and as far as I know Windows support is very patchy. At least with webOS it supports all the video formats the TV supports.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#232

Post by anderspitman »

zokier wrote: post #197
anderspitman wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a Chromecast. I have a Roku TV. One of the implied points of this article is that the solution I'm suggesting would work for any device as a fallback, let them implement whatever other fancy protocols they want.

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app. But chromecast is essentially that standard you ask for, otherwise "apps" like I linked wouldn't work. Heck, as far as I know (I'm not really a Chrome user), Chrome has this functionality built-in, so you can send URLs directly from browser to a chromecast device.

As I said in the post, I'm all for these technologies. I'm just asking for a copy-paste style alternative for when they don't work.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#233

Post by dredmorbius »

apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

Since the entire conceit of your essay is to tell others what they should do, I'll return the favour:

Please make your site work with vanilla HTML.

A link to your Github repo head where the Markdown might ... possibly ... be unearthed ... is not that.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#234

Post by zzo38computer »

danShumway wrote: post #144
anderspitman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Even without adding a build step, would you be willing to add a tag to your index.html that just linked to the Github repo in general? It wouldn't even need to be specific to each individual post. While admittedly some readers here are purely focusing on the irony of supporting "the primitive, simple case", for the most part non-JS users are willing to meet sites halfway on this. I'm totally fine manually navigating…

I agree; that is good. (It is easy enough to find the post wanted from that.)

I suggested to have a link (or just instructions, if you don't want it to be customized per post) for accessing the Markdown code for the specific post. However, a link to the Github repository also works perfectly OK, so I am not complaining.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#235

Post by zzo38computer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #233
apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

Since the entire conceit of your essay is to tell others what they should do, I'll return the favour: Please make your site work with vanilla HTML. A link to your Github repo head where the Markdown might ... possibly ... be unearthed ... is not that.

Yes, or plain text. I would be fine just with a link to the Markdown text.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#236

Post by Izkata »

jschwartzi wrote: post #142
crazygringo wrote: post #100

I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser. Virtually universally, videos are embedded in webpages, and occasionally a link is provided that downloads rather than plays a video. So I think this is just a use-case issue: the average user is exceedingly unlikely to ever want to watch a raw video file specified by…

Before Youtube this was a thing, just as streaming radio was a thing before Pandora. You'd get a URL and the URL would stream radio or video instead of being a website. Obviously the protocol descriptor would be different from HTTP/HTTPS.

It wasn't even just "a thing", it was the main way to share video on the web before youtube made flash players ubiquitous.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#237

Post by zzo38computer »

apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

Making the files accessible with curl seems good too, and the web browser is too complicated. Actually, I generally make the documents I write available as plain text instead of HTML, in order to support this (and many other uses, some of which might not be immediately known). But at least you added a block, so I am glad you did that at least.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#238

Post by ixwt »

duxup wrote: post #212
justinclift wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't some smart tv's scan the local wifi networks and try to find one they can connect back home through? eg no password on it. Guessing they haven't started shipping with a dictionary to try brute forcing the most common passwords. :D

That thought had occurred to me, fortunately I don't have a guest network. I do worry that one day someone is going to buy one of those Comcast modems that has the automatic Xfinity guest networks and it will find that ...

In my experience, those networks only work if you are a Comcast subscriber. You have to have an account to authenticate.

There would be some kind of backlash if those TVs connected to one and was able to phone home. Don't know how bad, probably on the order of the smart TV that was phoning home with the name of the contents of and flash drives you connected.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#239

Post by dredmorbius »

baddox wrote: post #52
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Irony: blank page w/o JS, fails in Outline.com.

In what sense? Because the article is explaining some problem, and the article itself has some other unrelated problem?

The article entirely fails to render in Chrome, with JS disabled.

It entirely fails to render in text-mode browsers (I actually make heavy use of w3m).

It entirely fails to render in https://outline.com/, which otherwise is a good way to get fucked-up JS-dependent sites to render. I consider that stage of fuckwittedness either absolutely deliberate (which it appears to be in this case based on the authors defence of their practices), or utter incompetence. These are not mutually exclusive possibilities.

The fact that the article is apparently (I've still been unable to read it) a plea for base-level compatibility is, as initially noted, arch irony.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#240

Post by OrgNet »

crazygringo wrote: post #100

I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser. Virtually universally, videos are embedded in webpages, and occasionally a link is provided that downloads rather than plays a video. So I think this is just a use-case issue: the average user is exceedingly unlikely to ever want to watch a raw video file specified by…

> I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser.

Here is one of many examples (look at the bottom): https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9462-what_the_fax

I see those all the time.

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