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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

#261

Post by amiga-workbench »

m-p-3 wrote: post #75
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…

TV makers should stop embedding the Smart TV features, and focus on either bundling an external box on dongle, or establish a standard for smartTV circuit board that you can replace by a third-party or pull out completely when the inevitable happens (system is unsupported/EOL, has some security flaws the manufacturer doesn't take seriously, etc. And more importantly, make the display works without such card.

Commercial grade NEC digital signage displays use the Open Pluggable Standard. You can insert a number of modules into the OPS slot, from a SDI video receiver, to a nasty Android based media player, or even a full x86 PC.

I've said it before here, but I'm getting a second hand NEC commercial display as my next TV. I've used them at work and they are excellent panels.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#262

Post by JohnFen »

jefftk wrote: post #157
JohnFen wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted. I never whitelist sites that don't work without JS unless the site is actually critical for some reason (doing so is too risky). I expect that this means some parts of the web effectively no longer exist for people like me, and accept that, but I wonder if the authors of these badly engineered pages really…

> I wonder if the authors of these badly engineered pages really know that they're excluding people People who choose to turn off JS are excluding themselves. JS is part of the web platform, and there are tons of amazing things it allows you to do. Being able to write a site in markdown with static hosting and have it instantly rendered in user's browsers is one of those things! If you choose to browse with IE6 and c…

> People who choose to turn off JS are excluding themselves.

It goes both ways. Yes, turning off JS means that some sites will fail to work. As I said in my comment, I expect this. On the other hand, a well-designed site should fail gracefully, so that turning off JS won't make the site fail to work, but may make certain features unavailable. Sites that don't fail gracefully (with certain exceptions) are poorly engineered sites that are excluding people unnecessarily.

> JS is part of the web platform

JS is an optional part of the web platform.

> and there are tons of amazing things it allows you to do.

Of course. The problem is that JS allows terrible things to be done as well. Just as I won't download and execute binaries from random web sites, I won't allow JS from random websites, for precisely the same reasons. JS is too risky.

> If you choose to browse with IE6 and complain that sites using HTML5 are excluding you, I'm not going to be sympathetic either.

That's a poor analogy because HTML5 will fail gracefully. If I browse to an HTML5 site with IE6, I will (with rare exceptions) still be able to read the page.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#263

Post by droithomme »

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…

> I'll do what I want with it.

As is your right but it's not consistent with calls for simplicity.

> should be working now

I've always had JS enabled and your site has still not worked, then or now. Your site is not accessible or simple. Again that's your right, and I agree with you about Smart TVs. Why not start the path to fix things by making your site readible on the screen of common blokes, poor people, and the non-elite that didn't buy something in the last 2 months?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#264

Post by droithomme »

zzo38computer wrote: post #235
dredmorbius wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely! A plain markdown file or even txt would be preferable to the current situation where I can't read anything.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#265

Post by jaipilot747 »

Tyr42 wrote: post #125
jchw wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely one approach, but I would actually just prefer a full computer, because I do sometimes run other software that is simply not available on any dongles. One downside though is that I only have a couple HDMI ports to work with, so between a Nintendo Switch and a full desktop PC I'm already using all of the ports. Also, even though I love the NVIDIA Shield, I find it does not really integrate as well a…

My shield also keeps stealing focus. When I turn on the switch, the TV turns on, then the shield turns on and steals focus from the switch, and I have to go grab the tv remote and turn it back to the Switch again.

Pressing the Home button on the Switch controller automatically changes the input source to the Switch, on my TV.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#266

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…

I agree with you about avoiding dependencies; I try to reduce dependencies myself. Many projects have a lot of dependencies, but I prefer to reduce dependences instead, I think is better.

I will write documents as plain text, and I agree with your idea to make them accessible as text is good.

I and others will write computer games and other stuff using simpler VMs than the web browser, such as Famicom and Glulx (both of which can also be implemented to work within the web browser, too). (Z-machine is also very portable; there are implementations for many computers, and I even wrote implementation of Z-machine in Glulx and in PostScript, and started (but never completed) writing one for Famicom (which has my own unusual mapper design too, with a bank size of only one byte, and mapper registers overlapping mirrors of internal RAM).)

Another thing can be, if you have a discussion forum, then I think NNTP is good (better than mailing list and web forum), although you can have mailing list and web forum with the same messages as the NNTP too. Even if the web interface requires JavaScripts to work, I would still insist that at least one thing works even without JavaScript and CSS, which is the link to the NNTP, including the message ID or newsgroup name. (It may also be used with the web forum allowing Markdown and then they appear in NNTP with "Content-type: text/markdown", which is something I have seen suggested; however, I think plain text is also fine and is my own preference.) (I also made up "Unusenet", which is a way of making newsgroup names which are not part of Usenet; all Unusenet newsgroup names begin with "un" and one or more digits and then a dot, and then the rest of the newsgroup name.) (Also, like IRC, NNTP can also be used without specialized software for it, although also like IRC, it is more convenient and work better if you do have such software, and it is not as difficult to write as the web browser software.)

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#267

Post by mr_toad »

mikepurvis wrote: post #163
worble wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Christmas I finally took the time (which admittedly didn't take long; I was just lazy until now) to set up LibreElec on my pi and hook it up to my TV, and I honestly don't know how I've overlooked this for so many years. It's a DLNA/UPNP client so I can cast anything I want from my media server on my computer to it (Bubble UPNP is a great app to control all this from my phone) and even though it doesn't have "ca…

How have you found DLNA? I tried it briefly with the built-in PS4 client and MiniDLNA/ReadyMedia on a headless Ubuntu machine and I found it to be awful— the server side needed to be rebooted in order to discover new media in the folder, the PS4 client was clunky to use (missing obvious stuff like picking up playing a file where you left off), and iTunes instances on the same network would do weird stuff like suddenl…

The PS4 renderer is pretty bare boned, no getting around that. The newer versions of UMS support resuming and FF/RW, depending on the way the file has been encoded.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#268

Post by bhandziuk »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #44
moondev wrote: post #15

drag mp4 to browser then cast it?

You can't cast arbitrary things like that except through desktop/whole screen casting, which is not at all what the author is talking about (because it sucks).

You can cast files from your computer though, right? Which is different than desktop/full screen casting.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#269

Post by droithomme »

jefftk wrote: post #46
danShumway wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.... Note for OP: The reason this breaks without Javascript is because it's rendering the Markdown clientside. That could be moved to part of the build process without increasing your hosting requirements at all. I can see that you already have https://github.com/anderspitman/anderspitman.net/blob/master... started, so I'm assuming you know this already and t…

Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page. It's a cheap transformation, and it means you don't need any sort of server-side build process. Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

> Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

JS is enabled here and it doesn't render.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#270

Post by danShumway »

anderspitman wrote: post #226
danShumway wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Absolutely! Should be working now (or as soon as CloudFlare cache is purged). Thanks for the snippet.

Thanks a ton! It's showing up perfectly on my end.

As long as I know how to get to the text in some format, I'm usually fine with the rest, and markdown is a format that's very easy to read.

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