Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: This website is valid JSON

webdatarender.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 240 posts

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#181

Post by aidos »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #126
chrismorgan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says: > I'm creating a blog platform using this concept. Yeah, please don’t; this is an abomination that’s fun for demonstrating and teaching how these things work, but should absolutely never be used in reality. You could use this as your data model foundation upon which to build a generator , but you should never under any circumstances actually serve this stuff.

Moreover this is not even a "plain JSON". While I don't think the OP doesn't make this exact claim, an arbitrary JSON with the `#render` bootstrap won't necessarily work because the JSON can contain valid HTML tags... Interesting as it stands, utterly useless in practice.

Can’t you put the render at the top and the script can block before anything else to make sure a) it always executes and b) removes all the json content from the page.

Or actually, you can probably just put some closing angles before the start of your render to make sure you don’t get broken from above. Little sketchy though.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#182

Post by silvester23 »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #178
sillysaurusx wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a depressing comment. It's the opposite of the hacker spirit. The web has made it easier than ever to discourage people from trying anything new. New ideas seem like bad ideas, because otherwise people would be doing them. One could imagine your objection applying to React: "What a horrible idea. It's a nice hack, but under no circumstances should you actually build webpages like this. Webpages are built…

I think the difference is that nothing in React is abusing fault tolerance in a browser to the extent that this is. This very specifically works only because browsers don't generally care that an HTML page is anything close to valid HTML. There's no guarantee at all that this will continue to be the case, and it's resonable to assume that some browser in the future might decide to do render things that are very clear…

In fact, at least Firefox already has support for displaying JSON files. I assume this does not happen here because eventually, there actually is an tag.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#183

Post by chrismorgan »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #176
chrismorgan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says: > I'm creating a blog platform using this concept. Yeah, please don’t; this is an abomination that’s fun for demonstrating and teaching how these things work, but should absolutely never be used in reality. You could use this as your data model foundation upon which to build a generator , but you should never under any circumstances actually serve this stuff.

This is such a depressing comment. It's the opposite of the hacker spirit. The web has made it easier than ever to discourage people from trying anything new. New ideas seem like bad ideas, because otherwise people would be doing them. One could imagine your objection applying to React: "What a horrible idea. It's a nice hack, but under no circumstances should you actually build webpages like this. Webpages are built…

I’m going to double down here.

React and its ilk were designed for use in apps, where there are meaningful advantages in powering things entirely with client-side scripting rather than generating server-side HTML and possibly enhancing it on the client side with scripting.

They were then abused by increasingly many people for rendering static content, things like blogs.

These people were using the wrong tool for the job, and it has had a detrimental effect on the web.

Now, pages are regularly far heavier than before with expensive client-side code to do stuff that should have been done server-side in almost all cases, and it became popular enough that search engines eventually had to cave and introduce a full JavaScript execution environment in their indexers, tooling everywhere got a lot more complicated, and the last state of the web was worse than the first.

There is a place for things like React: in rich apps, and perhaps even for server-side rendering, though I’m not fond of that for things like blogs because it encourages you to end up depending on it on the client side too.

But client-side JavaScript app frameworks made some formerly-impossible things possible, and formerly-complex-and-unmaintainable things tractable.

This monstrosity, on the other hand, offers no actual benefits for the user, and does introduce a few new problems (quirks mode for styling, and an unnecessary dependency on JavaScript). And so I say it should never be exposed to the client side. Use it as an input format for your blog generator if you like, but don’t try shipping a wonky JSON/HTML polyglot directly.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#184

Post by sillysaurusx »

chrismorgan wrote: post #183
sillysaurusx wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a depressing comment. It's the opposite of the hacker spirit. The web has made it easier than ever to discourage people from trying anything new. New ideas seem like bad ideas, because otherwise people would be doing them. One could imagine your objection applying to React: "What a horrible idea. It's a nice hack, but under no circumstances should you actually build webpages like this. Webpages are built…

I’m going to double down here. React and its ilk were designed for use in apps , where there are meaningful advantages in powering things entirely with client-side scripting rather than generating server-side HTML and possibly enhancing it on the client side with scripting. They were then abused by increasingly many people for rendering static content, things like blogs. These people were using the wrong tool for the…

Look. We're on a Show HN. You call his work a monstrosity with no benefits for the user. You call it an abomination. When you've used up all your insults, what's left? What are you going to call something deserving of hate? It's so petty and bitter, and you need to go have fun with something. Go play!

As for your React commentary, it's 4:42am my friend, and I was just sad to see someone take such a hot steamy dump on someone's work on a Show HN thread without a single other person standing up for them. But all of your points about React can be summed up as "well, yes, that's what happens when something is successful: history is rewritten to make it seem like it had a place from the beginning."

If someone was like "Show HN: React - a new way to write websites," it feels like a guarantee you'd be right there like "But it breaks when you turn off Javascript!" Meanwhile, even Tor admitted defeat long ago and enabled JS by default.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#185

Post by beshrkayali »

From what I can see, your JSON still contains "style" information in the form of Markdown. So this doesn't really separate information from design. If we're going to accept Makrdown as minimal styling, why not just use regular HTML. Which technically is already separating between information (HTML markup) and design (CSS).

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#186

Post by flyx86 »

Animats wrote: post #115

I think someone just re-invented XSLT.

Okay so I wondered whether we can leverage XSLT in order to render the JSON without quirks mode. The idea is:

* We have an XSL stylesheet that ignores input and renders out the HTML contained in "#render"

* Along with the JSON file, we send a header `Link ; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/xsl"`

* We send the JSON with `Content-Type application/xml`

* Browser renders the HTML via the stylesheet and then the JavaScript takes over and renders the page without quirks mode

Sadly, this doesn't work because when the browser can't parse the JSON as XML, it stops processing and doesn't call the stylesheet :(

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#187

Post by lattay »

zelly wrote: post #99
habitue wrote: post #10

This is a really cool hack. > The JSON must contain only pure information without any concern about design or markup. Wellll.. I mean the json has markdown syntax in it. That's a lot nicer than html tags for markup, but it's still markup. In case anyone reading hasn't seen it before, browsers have a thing called XSLT built into them that does something similar for XML documents. You serve up your data as XML, add a t…

> Apparently web standards folks in the early 2000s thought the future was XML all the way down. It should have been, but just like the masses rejected LISP for its parens, the masses rejected XML for the closing tag. We could have avoided PHP and the zoo of MVC frameworks.

Programming languages are addressed to humans, XML is addressed to machine. That is the difference. BTW the problem with lisp is not the parens, it is that it is too powerful for its own good. C++ and Java got there popularity from there restrictions really.

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#188

Post by cubic »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #176
chrismorgan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says: > I'm creating a blog platform using this concept. Yeah, please don’t; this is an abomination that’s fun for demonstrating and teaching how these things work, but should absolutely never be used in reality. You could use this as your data model foundation upon which to build a generator , but you should never under any circumstances actually serve this stuff.

This is such a depressing comment. It's the opposite of the hacker spirit. The web has made it easier than ever to discourage people from trying anything new. New ideas seem like bad ideas, because otherwise people would be doing them. One could imagine your objection applying to React: "What a horrible idea. It's a nice hack, but under no circumstances should you actually build webpages like this. Webpages are built…

The primary reason for calling it an abomination is that if they actually plan on having this used (especially if by other people) it will spectacularly break the moment Chrome decides to make their quirks mode more strict.

It's a fun hack, although not exactly very unique. See also the very old by now "Website in a PNG file" concept, which does the exact same thing: https://gist.github.com/gasman/2560551

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#189

Post by toyg »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #176
chrismorgan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The page says: > I'm creating a blog platform using this concept. Yeah, please don’t; this is an abomination that’s fun for demonstrating and teaching how these things work, but should absolutely never be used in reality. You could use this as your data model foundation upon which to build a generator , but you should never under any circumstances actually serve this stuff.

This is such a depressing comment. It's the opposite of the hacker spirit. The web has made it easier than ever to discourage people from trying anything new. New ideas seem like bad ideas, because otherwise people would be doing them. One could imagine your objection applying to React: "What a horrible idea. It's a nice hack, but under no circumstances should you actually build webpages like this. Webpages are built…

This is just a bad idea. Apart from abusing browser rendering quirks (which is unfortunately a sad tradition of the web, something that has claimed the life of entire technology stacks like xml/xhtml), it removes any hope of producing webpages accessible from screen readers and similar. In comparison, JS-only pages look like model citizens. This is the equivalent of abusing IE hot-comments and other CSS-parsing bugs to style your website, but worse (at least that technique was useful).

Re: Show HN: This website is valid JSON

#190

Post by znpy »

> The website is readily available to be consumed outside the browser via JSON, but also still presentable to users accessing through the web browser.

Wasn't XHTML (and thus html5) supposed to be parsable, since it's basically XML (specifically, the html spec redefined as XML) ?

Post reply on HN