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I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

justinjackson.ca

131–140 of 229 posts

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#131
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still just use HTML.

This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…

netlify for free static hosting. dirt simple no cc decent free teir

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#132
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".

They're right though. The Internet was better when it didn't have tons of people giving their unsolicited opinions and corporations coming in and having every single one of their actions be antithetical to the esprit of the WWW. It was better when people had to put in effort to find something and not take 30 seconds to select the first Google-approved search result.

Was it better for those who couldn't use it?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still just use HTML.

At least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.

Horrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#134
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the issue. You write a function to check if a number is odd. You seem to have this function in every project so you make a package for it so you, and others, can easily include it. This is exactly what npm is made for?

Testing whether a number is odd is done in 3 characters: n % 2 if you don't like the % you can also do it using a bitwise AND, this also handles negative numbers: n & 1 this is equal to 1 if the number is odd, 0 if it is even, and will be converted to true or false in a if statement. You don't need a library for this. And you should not need a library to handle string conversions, you should be aware of the types you…

You don't have to tell me how to calculate if a number is odd or even, that's not my point.

The thing is, n % 2, i need to do mental gymnastics do comprehend whats going on. Even if your function is just one line, I rather read isOdd or isEven instead of n % 1 of n % 2, remembering when 1 or 2 stand for even or odd is something I could have trouble with.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#135
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still just use HTML.

This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or so…

It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed.

The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#136
post #130

The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?

hostmaster, ftpmaster, listmaster, gophermaster, fingermaster, timemaster (NTP)

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#137

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some si…

When I was in primary school, at around 10- or 11-years-old there was a popular website that gave you a homepage and had challenges for doing things like making the header a certain size or having images and so on, I remember thinking it was really cool

I think it was called Grid or grid, I just had a look but couldn't find it

Think it was somehow linked to schools, this was in the UK around 2005

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get the issue. You write a function to check if a number is odd. You seem to have this function in every project so you make a package for it so you, and others, can easily include it. This is exactly what npm is made for?

The issue is the idea of introducing an external dependency for a one line function that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of programming should be able to write in their sleep. The idea of sharing code isn't flawed here, but the risk / reward in these cases is very much out of whack.

The risk / reward of using npm is always there. It doesn't matter how big the package is. Any dependency is a risk? You're free to not use the dependency. Nobody is forcing you.

If someone wants a 1 line dependency, I say let them. I have zero issues with that.

Again, if you think something is not how it supposed to be, maybe YOUR view on what it supposed to do is whack instead?

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#139
post #130

The “webmaster” designation probably came from the “webmaster@domain” functional email addresses, which in turn were modeled after the existing “postmaster@domain” convention for contacting the email admin(s) of a domain. Does anyone know if there were other *masters?

hostmaster, ftpmaster, listmaster, gophermaster, fingermaster, timemaster (NTP)

Right, at least hostmaster and listmaster are what I’m familiar with and should have thought of.

Re: I'm a fucking webmaster (2016)

#140
post #67

I miss those times. I could spend hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web, I imagine being a newcomer to such world and have to handle the over complexity of the current scenario without knowing that things could be simpler. I remember seeing a team member migrating a project from grunt to webpack, the project was just a 404 page. "You need to compile your assets" they say, just a cat *.css >…

It's funny, the package is-odd has dependencies itself. It depends on a package called `is-number`. Go figure. I finally understand how `node_modules/` directories grow to 100s of megabytes for the smallest apps Turtles all the way down.

It is a trade off.

In most other ecosystems such as Java, Python, PHP, etc if you have a dependency A that depends on B 1.0, and a dependency C that depends on B 2.0, you cannot have both of them installed, so you either pick one or the other, or some intermediate version which works in all cases, but many times you end up not being to use one of them or, worse, not able to upgrade either A or C because you cannot resolve all the dependencies anymore due to constraints.

In node you can do this, you can use both A and C even if they use their own, incompatible B versions. If both A and C depend on the same (or compatible) B version, then you only have one as in the other ecosystems. And you can always enforce and override what final version you want if necessary.

This, plus usually the inclusion of documentation, type definitions, source and transpiled code is why node_modules is usually pretty big.

But you don't ship node_modules "as is" to the browser (200MB node module does not mean a 200MB bundle). And usually this is not a problem for any modern laptop or server.

Is this better? Is this worse? Can't say, it is just a different tool with a different trade off.

But just "node modules 10Gb is bad" to me only tells the bad side of it, and usually comes from a lack of understanding of how this works and how it compares to other systems.

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