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Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#471

Post by hulitu »

Y-bar wrote: post #290
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #281

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

> more security holes than anything else.

Adobe was never known for its security or quality.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#472

Post by yoz-y »

reactordev wrote: post #465
maratc wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to remind you that text [0] that has been working for ages in every browser ever, is NOT a valid XHTML, and should be rejected by GP's proposal. I, for one, is kinda happy that XHTML is dead. [0]: By I mean and by I mean , and the reason it's not valid HTML is that the order of closing is not reverse of the order of opening as it should properly be .

It’s totally valid XHTML, just not recognized. XHTML allows you to use XML and are just XML nodes with no schema. The correct form has been and will always be and . Since the beginning.

The problem there is the order of tags not their names.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#473

Post by Corrado »

I really liked Google Circles, a feature of Google+ social media. It allowed you to target content to specific groups of users. You could have a "family" circle or a "work" circle and not have to worry about cross posting something accidentally. It was a small thing but it made it really easy to manage your posts.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#474

Post by zweifuss »

MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro (1997) and Sidewinder Force Feedback 2 (USB). You can buy similar today, but nowhere near the pricepoint. Also the out of the box support by Windows has vanished, and therefore the incentive of game developers to include force feedback.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#475

Post by gregsadetsky »

coreyhn wrote: post #74

Yahoo pipes. It was so great at creating rss feeds and custom workflows. There are replacements now like Zapier and n8n but loved that. Also google reader which is mentioned multiple times already.

Definitely recommend reading https://retool.com/pipes about the history of Pipes, with lots of input from the people who worked on it

(It’s not super obvious, especially on mobile, but once you see the site, just scroll down to see the content)

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#476

Post by eterm »

chrismorgan wrote: post #428
eterm wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you forget to close a element. What happens? Even today, after years of better error messages, the strict validator at https://validator.w3.org/check says: Error Line 22, Column 4: end tag for "b" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified What is line 22? It's up to you to go hunting back through the document, to find the un-closed 'b' tag. Back in the day, the error messages were even more misleading than this…

For reference, observe what happens if you try opening this malformed document in a browser: save it with a .xhtml extension, or serve it with MIME type application/xhtml+xml. Firefox displays naught but the error: XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: . Location: file:///tmp/x.xhtml Line Number 22, Column 3: --^ Chromium displays this banner on top of the document up to the error: This page contains the follo…

Thanks for showing these. We can see Firefox matches the same style of accurate but unhelpful error message.

Chromium is much more helpful in the error message, directing the user to both line 19 and 22. It also made the user-friendly choice to render up to the error.

In the context of XHTML, we should also keep in mind that Chrome post-dates XHTML by almost a decade.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#477

Post by le-mark »

Havoc wrote: post #363

Pascal/Delphi - especially in the educational context. Crazy fast compiler so doesn't frustrate trial & erroring students, decent type system without the wildness of say rust and all the basic programming building blocks you want students to grasp are present without language specific funkiness.

Iirc Delphi didn’t have threads, sockets, or OS integration (signals, file watching …). So it wasn’t suited to systems programming ie servers and services. It nailed gui applications, and that was a lot. Maybe freepascal has threads and sockets but imo it was too late.

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#478

Post by herpdyderp »

prox wrote: post #406
neya wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.

Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better though!

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#479

Post by Austizzle »

Qem wrote: post #457
dlcarrier wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The easiest way to avoid patent liabilities is to always be 20 years behind.

20 years behind get us back to Windows XP, that had a better experience than Windows 11 anyway.

I've heard people say this, and believed it myself for a long time, but recently I set up a windows XP VM and was shocked by how bad the quality of life was.

I think nostalgia is influencing this opinion quite a bit, and we don't realize the mountain of tiny usability improvements that have been made since XP

Re: Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

#480

Post by pessimizer »

mock-possum wrote: post #322
kesor wrote: post #306

Geocities ; It was a "put your html here" Free web hosting back when people barely knew what html was. Today you have to be a rocket scientist to find a way to host a free static "simple" page online.

I’ll bet you I could ask any LLM about it and have something launched within an hour. tumblr will practically let you do that for chrissake

tumblr is nothing like a webpage. LLMs were just invented 5 minutes ago and are losing money hand over fist until people are dependent, then will be very expensive to use; and you still have to figure out how to host, where to host, and how much it's going to cost you. So, I have no idea what you're getting at.

You could have said Wordpress.com or something. It's not quite a website, but it's close. It's also probably going to be Typepad (i.e. defunct) in a few years and Blogger is probably going to be there quicker than that.

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