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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?

#551
post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've edited my comment to better present the issue.

Out of order closure should definitely error out with an “unclosed italic tag detected at line:…” error.

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

#553
post #37

A lot of things on https://killedbygoogle.com/ . I used to use 30-40 Google products and services. I'm down to 3-4. Google Picasa: Everything local, so fast, so good. I'm never going to give my photos to G Photos. Google Hangouts: Can't keep track of all the Google chat apps. I use Signal now. Google G Suite Legacy: It was supposed to be free forever. They killed it, tried to make me pay. I migrated out of Google. Go…

Picasa was awesome, they had face recognition years before almost everything else, in a nice offline package. Unfortunately the last public version has a bug that randomly swaps face tags, so you end up training on the wrong persons faces just enough to throw it all off, and the recognition becomes effectively worthless on thousands of family photos. 8( Digikam is a weak sauce replacement that barely gets the job don…

Immich is supposed to solve this nowadays: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

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

#554

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

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

#555

First Class and Hotline. Server/Client. First Class had broader userbase, such as schools and organizations in the groupware/collaborative segment (but also Mac user groups and so on). First Class was a comercial product (the server). It had filesharing (UL/DL), it had it's own desktop, mail, chat, IM, voice mail and more. Started out on Mac, but later became cross platform. Still you can find presentations and setup…

I ran a hotline server in my formative teenage years (on a server in my bedroom with a static ip), and we all hung out there. It was absolutely great.

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

#556

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

> - XHTML. Have you ever read the parsing rules for HTML 5, where the semantics for bad HTML were formalized? Browsers should just punt at the first error, display an error message, and render the rest of the page in Times Roman. Would it kill people to have to close their tags properly?

IMO there's a place for XHTML as a generated output format, but I think HTML itself should stay easy to author and lightweight as a markup format. Specifically when it comes to tag omission, if I'm writing text I don't want to see a bunch of `` or `

` everywhere. It's visual noise, and I just want a lightweight markup.

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

#557

The Plan 9 operating system. It's the closest thing to a Unix successor we ever got, taking the "everything is a file" philosophy to another level and allowing to easily share those files over the network to build distributed systems. Accessing any remote resources is easy and robust on Plan9, meanwhile on other systems we need to install specialized software with bad interoperability for each individual use case. Pl…

What’s stopping other Unix-like systems from adopting the everything is a file philosophy?

Probably that not everything can be cleanly abstracted as a file.

One might want to, e. G., have fine control over a how a network connection is handled. You can abstract that as a file but it becomes increasingly complicated and can make API design painful.

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

#558
post #549

- Photon, the graphical interface for QNX. Oriented more towards real time (widgets included gauges) but good enough to support two different web browsers. No delays. This was a real time operating system. - MacOS 8. Not the Linux thing, but Copeland. This was a modernized version of the original MacOS, continuing the tradition of no command line. Not having a command line forces everyone to get their act together ab…

I was all gung ho on XHTML back in the day until I realized that a single unclosed tag in an ad or another portion of our app that I had no control over would cause the entire page to fail. The user would see nothing except a giant ugly error. And your solution of rendering the rest of the page in Times New Roman isn’t an option. Do you try to maintain any of the HTML semantics or just render plain text? If it’s plai…

if the world was all XHTML, then you wouldn't put an ad on your site that wasn't valid XHTML, the same way you wouldn't import a python library that's not valid python.

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

#559
Lytro light field cameras. The tech was impressive and the company was able to put two products on to the shelves, though unfortunately they hadn't quite reached the image quality needed for professional photographers.

But now with the new Meta Ray-Bans featuring a light field display and with new media like gaussian splats we're on the verge of being able to make full usage of all the data those cameras were able capture, beyond the demos of "what if you could fix your focus after shooting" of back then.

Beyond high tech, there's a big market for novelty kinda-bad cameras like Polaroids or Instax. The first Lytro has the perfect form factor for that and was already bulky enough that slapping a printer on it wouldn't have hurt.

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

#560
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.

Delphi 2, the first 32bit version of Delphi, had all of this. Some, like threads, even had wrappers (TThread), but Delphi came with Win32 bindings out of the box so all Win32 functions were available too - and it came bundled with documentation for the APIs. In addition, calling out to a DLL was trivial so even if a function wasn't available, you could just define it. Pretty much anything you could do with a C compiler was possible with Delphi 2 too.

Free Pascal obviously has all of that stuff too.

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