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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

#191

Post by mijoharas »

justinclift wrote: post #154
tmountain wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse yet, Smart TVs often brick themselves due to failed software updates. My last Sony TV did an overnight Android update, and I found it in a state where it'd show the Android boot logo and subsequently shut down. Some Google research showed that this has happened to hundreds of people (youtube videos outlining the problem, etc). Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty, and no amount of hac…

> Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty. Interestingly, apparently in the UK (or maybe EU?) there's a defined period an appliance is required to work for, to be "fit for purpose". Note - not a warranty thing, it's a consumer goods thing. Not living in the UK any more (thanks Brexit), so don't remember off hand the period of time though.

I believe it's at least two years and I thought it was an EU wide thing (though I used it in the UK).

I always laugh when I see something say "1 year warranty" as I know two years is required.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#192

Post by zzo38computer »

anderspitman wrote: post #133
egdod wrote: post #8

Please make your stuff work without JavaScript. This is a simple text-only web page (in courier new ffs) and it refuses to load with JavaScript disabled. There is no valid reason for this.

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

One possibility is to fix it so that there is a block which contains a link to the Markdown source (or if the way it is set up makes that difficult, instructions for accessing it). I highly suggest doing this if you do not want to prerender it on the server. (I saw another comment which mentioned the Markdown file, and was able to read it from that.)

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#193

Post by anderspitman »

crazygringo wrote: post #100

I don't believe I've ever, once, in my entire history of browsing the internet, come across a direct hyperlink to a video file to play in the browser. Virtually universally, videos are embedded in webpages, and occasionally a link is provided that downloads rather than plays a video. So I think this is just a use-case issue: the average user is exceedingly unlikely to ever want to watch a raw video file specified by…

Author here. It's probably worth mentioning that the future I'm trying to help build[0] involves users having ownership over their own data. Passing things like capability URLs[1] around is going to be an important part of that future.

[0] https://moosedrive.io/

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#194

Post by mijoharas »

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…

I used to write software for samsung smart tvs along with other TV OSes and games consoles.

Samsung/Tizen was one of the worst in my experience (the only thing I found more annoying was PlayStation only giving a windows sdk when the box itself is basically a BSD. Let me develop on Linux dammit!)

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#195

Post by zeveb »

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.

> Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page.

Requiring readers to execute arbitrary code in order to read content seems like a terrible way to implement a web page.

Nor is it cheap: it requires every single reader to execute the same code, burning CPU over and over and over when it could be done once for all readers, by the server.

> 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, you can require execute privileges in order to publish content, but anyone who publishes that way should expect that many people won't read what he writes.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#196

Post by mtarnovan »

anderspitman wrote: post #176
mbreese wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is very much an HTTP thing. When you request a resource over a URL, you should get the resource... instead with their site you get an HTML page with a bunch of javascript includes... that then retrieves content. It works, but it is opposite of what they are arguing for. Now, this is this person's personal site... they can do what they want. But it's pretty ironic to put a rant about working with URLs on a si…

The URL does work. I don't say anything in the post about reading what's on the other end. What you're saying would be like if I had said in the article that I should be able to give the Roku a video format it doesn't support and expect it to work. My website should work for anyone using a browser with default settings. I never claimed it was a static HTML site. It's an interactive JavaScript application.

That's exactly my point. It's a website. It's meant to be consumed by browsers, so it's fine if the served resource is a SPA that renders the content lazily or whatever. The claim that SPAs somehow violate HTTP seems weird to me.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#197

Post by zokier »

anderspitman wrote: post #127
zokier wrote: post #62

Few minutes of googling found this, and few other similar thingies that send urls to chromecast just fine. http://movies.foamsnet.com/url/ discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365256

I don't have a Chromecast. I have a Roku TV. One of the implied points of this article is that the solution I'm suggesting would work for any device as a fallback, let them implement whatever other fancy protocols they want.

> However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app.

But chromecast is essentially that standard you ask for, otherwise "apps" like I linked wouldn't work. Heck, as far as I know (I'm not really a Chrome user), Chrome has this functionality built-in, so you can send URLs directly from browser to a chromecast device.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#198

Post by zzo38computer »

stefan_ wrote: post #35

URLs are an utter failure, normal people don't understand them, the only protocol they are ever used for is HTTP, special characters are a mess, IPv6 turns the insanity up to 11. The one other use of URLs has been tricking unwitting users into launching vulnerable applications with malicious input, because applications registering themselves for protocols was a thing once added, then never critically thought about, e…

URLs are used for protocols other than HTTP(S), although it is most common with HTTP(S). Other URI schemes are sometimes used where a URL is needed to make a link to something else (such as in a HTML document, or a Gopher menu item that links to something using a protocol which Gopher does not support linking to (HTTP being one of these protocols), or opening local files or other stuff in a web browser, or for some uses in RDF).

But I agree that IPv6 makes it messy. (I had my own idea which is version 10 (numbers 7, 8, 9 are unusable) which uses the same format like version 4 but with sixteen octets instead of four, and some other differences too.)

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#199

Post by moby_click »

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…

Tizen could be a great OS if Samsung did not lock it down and enabled building from source. It is a lot closer to Linux than Android. I use it on a watch/fitness-tracker and the whole package would be great if the development was not hamstrung by Samsung.

You need to sign packages with a certificate you get from Samsung and tie it to your device ids for sideloading. For that, you need Tizen Studio, which is a custom outdated version of eclipse, depending on outdated versions of some external libraries. I tried it in a container, which worked fine, except for the signature generation. So I ran it in a sufficiently outdated VM.

Unfortunately, this developer cert will only get you so far and for the complete API, you need a partner level cert.

If you put up with all this, there's the documentation[0]. It takes ages to load and you can't easily download the damn thing, because they pull in the content via XHR. Why, Samsung, why?

[0]: https://developer.tizen.org/development/api-references/nativ...

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#200

Post by zeveb »

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. JS is part of the web platform, and there are tons of amazing things it allows you to do.

People who choose to turn off JavaScript are protecting themselves, because JavaScript enables all sorts of attacks on one's security and privacy.

JavaScript is not part of the web platform. The Web is a web (hence the name) of interlinked documents: the core requirements for a web of interlinked documents are a protocol (we have HTTP) and a document format (HTML); a style format (CSS) is nice too, albeit not strictly necessary (one can read unstyled documents in links, lynx, elinks, eww, w3m or whatever else just fine).

There is absolutely no requirement for executing arbitrary, potentially malicious, unverified code from untrusted authors distributed globally. Are there great examples of cool JavaScript applications? Yes, certainly. Is JavaScript a core requirement to support a web of interlinked documents — i.e., the Web? No, not at all.

To the contrary, JavaScript is murdering the Web, and this page's misuse is a prime example. JavaScript delenda est!

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