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A heck of a wild bug chase

georgemauer.net

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Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#21

Post by ori_b »

Ethee wrote: post #4
jof wrote: post #2

It seems to me like the underlying issue was ignoring HTTP semantics and making a state-changing link like a logout link a plain (HTTP GET) and not something like a form submission (HTTP POST). Having intuition for the foundational layers of our tools saves so much time and future headaches.

Genuine question: How do you believe one should learn these semantics? This is more something I've been pondering myself recently, because I agree with you that the foundational knowledge for our work in any tech stack is usually the most important for understanding higher abstractions. But with so much to know it feels impossible to 'know it all' so to speak especially if you wear more than one specialized hat. Then…

The RFCs are often fairly well written and not so hard to digest.

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#22

Post by theamk »

Ethee wrote: post #4
jof wrote: post #2

It seems to me like the underlying issue was ignoring HTTP semantics and making a state-changing link like a logout link a plain (HTTP GET) and not something like a form submission (HTTP POST). Having intuition for the foundational layers of our tools saves so much time and future headaches.

Genuine question: How do you believe one should learn these semantics? This is more something I've been pondering myself recently, because I agree with you that the foundational knowledge for our work in any tech stack is usually the most important for understanding higher abstractions. But with so much to know it feels impossible to 'know it all' so to speak especially if you wear more than one specialized hat. Then…

This can be complex sometimes, but in case of HTTP methods specifically, it's hard to imagine how one can't know about this.

You learn HTML (and see a mention of "POST" method); or read HTTP primer (and see reference to methods) or open browser inspection window and see prominent "Method" column, or see the reference in some other place. You get interested and want to look it up - say wikipedia is often a good start [0] for generic part. And the second sentence of description says it all:

> GET: The GET method requests that the target resource transfer a representation of its state. GET requests should only retrieve data and should have no other effect.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP#Request_methods

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#23

Post by theamk »

danjl wrote: post #15

Authentication is a major hurdle. Back in the days of desktop software, there was no authentication. Mobile apps can often avoid authentication too. Despite decades of web coding, and lots of "this authentication system will make life easy" claims, it is still hard and easy to mess up.

it's impossible to avoid authentication once you start sharing data between systems though. This includes basic stuff like "I only want to share the list with our graduates", as well things like "those preferences should be the same on every device which user X owns".

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#25

Post by KTibow »

andrewfromx wrote: post #16
whbrown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why make it a link if you aren't linking to anything?

so you don't have to set "cursor: pointer" in css

You should really use a button for this. Using anything else is semantically incorrect, and the "it comes with bad styles" argument doesn't make sense given a CSS reset is under 10 lines of code, or even less if you use the `all` style.

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#26

Post by boruto »

Ethee wrote: post #4
jof wrote: post #2

It seems to me like the underlying issue was ignoring HTTP semantics and making a state-changing link like a logout link a plain (HTTP GET) and not something like a form submission (HTTP POST). Having intuition for the foundational layers of our tools saves so much time and future headaches.

Genuine question: How do you believe one should learn these semantics? This is more something I've been pondering myself recently, because I agree with you that the foundational knowledge for our work in any tech stack is usually the most important for understanding higher abstractions. But with so much to know it feels impossible to 'know it all' so to speak especially if you wear more than one specialized hat. Then…

Personally, I think it comes from experience and learning. I read the comment and an old HN story popped into my head.

That was where I "learnt" side effects of not using verbs properly. It stuck to me from then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16964907

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#28

Post by danparsonson »

dzaima wrote: post #19
andrewfromx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so you don't have to set "cursor: pointer" in css

And it gives some baseline accessibility functionality. Sucks that there isn't any gerneral "I am clickable" element that neither has bad default click behavior, nor has its own likely-unfitting styling.

What's wrong with a button? You can make it look like an can't you?

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#29

Post by realxrobau »

So, in summary, because you added a whole bunch of stuff that didn't need to be there, it broke. Colour me surprised.

It sounds like this could be implemented almost completely without any of that, especially as you were using JavaScript for the data.

All I can hope is that you've learnt a lesson about unnecessary overcomplication.

Re: A heck of a wild bug chase

#30

Post by soneca »

togakangaroo wrote: post #18
thedanbob wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no form submission, I'm not sure where you got that. There was also no POST. OP was saying the logout function should have been behind a form submission / POST.

Ah, yes, I mean, agree that would have been technically correct, but like I said, its just not how a lot of the web works. auth0-nextjs seems to react to `GET` by default (though it might also work with `POST` and you certainly can override things)

So OP was correct that a proper use of the foundational layer of HTTP would have saved time, yours in particular, right?

Also, I didn’t get your ”Claude predicted your tone smiley” thing. OP tone seemed polite and clear. Your tone, on the other hand, seemed defensive and dismissive. Even after you realizing that you initially misunderstood what OP said, adding a “I mean” and a “but I like I said” to reinforce you were right even while misreading what OP said (rather than just acknowledging you got it wrong in the first reading).

I would go even further and speculate that you were predisposed to get a dismissive tone from a web forum (your previous Claude test suggests that) so much that you got a perfectly fine comment and misread in a way that it felt in the “wrong tone” to you. Even misunderstanding what the post said. All of that to confirm your predisposition.

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