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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

#211

Post by zzo38computer »

zeta0134 wrote: post #30
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've long since run with the notion that if you must have Smart TV features, do it with an external box. Last time I checked the Roku devices were decent for this, but there's a bunch of alternatives, and some lovely FOSS stuff (Kodi comes to mind) that is much more privacy focused. The TV itself is a black box of mystery, and does NOT get to go on my network. It doesn't need my wifi password, and I certainly don't w…

Yes, having an external box can be a good idea, but some things you may want to have in the TV itself such as the picture adjustment settings. There might also be multiple inputs, and IMIDI interface which can be used to select between them and switch TV on/off and adjust volume and so on, allowing you to program other devices to control it.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#212

Post by duxup »

justinclift wrote: post #158
duxup wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My standard operating procedure for TVs is: Setup sound bar. Connect new TV to HDMI switch. Get the TV working with my remote. Throw TV remote in a corner somewhere.... I don't even try to use a smart TV's internal functions anymore. They're just big monitors to me.

Don't some smart tv's scan the local wifi networks and try to find one they can connect back home through? eg no password on it. Guessing they haven't started shipping with a dictionary to try brute forcing the most common passwords. :D

That thought had occurred to me, fortunately I don't have a guest network.

I do worry that one day someone is going to buy one of those Comcast modems that has the automatic Xfinity guest networks and it will find that ...

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#213

Post by jaywalk »

m-p-3 wrote: post #75
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…

TV makers should stop embedding the Smart TV features, and focus on either bundling an external box on dongle, or establish a standard for smartTV circuit board that you can replace by a third-party or pull out completely when the inevitable happens (system is unsupported/EOL, has some security flaws the manufacturer doesn't take seriously, etc. And more importantly, make the display works without such card.

How would that benefit the TV manufacturers?

Unless average Joes start clamoring for that, all of the cost associated with what you're asking for wouldn't help them sell a significantly larger number of TVs.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#214

Post by edflsafoiewq »

apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

You transfer 36K of JS on the first load. I estimate that all the entries together contain about 35K of gzipped Markdown.

Your largest entry (about dependencies) would be about 8K of gzipped HTML, and another quick estimate says that all the entries together would be about 50K of gzipped HTML.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#215

Post by anderspitman »

mtarnovan wrote: post #196
anderspitman wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW I actually agree with the underlying principle. It's just that I have specific things I'm aiming for with my site that require JS. I wish browsers were simpler. But that ship has sailed. In my perfect world, the JS-app functionality of browsers would be broken off into a separate "app player" application that users would download, and browsers would be stripped down to basic HTML and a subset of CSS (essentially fonts, colors, and flexbox). In that world I would definitely have an HTML-only version of my blog.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#216

Post by Martin_Scrafalo »

Bulleted list:

Please make your _stuff_ work with URLs. And I use that word ~~~lightly~~~ However, there doesn't seem to be any widely implemented standard for playing plain URLs, only walled gardens like the YouTube app. -- this is fucking annoying The Roku app for Android allows you to use your phone as a keyboard for the TV, rather than the awful [physical remote UX for input]. This is a great feature which I appreciate. -- whose standard are you using{?} I should be able to copy a URL from my phone (possibly obtained from scanning a QR code), paste it into the Roku Android app, and the Roku ;should; attempt to play the file at the URL. This is clunky, awkward, and :not particularly easy:. But it is simple, obvious, and intuitive. -- whose voice? Here is my plea: when you (_)don't(_) build hardware/software, but merely send your flying junk my way, please make it support the primitive, simple case. By all means implement the slick Chromecast style when sending good highfalutin stuff. It's OK when it works. HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet (and I use that word ~~~lightly~~~). When you build stuff, please make it work with (simple or complicated) URLs, as in myblog.com*, idiotsite.net or studiolo.fortdiurbino.net.

Edited by Federico P.S. Fuck all y'all

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#217

Post by anderspitman »

mywittyname wrote: post #94
baddox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense? Because the article is explaining some problem, and the article itself has some other unrelated problem?

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. The OP is arguing that the primitive, simple case for this page is to not use any javascript because it's unnecessary for the core functionality of this page. The content here can be displayed simply as a few kilobytes of raw HTML. Much like the author assumed that javascript is most primitive & simple functionalit…

It's a valid point, I edited my comment to concede it.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#218

Post by rahimnathwani »

bruckie wrote: post #188
rahimnathwani wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, someone already built it :) https://chromecast.link/

It looks like https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rabidgreml... may be the equivalent in Android app form.

Does it work with videos? The product description mentions HTML and static image formats. Neither the description nor any of the reviews mention videos.

I guess I could just spend 99 cents and 2 minutes to find out...

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#219

Post by Martin_Scrafalo »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #70
jefftk wrote: post #67

I think it should be possible to do this with the browser and the Chromecast protocol, since my understanding is "play a video from this URL" is the core of the protocol. Someone could build a website following https://developers.google.com/cast/docs/chrome_sender/integr... where you paste the URL of a video and are given the option to "cast" it to the TV. This would be some work, but only one person would need to do…

Right, someone already built it :) https://chromecast.link/

:(

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#220

Post by anderspitman »

mirimir wrote: post #61
dredmorbius wrote: post #2

Irony: blank page w/o JS, fails in Outline.com.

Funny, but with my cranky old Firefox, it loads just fine. With NoScript blocking both the site and Google. By "w/o JS" do you mean totally disabled? Or just NoScript?

How old is your Firefox? I actually wouldn't expect it to work on old browsers, since it uses native JS modules directly.
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