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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#281

Post by sjogress »

setr wrote: post #183
rodw wrote: post #179

I think this article is excellent, but one small nit: isn't it contradictory to say don't minimize HTML but do minimize SVG? The justification in the HTML case is that "view source is good" and "it's compressed over the wire anyway". Don't those arguments apply equally (or nearly equally) well to SVG?

I've never looked into svg specifically but I would assume that even if it's xml, it's generally far from reasonably human readable/editable, in which case you're not losing the properties by minimizing. Unreadable -> more unreadable is much less significant than readable -> unreadable

SVGs are human readable and human writable.

I used SVG as a templating/markup language for years. We were writing software for a specialized, embedded, browser that only understood JS and SVG.

It only took a few days of acclimatization to move from writing HTML to writing SVG.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#282

Post by unicornporn »

tempestn wrote: post #81
shasheene wrote: post #7

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

https://archivebox.io/

You bookmark in Pinboard or Delicious and ArchiveBox saves the page. Handy.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#283

Post by bonoboTP »

trishmapow2 wrote: post #256
kortilla wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they match a donation to themselves?

They currently have a deal with a donor who will donate $2 for every $1 the Archive gets in that time period.

Just sign such a deal with two donors and boom, feedback loop, exponential growth, infinite money!!

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#284

Post by BiteCode_dev »

The author says:

"that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'."

But at least in firefox, if you type "*" then your searched terms in the URL bar, it actually queries your bookmarks !

There are many such operators, you can search in your history ("^"), your tags ("+"), you tabs ("%"): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh...

My favorite is "?", which is not documented in this link. It forces search instead of resolving a domain name.

E.G: if I type "path.py", looking for the python lib with this name, Firefox will try to go to http://path.py, and will show me an error. I can just add " ?" at the end (with the space) and it will happily search.

It's a fantastic feature I wish more people knew about.

It very well done as well, as you can use it without moving your hands from the keyboard: Ctrl + l gets you to the URL bar, but Ctrl + k gets you to the URL bar, clears it, insert "? ", then let you type :)

It's my latest FF illumination, the previous one was discovering that Ctrl + Shirt + t was reopening the last closed tab.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#285

Post by hashmal »

ryandrake wrote: post #113
notatoad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Use whatever typography you want, so long as you self host the woff files. or use Google Web fonts, and set let last option in your font-family to be "serif" or "sans-serif" to let an appropriate typeface be used if your third-party font is unreachable. That's the beauty of text, the content should still be readable even if your desired font is unavailable.

Or don’t specify any font at all and leave it up to the user’s preference. Why presume you know better than the user?

When you go to a restaurant you let the chef prepare food for you.

Telling him to back off and let you cook because he can't know better than you (his user) would be absurd.

Same thing with design and typography. It requires skill and taste, and hopefully people will be delighted or simply consume the content for what it is, because the design/cooking just reveals that content in a convenient/useful shape.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#286

Post by abrolhos »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #284

The author says: "that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'." But at least in firefox, if you type "*" then your searched terms in the URL bar, it actually queries your bookmarks ! There are many such operators, you can search in your history ("^"), your tags ("+"), you tabs ("%"): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... My favorite…

Not sure you're aware of this one too... But, you might like the "Ctrl+Tab" shortcut as well. With it you can alternate between the last few active tabs, with thumbnails. Really handy.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#287

Post by _def »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #284

The author says: "that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'." But at least in firefox, if you type "*" then your searched terms in the URL bar, it actually queries your bookmarks ! There are many such operators, you can search in your history ("^"), your tags ("+"), you tabs ("%"): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... My favorite…

Thank you so much for this! Another handy and often overlooked feature are the shortcuts for bookmarks. And with %s in the URL you can search/navigate pretty fast. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s with the shortcut "w" could bring you the according article if you type "w foobar"

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#288

Post by mmsimanga »

atoav wrote: post #264

When I studied media science one of the most lasting experiences I had was a talk with one lady of the viennese film museum (on of the few film museums that store actual films instead of film props). As a digital native I never gave it a thought, but she told me that there is a collective memory gap in films that have been shot or stored digitally. With stuff that has been stored on film, there was always soem copy i…

Interesting analogy. I am having opposite problem. I have a shoe box half filled with miniDV tapes. Camera is long gone. I would like to transfer these to hard drive. Services that offer service digitize your tapes just too expensive for me. Most of the tapes probably just goofing around and there is issue of privacy. With current camcorder I just plug the SD card into computer and copy across.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#289

Post by Mojah »

Re: "Eliminate the broken URL risk"

This approach of monitoring a single URL is useful, especially if you can use the free version of monitoring services. It doesn't, however, go far enough.

Does your site only consist of a single page? Are there no links between pages? Or links to external resources?

There are few things as off-putting to your visitor by presenting them a link that ends in a 404 page.

Forgive the shameless plug, but this is the exact reason we built the Oh Dear [1] tool. We crawl the site, much like Google, to find those pages and present them to you so you can fix them.

It's not that expensive and it covers your _entire_ site, not just a single page that is designed to last. I hope your _entire_ site is designed to last, we like to help make that happen.

[1] https://ohdear.app/

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#290

Post by gdgtfiend » 

  > *from my high school years, where I first tasted the god-like feeling of dominance over software*
This piece of writing killed the rest of this article for me. While his point is worth making, the way he went about making it just sounds very childish. Especially for a Professor.
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