Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong • Hacker News Board

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#51

Post by Narishma » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #4

To the author: This website seems to use something called SmoothScroll (edit: a javascript library) which makes my scrolling really really jumpy/janky. I'm using chrome on a MacBook with the touchpad. Made it basically impossible to scroll around the page which in turn made it very difficult for me to read the article.

Works fine on Firefox for me. On the other hand, the text is in a small and thin font, light gray on a white background making it unreadable on my screen. Reader mode to the rescue, once again.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#52

Post by MisterBastahrd » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #47

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something on the site triggered mcafee on my laptop.

your bigger problem is likely that you're using mcafee

No choice, corporate laptop.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#53

Post by ampdepolymerase » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:36 AM UTC

Has Apple paid the author yet? Or is this yet another free bug bounty?

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#54

Post by throwanem » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #45

throwanem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really outside. The metadata was stored in a so-called "resource fork", with the file contents proper in a "data fork", both of which belonged to the file per se. Part of the resource fork was the "creator code", four bytes identifying the application which had created or could open the file, and the "type code", four more bytes defining which, among the potentially many kinds of files a given application could o…

Yes, and it sounded great on paper but was horrible for interoperability because a file was not self contained from the POV of filesystems that didn't support the resource fork. Every file you wanted to distribute cross platform needed 2 versions. One with all that metadata bundled up for Mac, one without it for everything else. It was a nightmare OS-X dropped it for good reason.

Yeah, it was painfully overcomplicated for sure - Palm OS did it much more seamlessly for cross-filesystem interop, but it was only when SD cards and /Palm/Launcher came along and you didn't really need Hotsync any more that it really got comfortable. It was very much of its time and I don't regret that it's gone, but it was certainly a clever and interesting design.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#55

Post by perryizgr8 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

dsjfalksjdflksa wrote: post #11

To this day osx still doesn't ship with a true plaintext gui editor.

It also doesn't ship with a paint program. OSx has a lot of ground to cover before it can function as a decent desktop OS.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#56

Post by userbinator » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

Two words: excessive complexity.

It's always seemed strange that an application called TextEdit is actually more than a text editor. I strongly believe that content-type autodetection, much less HTML rendering(!), most certainly does not belong in a text editor.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#57

Post by agumonkey » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #17

File extensions are a kludge anyway. (And Windows 10 still hides them by default, because hey, backwards compatibility, and you wouldn't want to confuse Grandma who's seen the file be called "grandkids" since Windows 95..). Why should the filetype be dependent on the name? People even think renaming a .BMP to .JPG means now it's a compressed file! Old school Macs stored the filetype outside of a file, so you can rena…

i always found that a bit funny to see the 'typing' hygiene vary between OSes just like between programming languages. Windows let you cast anything, MacOS.W had the application being the sole type constructor in a way. Very functional.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#58

Post by dylan604 » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

taejavu wrote: post #36

dsjfalksjdflksa wrote: post #11

To this day osx still doesn't ship with a true plaintext gui editor.

Not true, TextEdit is exactly this, it’s just not the default. One checkbox in preferences activates plaintext mode for all new files.

haha, after using OS X since the beginning, i have never even looked for this. after the first time of realizing it was rich text like WordPad and not a text editor Notepad, I never even attempted to use it for anything text related. better app options were available for pure text anyways. BBEdit was my gold standard in the way back days.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#59

Post by schwartzworld » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #38

lopatin wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also to the author: This is most likely costing you readers. Just weighing the pros and cons here: Pro: People who don't have smooth scrolling mouses will suddenly enjoy smooth scrolling on this website. Even this is a questionable "pro". Most people have scrolling setup how they want it and don't need it fixed on a per-website basis. Con: Degradating a core function of the computer (scrolling) for people who already…

It says something when the top comment isn't about the content of the article but about how bad someone broke people's browsing experience.

Yeah, it says you're on the Orange Site.

Re: Man who thought opening a TXT file is fine thought wrong

#60

Post by lubujackson » Sat, Apr 03, 2021, 1:41 AM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #41

marcinzm wrote: post #4

To the author: This website seems to use something called SmoothScroll (edit: a javascript library) which makes my scrolling really really jumpy/janky. I'm using chrome on a MacBook with the touchpad. Made it basically impossible to scroll around the page which in turn made it very difficult for me to read the article.

I consider messing with scroll to be one of the cardinal sins of web development.

Basically every single big site screws this up when lazy loading content - Twitter, YouTube, etc. If I drag down the scrollbar to position content where I want it on the page, invariably content gets loaded and pushed to the page. Because I am fixing the scrollbar by holding down the mouse button, the page jumps to a new position.

It is infuriating because this is solveable in many ways, the simplest being not to push during a mouseDown event.

But my new most hated thing is Google lazy showing details when I mouse over a result. Which means if I quickly go to click on the second link I mouse past the first link and it expands to the space where the second link was, so I either click the wrong link or have to reorient and then click the second link. I can't imagine how or why that feature exists.