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The web runs on tolerance

shkspr.mobi

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Re: The web runs on tolerance

#61

Post by edent »

Incipient wrote: post #47

This whole article has, to be ragebait - surely? It's such a inane piece of writing, the world needs to give less time to anyone that genuinely holds these views. They're entitled to hold them, but they're still wrong. >It had an intolerant ideology. Without going into the various reasons why its trash, conforming to a spec is not intolerance, it's success. Imagine the Brooklyn bridge design committee saying "requiri…

Thank you very much for your constructive criticism on my writing. I appreciate the candid feedback.

I must take one small issue though. Every engineering project I've worked on has very definitely specified a tolerance. Something may be X cm ± Y mm.

Tolerance is essential to engineering.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#62

Post by wredcoll »

N_Lens wrote: post #8

I think the Author diverges from the main point - that web standards and browsers' interpretation rules are loosely held (tolerance), towards indirectly attacking the current US administration which is allegedly trending towards intolerance and isolationism. Bit of a weird tangent (Though not inaccurate).

It's literally a metaphor about the benefits of tolerance.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#63

Post by wredcoll »

charcircuit wrote: post #51
wredcoll wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent. > I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. Tell me more about this subset you wouldn't like to work with.

I do not want to work with people who are obnoxious, mentally unstable, love stirring drama, self centered, controlling, etc. These attributes can make it hard to work with others, or waste time that could have been spent actually building a good product for end users. Of course people are not robots, they have emotions and attitudes that are variable so some people will exhibit these qualities some of the time, but…

It's weird that you associate those qualities with the minorities currently being discriminiated against.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#64

Post by karlitooo »

wredcoll wrote: post #36
echelon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet I grew up on barely had any moderation at all. Or polarization. Or algorithms that feed on that polarization. I grew up in a conservative, religious family. The internet, forums, and IRC exposed me to lots of ideas outside my upbringing and helped shape who I am today. I was already starting to really dig biology, science, and evolution as a teenager. Early internet culture helped tip the scale. I'm now…

> Critically, the internet was not so polarized back then. Conservatives and socialists and liberal democrats (were they a thing?) could all talk amongst one another and generally get along Really? 4chan has been around preaching death and hatred to all sorts of minorities for, like, 20+ yeara at this point and it's hardly the first or only. It's great that there are better places on the web than 4chan, but those pla…

Present day racism is carefully calibrated to cause hurt and outrage. That wasn't really a thing in the 2000s even on 4chan. 4chan was more freakshow culture than what Gaming The Algo for Clicks did to our media diet

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#65

Post by groby_b »

Postel was wrong, and it's got nothing to do with tolerance of other people, and everything with solid engineering (or encouraging the absence thereof). It mattered for rapid adoption, it is the curse of any stable system.

But if we must make stretched analogies, I'll give you instead "The Standard You Walk Past" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_TfZdIhIgg

It's making a pretty compelling case that keeping standards matters, "anything goes" is a bad idea, and it does all that in the name of tolerance towards other humans.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#66

Post by argomo »

stingraycharles wrote: post #17
didgetmaster wrote: post #7

This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in. I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!…

Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”. There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.

For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#67

Post by tadfisher »

gldrk wrote: post #54

>You can make your HTML as malformed as you like and the web-browser will do its best to display the page for you. I love the todepond website, but the source-code makes me break out in a cold sweat. Yet it renders just fine. It renders just fine because it is syntactically valid HTML. HTML is not and is not supposed to be XML. It is originally an SGML application described by its Document Type Definition and SGML De…

More than that, HTML5 specifies how browsers handle "broken" HTML. There's a super-precise algorithm that dictates what to do for unclosed tags, how to fix up the DOM for incorrect nesting, specific fallbacks/behavior for invalid attributes, and so much more. I would say this algorithm, along with its element/attribute-specific components, are where most of the HTML5 effort was applied, and continues to be such for newer Web APIs.

Browsers "trying their best" was like half of the Browser Wars, and what HTML5 was largely created to address. The other half being nonstandard ActiveX crap and IE-specific JavaScript.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#68

Post by auxiliarymoose »

trimethylpurine wrote: post #37
sebular wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Open the console on l any mediocre webpage and you’ll see a stream of JavaScript errors. But it’s still working. One script crashes? Doesn’t matter to any other script. Unhandled exception? Rest of the app is still working fine. Hell, that button may work if you just click it again. And CSS syntax error causing only that single line of code to be ignored while every other line of code works fine is the very…

All that is very good. But as a back end guy dabbling in front end, it would be more welcoming if JS was a little intuitive. I'm very thankful for LLMs now helping with that a bit, but honestly even they seem to fail at JS more so than other languages, at least in my experience so far.

Much of the challenge in JS today is due to unnecessary packages, build systems, and workarounds found throughout blogs and forums which were reasonable 5-10 years ago but aren't really needed today. Unfortunately, LLMs tend to output old-fashioned JS.

With (almost) everyone using an up-to-date standards-compliant browser, you can sidestep most of the complexity and weirdness by just using the standard library and ES Modules (instead of frameworks, libraries, build systems etc.) and an IDE with good intellisense + inline documentation lookup.

MDN documentation is good and up to date overall, but I'm not sure there is a good overview/entry point resource that is up to date as of today... maybe I'll have to write it!

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#69

Post by bonesss »

gaigalas wrote: post #43

Dude. HTML4 era was full of parser hacks. Increasingly more and more parser hacks. XHTML tried to solve that, and make HTML parsing more acessible to everyone . It's not about rigor, it's about making it simpler. HTML5 goes in the other direction. It formalized all those hacks into very, very strict parsing rules. It's super strict and specific, to the point that only companies with large resources can realistically…

Well put. In that broken metaphor we’ve seemingly enter into a web ‘inclusiveness’ discussion focused on pronouns over, say, accessibility for visually impaired readers and readers reliant on tool-based assistance…

Degenerative diseases and chronic functional limitations are super, duper, inclusive to start with.

From SGML and crystallizing the dreams of archivists, librarians, and academics for centuries we’ve ended in a place where actual Microsoft has to use other companies’ web engine because “too ‘spensive” and the ability to even copy text from a website isn’t a guarantee. If you can even see the text under the ads, inline ads, the cookie popup, the delayed email list popup, and then the helpful ai chat agent pop-up.

Stricter markup yields simpler tooling yields better accessibility and transformations. Letting the public web degenerate hurts humanity, every race and creed included.

Re: The web runs on tolerance

#70

Post by bitwize »

Postel's Law was one of those Great Mistakes of computing, alongside null pointers, fork(2), and well, C in general. Conform to the spec or be in error. If you allow for sloppiness, you create a problem because different implementations will tolerate different kinds of sloppiness, yielding incompatibilities and horrors like "quirks mode".

XHTML tried to rein this in but by then the cat was out of the bag, and every Tom, Dick, and Mary who was trying to learn HTML was used to the mire tolerant behavior.

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