14 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2023
    1. Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them

      Nope (re: offline). You're confusing "browser-based" and "Web-based" (sort of the way people confuse statically typed" versus strongly typed*). They're different. You can have a fully offline browser-based interface. Most common browsers are every bit as amenable as being used as simple document viewers as Preview.app or Microsoft Word is. The browser's native file format is just a different sort—not DOCX, and not PDF (although lots of browsers can do PDF, too; you can't write apps in PDF, though—at least not in the subset supported by typical browsers). Instead of Office macros written in VBA, browsers support scripting offline documents in JS just like online documents. You can run your offline programs using the browser runtime, unless they're written to expect otherwise.

  2. Jun 2023
  3. Oct 2022
    1. @1:10:20

      With HTML you have, broadly speaking, an experience and you have content and CSS and a browser and a server and it all comes together at a particular moment in time, and the end user sitting at a desktop or holding their phone they get to see something. That includes dynamic content, or an ad was served, or whatever it is—it's an experience. PDF on the otherhand is a record. It persists, and I can share it with you. I can deliver it to you [...]

      NB: I agree with the distinction being made here, but I disagree that the former description is inherent to HTML. It's not inherent to anything, really, so much as it is emergent—the result of people acting as if they're dealing in live systems when they shouldn't.

  4. Sep 2022
    1. note that this will show the historical content within the current template – so not necessarily exactly the same as the original page
    1. not designed to be secure

      "secure" is used in this context to mean, roughly, "work with adversarial input"

    1. XBL is a proprietary technology developed by Mozilla

      Example of when "proprietary" is not an antonym of "open source".

  5. Aug 2022
    1. "Why have a locked wiki when you can instead just post static Web pages?"

      What even is a locked wiki insofar as the ways it differs from traditional (pre-wiki) content publishing pipelines? Where's the wiki part of it?

  6. Jul 2022
    1. The trouble with redefining "REST" to mean "not REST" is that the first step in learning known techniques to solve a problem is learning the terminology that people use to explain the techniques. If you think you know the terminology, but you have the wrong definition in your mind, you will not be able to understand the explanations, and you will not be able to figure out why you can't understand them, until you finally figure out that the definition you learned was wrong.
    1. Let's call this style of API pseduoREST or JSON-RPC.

      What the re-education around REST needs is a catchy label for what people call REST that works well as a light pejorative. Two-Bit History gave it a shot, coining the ad hoc acronym "FIOH", but it doesn't have the desired properties.

  7. Mar 2021
    1. It's a pet peeve, but I wish that people would stop describing their HTTP RPC APIs using the term "REST".

      The only solution is probably to advocate for moving away from "REST" entirely—for all parties. Mend the discord by coining two new terms and clearly articulate the two meanings that should be attached to them.

      ("Indian" is another word like this, but that did not get fully deprecated. This is resulted in lots of confusion. "'Indian'? Like Native Americans?" "No, Indian as in 'from India'" "Oh, all right." A similar thing is happening with "open source".)

      This probably involves making the terms (or at least one of them—so long as it's the right one) somewhat cool. Maybe the non-REST term should be AROH (pronounced like "arrow") for "Application RPC Over HTTP".

  8. Apr 2020
    1. In mainstream press, the word "hacker" is often used to refer to a malicious security cracker. There is a classic definition of the term "hacker", arising from its first documented uses related to information technologies at MIT, that is at odds with the way the term is usually used by journalists. The inheritors of the technical tradition of the word "hacker" as it was used at MIT sometimes take offense at the sloppy use of the term by journalists and others who are influenced by journalistic inaccuracy.