The original reason to start the project which I had―which was the Germans were a danger―started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop […] the system in Princeton then at Los Alamos to try to make the bomb work. […] With any project like that, you continue to work trying to get success, having decided to do it. But what I did―immorally, I would say―was not to remember the reason that I said I was doing it. So that when the reason changed, which was that Germany was defeated, not the singlest thought came to my mind at all about that, that that meant now that I have to reconsider why I'm continuing to do this. I simply didn't think, okay?
-- Richard Feynman. Interview broadcast on BBC, 1981.
Submissions
A new suite of modern tools coming for editing and publishing RFCs
ietf.org
2 points·by cxr··0 comments
Don't fly if you can help it
michaelbluejay.com
4 points·by cxr··2 comments
Project was assigned for my Software Architecture course
danb.me
4 points·by cxr··1 comments
So long and thanks for all the applets
inside.java
1 points·by cxr··0 comments
Kiriakos Vlahos, the man who made Python better
blogs.embarcadero.com
3 points·by cxr··0 comments
CSV on the Web
csvw.org
5 points·by cxr··0 comments
Changes to Via, the Hypothesis proxy server for annotation
web.hypothes.is
1 points·by cxr··0 comments
ActivityPub Fuzzer: Improving Testing in the Fediverse
asml.cyber.harvard.edu
12 points·by cxr··4 comments
Hidden interface controls that affect usability
interactions.acm.org
565 points·by cxr··450 comments
Mooers's Law
en.wikipedia.org
2 points·by cxr··0 comments
Typesetting and printing a family memoir (2017)
teamten.com
48 points·by cxr··13 comments
Notes for an annotation SDK (2021)
blog.jonudell.net
21 points·by cxr··1 comments
Vanishing Culture: Keeping the Receipts
blog.archive.org
5 points·by cxr··0 comments
Critical social infrastructure for Zig communities
For a time, it was popular for movie trailers to end with a domain, often of the form "${ $TITLE }film.com", which would take you to the marketing site for that release. Nowadays there's a whole TLD specifically for movies.
It's a shame that isn't a norm for you to be able to plug a URL into a reader that consumes application-specific RSS (à la podcast clients) for the express purpose of giving notifications when that film is available (either for rent or by subscription) on a new platform.
(Ideally, of course, the media itself would be self-hosted, so you could paste the URL into e.g. VLC and encounter a platform-neutral way to negotiate payment directly with the distributor (or not and just get embedded ads—à la podcasts) and then you're off to the races.)
> There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
> <iframe sandbox=""> - which really is designed to be used as a sandbox
Not for untrusted content living on the same origin to prevent it from exercising any of the powers that it would ordinarily have to be able to access sensitive data. It's a misleading name and shouldn't have been chosen. There is no combination of CSP or the iframe sandbox attribute that can be relied upon for that purpose. This is a fundamental limitation of the way the specs were written.
(There needs to be a big warning about this on MDN, but moving from the old wiki to a wiki with GitHub for login to the GitHub-based pull request process really didn't help the there's-a-problem-on-this-page-but-limited-resources-to-make-things-better problem.)
CSP is optional and designed to be one part of a defense-in-depth strategy (to extent that it was thoughtfully designed at all—it's an awful standard that should not have made it past proposal stage). It's not a solution for sandboxing untrusted content and should not be relied upon that way. Treating it like one is a great demonstration of how some uses of CSP make people more vulnerable.
It's no use being pedantic if you're not going to be correct.
> This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another
The history and etymology doesn't support that definition, either; that's just another "common [mis]understanding" of the term. It's in the name. A compiler produces a compilation—an aggregate of multiple subroutines, including user-supplied ones and some by the system/programming environment, transformed into a single program for a given target.
(You're describing the process of "autocoding", a job that every compiler does, and a term that predates "transpiler" but that no one uses because they favor stretching the more frequently encountered term "compiler" for their use case.)
> You seem very angry and I clearly don't understand what you are talking about.
Luckily you managed to frame it so that the failure comes across like something that I got wrong and messed up and am responsible for, and that's the most important thing.
> Unfortunately Firefox doesn't support the FileSystem API so to do this you need to resort to uploading the entire source code directory each time you change a source file.
Right, it's so much less onerous to have people download and set up an entirely separate fickle toolchain—and needing to trust that the install triggers in the package.json of some transitive dependency won't exfiltrate your personal data or install some nefarious ineradicable background service onto your system, versus the two extra clicks you'd have to subject yourself to if you wanted to re-run the build.*
Wait, no.
> people [are] forced to ship "Chrome-based only" features
No they're not. By your own admission they could make their build scripts work with the standardized HTML5 APIs that are well-supported in all major browsers. They choose not to.
And you're not really responding to the substance, anyway—which is that JS programmers (frequently writing for browser runtimes, even) require that you install NodeJS, Bun, or Deno (because they hardcode the build scripts internals against one of those runtime's APIs). If programmers really were writing build scripts that you could run in Chrome but unfortunately not Firefox, then even that would be an improvement over the status quo. But that's not what we're talking about, because that's not happening.
* most of which are destined to be one-shot executions, anyway
That's a start at improving something. But it won't rid itself of the Playskool/Fisher-Price gimmick factor or have any lasting effect until we can convince JS developers to write their own tools in a standards-compliant dialect and use standardized APIs so that contributors can use the runtime they already have installed instead of being cajoled and browbeaten into installing NodeJS or Bun or Deno or whatever to do what the browser runtime is perfectly capable of: opening a project directory, executing the code comprising the build script, and outputting the build artifacts when it's done.
> the class="" property is in the HTML and that is the styling info
The class attribute (not "property") is in the HTML because it's part of HTML. It's markup. Element classes weren't created either by or for the CSS people when CSS came along. The class attribute predates CSS by years and has no more relation to "styling info" than the id attribute does.
> How can the browser execute git commands from opening a local html file?
It can't. The CONTRIBUTING.html shell would spit out a file and tell the user what Git commands need to be run—just like project READMEs (or landing pages like jekyllrb.com) show which commands will install the tool.
I am one of ~3 people primarily responsible for the JS Reference as it appeared/appears on developer.mozilla.org since before NodeJS (or V8) ever existed. I "know what JavaScript is".
-- Richard Feynman. Interview broadcast on BBC, 1981.