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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

Side note, the author's home page is an absolute relic from the past: https://kovidgoyal.net , including things like provisions for 56k modems, iframes, detection scripts for IE3 and AOL, and other gems.

It even looks like he has his own pre-jquery compliance library written about 18 years ago: https://kovidgoyal.net/scripts/VisualDocumentAPI.js

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Wow, he's the creator of calibre [0].

[0]: https://calibre-ebook.com/

Oh man - there's an Array.prototype.add definition in there. This was written before browsers could be expected to have Array.push(). That's insane.

And most of it still works perfectly fine on an iPad Pro, in a completely new browser from the future. Good times!

On safari desktop and mobile, I get:

> W A R N I N G! Your browser is not supported by this site.I cannot guarantee that things will work as they should. Consider downloading either Mozilla >=1.4 or Internet Explorer >= 6

Considering Safari only exists for about 15 years, and the site is older than that, I think it does a very reasonable suggestion.

It's the same for Firefox (61.0.2), maybe the version number is detected wrongly on the new versions.

And it's so damn fast!

Could be even faster with modern tech like HTTP2, HTTP2/PUSH, gzip, brotli and all that while looking much nicer with some basic CSS. Some additional speed could probably be squeezed out with something like anycast DNS.

I'm not sure what are you talking about. His site is served with SPDY and HTTP2 protocols https://i.imgur.com/LqGSHUj.png

AFAIK SPDY is the predecessor of HTTP2 and the site doesn't use HTTP2/PUSH.

In theory, yes. In practice, all that is inevitably coupled with monstrous pile of Javascript frameworks and dynamic loading and whatnot, and loads for 10 seconds on good days.

> DHTML

takes me back!

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