Comment by move-on-by | Hacker News Reader

Comment by move-on-by | Hacker News Reader

I’ve recently gotten very into NTP with GPS and PPS as a fun personal project. Just a couple weeks ago I was reading about him on Wikipedia and I could relate to this quote (as no one else I’ve talked to about PPS has shown any interest):

> he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief"

Debian recently switched to NTPSec, and I was happy to see how familiar their website style was to the main NTP site. In the FAQ I found:

> [Q] Why do these web pages look so 1990s

> [A] Because that simple look is good for people with visual impairments, and as a tribute to Dr. David Mills, the original architect of NTP who is himself visually impaired. Dr. Mills has very particular ideas about Web visuals, and this site is carefully styled to resemble his NTP documentation pages.

I’ve never had an opportunity to meet him, but he has certainly made a positive impact on my life. Rest in peace Dr. Mills.

Same here, getting into PTP, you end up studying a lot about timing on computers, and Dr. Mills is one of the main players in building up modern timing foundations! RIP, and thanks for all your contributions!

He really was. I remember encountering him on comp.protocols.time.ntp two decades ago and the breath of knowledge he had on computers keeping time was astounding, both at the time, and now that I look back at it.

here's that page

https://www.ntpsec.org/FAQ.html

I understand (and endorse) simplicity of design, but that page doesn't even have a link back to the home page. They've gone too far past accessibility into creating a less-accessible page...

Note well: all accessibility decisions are trade-offs. Do you need a link to the home page if you have a perfectly-good address bar? Some people do; for others, it's a nuisance. If someone with particular accessibility needs has designed a website, and diverged from usual practices, I tend to assume they had a reason for it. (That isn't to say I'll naïvely copy it. Usually I'll ask, but that's no longer possible in this case.) Imo, they should have a link (either <a> or <link>) with rel="up", so the browser's Up button works.

I think you miss the point. This page was linked to you from somewhere. “Home” in that context is back where you came from, I.e. the back button. Finding this page could have come from anywhere and sites don’t have to have pages keep you in their domain. That’s not how the web used to work. Nowadays everyone has their own “site” and it’s a much different eco system from decades ago.

Meh, it's common to want to navigate to the root of a domain to find more information if you've been linked to a subpage that may lack some useful context. You can of course edit the URL by hand, but that's less convenient. Intra-site navigation links have a purpose.

(Perhaps on another timeline browsers would have had an "up" button in addition to "back" and "forward" like filesystem browsers do, but that did not happen. Even <link rel> doesn't have an "up" option, though it does have "prev" and "next" – not that anyone uses <link> for anything but rel="stylesheet" and maybe rel="alternate". EDIT – rel="up" used to exist but was dropped from HTML5 with no reason given. I presume it's nevertheless supported by browsers and eg. screenreaders.)

The first website ever, at CERN [1], is not very consistent about this. Some pages [2] do link "home", but don't use this term: in this particular case, a link to "the WWW project" is given in the first sentence. Some [3] do not.

[1] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

[2] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Status.html

[3] http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Helping.html

> “Home” in that context is back where you came from, I.e. the back button.

...No, that would be "back", not "home". Those aren't interchangeable terms unless you are coming from a (or your browser's) home page.

Anyway, this page is an FAQ about the site itself. It is not a standalone document. Without the context of the rest of the site, it has no meaning or value. There is no better use case for intra-site links than a page written entirely about content on other parts of the site.

And if you haven't looked at it yet, you should probably look at Network Time Security (NTS). https://www.netnod.se/knowledge-base/What-is-Network-Time-Se...

Which NTP site are you referring to? I’m keen to check out some examples.

ntpsec.org

https://ntpsec.org/accomplishments.html is a good read for some fun insight in to what it takes to modernise a 1990s pre-git codebase and build chain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com