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Comment by nameuserc | Hacker News Reader

I save ESC2J to a file and my "cls" is simply another file consisting of

cat file1

in my PATH. Only because sometimes printf or some other way to print ESC's might not be available.

The idea of starting up X11 so I can start the super-sized code complexity experiment that calls itself "Firefox", all just to get to a command line struck me. The fact they are calling the approach at Mozilla as "responsive design" I found insulting.

Are they in denial about just how big and complex Firefox is? This is not how you attain responsive design.

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They identified the Mozilla home page as an example of responsive design, not Firefox. The feature being demonstrated with that example was the ability to "resize" the browser window to see how a page built with "responsive design" in mind would be rendered with, say, a mobile device with a smaller screen. Pretty useful, if you ask me.

Definitely. I just wish they would make some changes so that we can use the "70's style command line" more with Firefox. In other words, options and arguments we can pass to Firefox (the xulrunner app) via the Linux/BSD/OSX/Windows commandline.

For example if I have Firefox running in Xvfb it would be nice to be able to issue remote commands (an early version of Mozilla did have something like this if I recall correctly: -remote), such as the commands they are implementing for this "graphical command line". It would be convenient to easily dump screenshots to image files without having to run something like Crowbar.

Anyway at least they are starting to acknowledge that not everyone uses a mouse or prefers using a trackpad over hitting keys. I mean keys as tactile buttons, not images of onscreen keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad.

Responsive design doesn't mean what you apparently think it does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_design

Ah! Thanks. So if I say "responsive" in relation to a computer, are people now going to think I'm talking about webpage layout?

To me, "responsive" means the amount of time between when I issue a command and when the computer has completed what I asked it to do.

I fail to understand why this phrase is offending you so badly.

  Let’s look at a more interesting example. The current design of 
  mozilla.org is a responsive design. I want to see how the headings 
  will show up on a smaller screen. If I’ve been working on the page, I 
  would likely know some of the IDs and structure used in the page, so 
  I could enter a command like:

"Responsive design" is a fairly established noun in the web design world. This is an article about new developer features in a web browser. Inside the context of the sentence, it's obvious they're talking about how a web page is constructed.

This is how web devs use "responsive design". It's being used by a web dev, in an article for other web devs. You might find it slightly confusing, but that's your problem, not theirs.

OS programmers and corn farmers use the word "kernel" to mean two different things, is this also a crime against nature?

kernel: a central, essential part of something

paraphrasing the dictionary definition

the meaning is similar in both contexts you mention.

indeed if we asked someone who did not know what an "os kernel" was, they might think of the meaning they do know: e.g., the innermost part of a seed of a cereal or nut

and they might guess based on what they know.

have you ever heard the phrase "the computer program has become non-responsive"

e.g. a graphical web browser such as Firefox

Mozilla developers are not committing "crimes against nature". But nonetheless they do create some annoyances that millions of people have to endure. That's not the developers' problem, it's the users' problem. Some might search for solutions to the annoyances. Such solutions could be quite valuable to users. They might read things that are meant for "web developers" because that is where the annoyances come from. They are created by web developers.

responsive: able to respond to something

Guess what, a responsive layout responds to media/container size variations, just like a computer program responds (or stops responding in your example) to user or system signals.

Is it a coincidence they had to link the term "responsive design" to a Wikipedia entry?

Is it not self-evident what "responsive design" means?

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