The magic of HTML5 and S3 | Hacker News Reader

The magic of HTML5 and S3

threads2.scripting.com

35 pointsjessaustin28 comments

I thought S3 wasn't suitable because it doesn't return http status codes that browsers expect? Anyone know?

I'm not aware of any invalid status codes, the main issue is that vanilla S3 does not support index or error pages. Instead, it either returns Access Denied or a list of all objects when making a "GET /" request. However, S3 has a website feature, which allows you to set up index and error pages, and redirects.

You might also want to put CloudFront in front of the S3 website. You lose some capabilities like root domain, but you gain a lot of performance and voodoo magic like mapping part of your website to a different origin (e.g., you can request RSS feeds directly from a third-party website using only JavaScript and CloudFront as a proxy).

One problem is that S3's object availability is only 99.99%, which sounds good, but if your site has 20 assets it needs to load (html, js, img, fonts, whatever) then 1 out of every 50 non-cached loads could be expected to be missing an asset which can be a big problem for JS heavy sites.

I think you're off by an order of magnitude: 9999/10000 requests should succeed, so 1 in 500 loads of 20 assets would be expected to have an asset missing.

Oops, thanks for the fix

Using Cloudfront should improve your availability (if using Cloudfront URLs).

I'm planning on s3 to serve my static assets, and hoping to mitigate this by serving a small file from a traditional server that checks up on all links and does the whole back off request dance if there is a problem.

I was poking around and found this in the linked article, at the end of the article text:

  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://127.0.0.1:5337/
   opmlEditor/comments/
   button?title=The%20magic%20of%20HTML%205%20and%20S3&
   editorialDomain=comments.scripting.com></script>

What does it do? Wouldn't it fail loading something from my localhost?

This confuses me, and I am also unclear about the benefits HTML5 bring over a normal static website - S3 is already "infinitely scalable."

He just means that HTML5 allows you to do things purely locally that previously would have required some kind of interaction with a dynamic script on a web server.

Not familiar with OPML editor, but it looks like a way of activating features that are only available on the author's own computer (e.g., editing comments) that is useless to everyone else. Seems like a bad way of doing that though.

Dave's long-time software, Radio Userland http://radio.userland.com uses a local server to serve the UI of a blog publishing tool. I surmise it published this site, and this is an artifact.

In the dev console you can see that this script actually failed to load.

As a former user of Frontier, OPML Editor and Radio, I welcome this new outliner =)

I am having hard time understanding why we need this product given that WorkFlowy already provides this service and there doesn't appear to be a great demand and required innovation in this field.

I think it's because he/they are mistaken "product" with "project". To me this is just something fun someone has build. Kudos for putting in the time but it's not a product in any shape or form.

I would agree with you if Dave Winer were to be posting this in a passing. But he seems to be actively and heavily promoting it as a product people would consider using, and paying perhaps. You know Dave is not into providing things for free, so your reference to "fun" is probably misplaced.

I guess its all about perception. Personally I don't perceive this as something I would ever consider paying for. Its nothing I haven't seen before and it looks like its executed as a hobby project.

With that attitude we wouldn't have much improvement in anythin.

No one really knows if a given product will be successful or not.

The creator of this product wrote (http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/myNewCompanyAndOurF...):

"Little Outliner is a new beginning. Our easy on-ramp. We want to re-introduce idea processing, and using outliners to create presentations, but this time the difference is networking. I think you'll be amazed at what we come up with in the coming months."

Now, whether they'll be successful or not is anyone's guess, but clearly they have a plan and presumably that plan involves doing something better/different than workflowy (which is a good product that I pay for).

Let's wait and see and give them the benefit of the doubt?

It is not magic. It's the fat client getting fatter.

I made a simple tool to upload a local directory to S3 called s5tool (https://github.com/etaoins/s5tool). It's useful for managing static sites such as the one mentioned in the article. As a bonus it will attempt to pre-gzip assets for faster load times.

Could use Dropbox as the backend here as well, then you get caching, versioning etc for free as well

Don't you typically run up against traffic limits though? Seems like I've run into suspended pages more than a few times.

Hence Site44[1], which has a lot of other benefits like gzip compression, in-memory caching, etc. (I'm a founder of Site44.)

[1] http://www.site44.com

No "magic" here. They're just paying Amazon to host their content instead of hosting it themselves.

This is nifty but it does mean users aren't sharing data between machines anymore.

Some kind of sharing could be done with the peers to peers feature. Cf https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/02/hello-chrome-its-firefox-c...

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