ZenPsycho

so they should tackle accessibility (20%) before mac (8%) and linux (2%) support

until accessibility is implemented, don’t use this please

it’s a distributed personal content addressed blob object store, with a variety of configurable storage back ends, plus a web interface to make that kind of usable to a human for human things.

it’s like git but for all your stuff.

why would you want to use it? you probably wouldn’t, quite yet. but it’s an interesting attempt at doing something a little more sophisticated than a plain file system.

I was shadowbanned by dang for expressing disappointment in some HN commenter's defense of coronavirus conspiracy videos. I really wish there were a way to delete my account and all my posts, but this is apparently the best they can do.

also, you may be interested in the openflash project

https://github.com/open-flash

and the shuobject api

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/blob/16451d8836fa85f4b16e...

I forgot to mention the myriad ways that flash would interact with the browser and the operating system, with swfs often designed to interact with browser javascript in particular, in platform and browser specific ways. the various network protocols, RTMP streaming, prioprietary video codecs, ALPHA MASKED video, the CSS parser and styling engine! the API has everything but the kitchen sink. You can have a look at the sorts of challenges you're in for by looking at Shumway's issues register here:

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/issues

I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why previous reimplementation efforts didn't get anywhere. Here's where they get stuck

swf format: 100% implemented

Tamarind AS3 VM: Open sourced by adobe.

AS1, AS2, AS3: Not technically 100% but effectively so

Flash platform API: Enormous and bug ridden, like mapping the coastline of finland. you can get 90% through this and have 90% to go, over and over again for however many decades you care to work on it. It's not like the stuff here is hard, it's just the sheer quantity of stuff, like, for instance, the precise way that XML whitespace gets parsed by the XML parser into a DOM matters. The gamma interpretation of RGBA colours. And so on.

Flash rendering pipeline: No one has succeeded in figuring out how this works, at all. You can get far enough for strongbad, but for 100% compatibility, the CheerpX approach is the only one that I think has any chance of success.

The worst part of that preservation problem is, that as a DRM measure, some games will "phone home" to download a swf component that implements some critical path of the game. If the server goes down, those games are dead in the water unless you can reimplement the missing pieces.

if there were a way to delete all my posts and my account I would do that. the hacker news community has become thoroughly disappointing to me and I retroactively want all my contributions withdrawn. i want nothing to do with it.

Forgivable for a child, perhaps. but not for a president, or a ceo, or startup founder.

this kid really embodies the american spirit: rich white boy doing whatever the fuck he wants without the slightest concern for who he might hurt or kill in the process, all in the delusional pursuit of a meaningless status symbol he has been conned into thinking he can get because of the cultish adherence to the belief it’s the land of equal opportunity despite any and all evidence to the contrary, all while trumpeting about how great he is to anyone who will listen

in my non expert impression from reading a lot on the topic, in the grand scheme of pollution and environmental problems, waste paper ranks very very low on the list of problems we should be worried about.

That said, I always liked the idea of receipts being replaced by QR codes that display on a little LCD screen, and automatically logged into a receipts app.

Well obviously nothing is impossible, but this sorta work is about as close to literally rocket surgery as you can get. Software: difficult, hardware: difficult, thousands of dollars of specialist equipment, and the steady hands of a surgeon. There's a difference between possible and "possible".

also there's a difference between devising a technique for a model, and doing a repair on this specific device. To get to a working technique you probably need to brick a lot of machines.

i would have thought miniaturisation would make this basically impossible without thousands of dollars of specialist equipment. I’ve never known a mac repair shop to do anything other than replace the whole bosrd. the thing is smaller than a raspberry pi.

spend enough time on hacker news and you’ve seen many srticles complaining specifically about how unrepairable macs are. especially newer ones, that cryptographically brick themselves if they detect tampering.

pretty hard to educate people when the tools for distinguishing between bullocks and expwrt opinion are discredited by 1000 yourube videos.

you know what else tanks the economy? lots of people dying.

by all means inject yourself with bleach as your “expert” suggests but don’t pretend that people deciding to spread covid19 around because they believe it’s caused from miasmas are only hurting themselves.

welcome to the list of hacker news commenters I am extremely disappointed in then. I cannot logically argue you into caring about human life. though personally i don’t think conspiracy theory videos and slippery slope arguments are more important.

yes that’s why I am mocking the folks who think people dying is fine, and “freedom of speech” is more important.

Really disappointed in hacker news today. Children all of you, crying for the right to scream "fire" in a crowded theater.

What would be nice is if there was something like a standard test or demo set of HTML for all these to work against, which would enable a way to switch themes.

So, how many deaths are you willing to be responsible for? make sure to scale it up to youtube size.

i found this too, (but i can’t find a demo page) https://github.com/npjg/new-dawn

the one positive thing about table based design, is you could code a module, and just echo it out anywhere you wanted it with say, php or coldfusion, and it would mostly just work. transplanting a chunk of semantic html to a site with a different stylesheet though, if you wanted it to look the same, requires some forward planning. that is, it needs to be designed as a component, its css js and html all moved together in lockstep. and if you’re trying to be a good pure citizen, they’re in three different files and you wcho them out into the head, foot and body in turn, being careful that the js appears after anything it depends on. it would be easier to just inline the css and js and echo it all out at once, hut that will make hixie sad. and so it seems sometimes you want self contained components with all their batteries included. sometimes you want to control certain aspects of appearance in some central location so it’s easy to keep everything looking consistent. it’s not always obvious how to find the balance.

all I said was that scoping is an easier mental model than specificity. i am not saying that is a bad thing. but i can see how it would seem that way since a lot of programmers, whether they realise it or not, aggressively look down on things that are easy. so it’s essy to assume that when i say something is easier, i am implying it’s bad or weak, but i assure you i don’t mean that.

then why is BEM more complex than just plain CSS? if the idea is to reduce complexity, that’s a giant fail.

look, i love CSS. Not dumping on it. but you have a bit of stockholme syndrome going on here. sometimes loving something means realistically looking at its flaws and limitations. and you seem to have a distorted view of history, and what a “stylesheet” is. (they existed for decades before CSS was invented, and come from the tradition of printing and writing, not design so much. they do not, generally speaking, specify layout. layout specifies layout.) from the start, browsers didn’t have a css engine. css was added later, and has never fully exposed every piece of the browser display engine. some of the browsers needed to be rewritten from scratch for this to even be possible. as for layout, from the start and for a very long rime, the position of the w3c and browser authors is that website authors shouldn’t want layout and refused to implement any layout capabilities. in their view, layout should be left up to the client, and a website author should focus only on writing plain semantic documents. they told people to stop using floats for layout because it got in the way of client decisions about layout. they have only been added grudgingly, and after the forced removal of the people who were blocking it. i for one welcome these layout capabilities, and am glad the old farts didn’t get in the way. that doesn’t mean we’re up to par with the best layout engines though.

your link makes only one reference to style: “style of shape”, and a passing reference to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide with regard to keeping non layout elements consistent, and that page in turn, which makes no reference to layout.

“float” and “normal” (what?) aren’t layout modes. the rest didn’t exist in css until relatively recently. postion: relative exists, yes, but it doesn’t do what you say it does. - it sets the top, left, bottom and right properties to be relative its own natural position. it doesn’t specify any relationship to any other element. the other properties you say specify layout relative other elements- don’t do what you think they do either. align and margin only effects an element’s content, margin only refers to other elements in edge cases, and float was only ever supposed to let you embed figures that text would wraparound. it’s use for layout was an abuse and not what it was designed for. Though i can see how it can seem like those elements seem like they refer to other elements, but that is just a consequence of the properties interacting with the document flow algorithm, which is there with or without css.

while css now does have real layout modules: flexbox and grid, CSS wasn’t designed for layout and it just isn’t very good at it, especially if you compare it to say, cocoa autolayout, or the flexbox model in UI frameworks that were designed to do this stuff at the start instesd of having it awkwardly bolted on. and just what is document flow? is it a layout algorithm? no, it’s a greedy word wrap algorithm applied to boxes. that’s it.

finally, 15 year old display: table and flex hacks? what are you smoking. ie8 was released in 2009 and didn’t uproot ie6 and ie7 until many years later. i had to have fallbacks for ie7 up to 2015. flex only became usable after 2015. it existed before that but not in all the browsers.

the closest thing in css to what I am talking about is position:absolute, which implicitly refers an element to its nearest parent with either position relative or position absolute. i don’t get to identify which element or elements i would like to refer to directly.

the only other thing is percentage unit which refers to a percentage of the paren’s width or height depending on which property it appears in- which was annoying enough they almost fixed it with vw and vh units which refer specifically to width and height of the viewport, but if i want a proportion of any other element’s dinensions my option is to use javascript or eat a bag of donkeys.

you’re kind of missing my point. which is fine because i didn’t spend a whole lot of words explaining it.

i am not saying table based design is bad. but we did originally move away from it for legitimate reasons that seem to have been largely forgotten, and as a result we now have developers who build json theme files and react frameworks that wire “darkmode=true” individually through every component instead of just using css for what it was designed to do: to exactly be a theme configuration format.

a lot of where things have gone wrong is CSS started to be used for layout, which was originally a hack, abusing the float property to do things it was never designed to do. and css has never gotten good at it, because fundamentally layout is about relationships between elements, while CSS is stuck only ever specifying properties ON elements. sure we have display table, flexbox and css grid, but css is an incredibly awkward and unnatural way to express those concepts. app frameworks deal with layout seperately from colors and fonts, which is how it should be done. and so this is why it’s all hacks and workarounds in css land. it doesn’t have to be this way. but it’s how it is.

there’s using it deliberately as a tool, and running into it unexpectedly and doing absurd things to work around it like it’s an obstacle to overcome. i see much more of the latter than the former; squarely i think because most css is written by people who don’t know how to use specificity - so they come up with things like BEM, or css in js frameworks to force specificity away like it’s a flaw in the system. all this work goes in because module scope is an easier mental model to grasp than specificity, which i suppose works more like traits. but, having been in this web making game long enough, it seems like a return to table based design and font tags. just with different syntax.

This is conspiracy theory logic. You could literally use this same line of argument to blame anything bad on a vague "explosion of javascript", fact free. Not very impressive either since it relies on smearing people's competence and professionalism based on handwaving instead of any kind of serious engagement with the facts of the situation. Moving on.