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kroc

30 karma · joined July 16, 2010

Code is art
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kroc··on It's Time for Server-Side Browsers
What I’m proposing is that we replace PHP with a web browser so that the code we run on the server could be the same code we run on the client. To make it so developers only have to learn one language, one set of technologies.

That will eventually lead to decentralised applications, but in the mean time will simply lay the groundwork for it whilst people continue with the centralised model.

There will always be a need for centralised systems, the world is just not going to simply change their entire toolset and paradigm overnight. We must make centralised apps use pretty much the same technologies as decentralised ones first, then coax developers over.

kroc··on Hacker News app for Android (with login, voting, and commenting)
No. Any well written web page can cache itself for offline use, and use AJAX to load all data after the first page. This is how iUI works, and therefore most iPhone-specific web apps.
kroc··on Hacker News app for Android (with login, voting, and commenting)
Why. Why are we doing this? Why do people go and write this stuff when there is already the web. That doesn’t require an app store. It can use the same code as the actual website (imagine that).

Why are we running so fast in the wrong direction?

kroc··on RSS: A Reply (Author's follow up to "RSS Is Dying")
Site’s currently down (8:24 PM GMT, 10th) due to massive bandwidth. It is just a shared host and it suffices for 99% of the site‘s uptime. Google cache here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
kroc··on RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
How can there be demand if nobody is making it easy to use?
kroc··on RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that.

Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.

There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!

kroc··on RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it’s faster and gives them better features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be complaints.
kroc··on RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried
because the browser is supposed to provide the button.

Why do you think I’m worried? I don’t want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto-discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile.

Turning the key in a car shouldn’t present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn’t sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.

kroc··on John "Captain Crunch" Draper, the Hacker's Hacker
An alternative view of Captain Crunch: http://www.osnews.com/story/20606/_Captain_Crunch_on_Apple (see the snippet from the Recollection article). Read the full recollection article, this is an important read re: phreaking
kroc··on Dear Microsoft: Please Do Pinned Menus Like This
Bear in mind that a HTTP Request is significantly slower than the bytes in the page. A request could be anything from .25s to 2 whole seconds, if the bandwidth is saturated. Not least problems with blocking other parallel downloads and delaying the initial paint. HTTP requests that are not images or the CSS are to be absolutely avoided!
kroc··on Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness
I don’t think you understand what “CSS hack” means.
kroc··on Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness
Yes, the problem is that iPhone’s HTML layout engine breaks the page when you rotate the phone, then breaks it further when you rotate it back to where you were. I put the viewport tag in to solve the iPhone, but then the iPad came out and there’s no way to have a different viewport for an iPhone / iPad. Blame Apple, I’m still trying to find a working solution.
kroc··on Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness
Fixed, thanks for the keen-eye.
kroc··on Microsoft, Please Stop This Madness
Scrollbar should be there, what web browser are you using? The y-overflow is hidden on html, but not on body for page-centering reasons but this has not affected browsers I have tested thus far. Maybe you’re on kHTML?