Grumbledour

I strongly disagree. Empty alt text means no image description. Think about that. You are blind. Your Screen reader tells you "image", nothing more.

How are you to know if this image is purely decorational or if the author just didn't include any alt text, like happens so often?

Also, don't think of the alt text as part of the surrounding text. Think of it as many browsers would display it, a box with a broken image icon with the alt text besides it. Would you not wonder what would have been displayed there if the image would work?

And do images that are just for decoration really need to be images? Can they not be for example background images in other elements? Like styling an hr element for a visual divider instead of using just a divider image?

But in any case, provide some alt text! If it just says "divider", "logo" or "decoration", that is still better than nothing for someone who can't see it at all.

My screen reader knowledge is a bit dusty, so this might have changed:

As far as I know, screen readers don't read the title tag by themselves, though users can request it. So your approach works. And I think it is also has nicer semantics.

Personally, I prefer to use a text link with the company name, then move the text out with css and add the logo as a background image. This also works great in text browsers of course, the company/site name just becomes the h1 of the page.

After over a decade of discussion about the semantic web and accessibility, after so many best practices and recommendations from experts, it breaks my heart that in 2020 we are back to that.

While I can't speak for the author, I have a few blind friends who use screen readers. They often access a list of all links in a page to navigate, but naturally, you get only the text of the link in this list. I suspect the same problems occurs if you use tab to go from link to link. Surrounding content is of course not read aloud unless requested.

I want to add my personal bugbear, sortable and filterable tables. And Lists of all links on a page. Oh, also expose RSS feeds again. And what about standard form controls that actually could be styled completely with css? Really, the more I think about it, the more come to mind.

While it sounds like it would make browsers more complex, I think it would actually reduce complexity, because the browser would not need even more programming capability and APIs just to enable web developers to create these kind of features themselves in a thousand variations of Javascript that adds bloat to every connection and slows down end user devices.

I never really understood what people have against float. I think it works fine for most use cases and is not to difficult.

Now table layouts where quite a pain because they got very complex very fast. Flexbox and Grid are fine I guess, but I always found them a bit harder to understand than float and did not so much they offered that I needed.

I think it is actually the other way around. We technically minded people are mostly the tastemakers on this kind of topics.

I know a lot of "normal" people using Firefox with privacy add-ons, mostly because someone knowledgeable told them to. I have often seen these people very receptive when I tell them why I deem Firefox a better Choice then Chrome.

I do however see no way to convince my coworkers to switch. And look at hacker news threads on this topic. It's always some variation of "I don't like google collecting everything I do but Mozilla did this one thing once so I can never ever use Firefox!"

So if we, the people who are supposed to be in the know don't recommend it, why would anyone who is not in the know want to use it?

It is and there is no reason not to do it this way just because it has been around for a long time.

However, for accessibility reasons, Son of Suckerfish[0] works a bit better. It moves hidden items out of the viewport instead of using display: none, thus making the menu usable to screenreaders users without them having to "hover". It would of course also be advisable, to expand the :hover to also inlclude :focus.

[0] https://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

What kind of SBC to use for such a project really is an interesting question.

On one hand I would love a "shell" where I could just plug in a compute module and have a working portable. On the other hand, the compute modules are more expensive and seem really hard to source, why it's easy and cheap to find a Pi Zero. If one would need to solder it to an expansion board oneself, this would probably be a hurdle for many people. And then, if we are thinking about different boards, why not something else entirely? With more/better capabilities, like included charging circuit or as you mentioned, PCI-E?

I guess there is just no good answer on what would be an adequate basis for such a type of computer. Every option has some drawbacks somewhere.

Thanks, that's actually a good point.

I knew there was an option to vouch for comments but just assumed I did not have enough Karma to do so. But another comment in this discussion mentioned the "hidden" flag button, which you only see if you click the comments timestamp.

And sure enough, the vouch button is just there. So the problem may just be that you have to know where to find it. Which I now do. And hopefully everyone who didn't and reads this now as well.

So, out of curiosity: Why do you care if you get downvoted? Are there negative repercussions when using the site?

But you know, making sure your post is factual correct, nicely worded and thought out seems to be a good consequence. Reading that I actually wish I was afraid of downvotes so I put more effort into some of mine.

The one thing I don't like is when comments become "dead", which I understand happens after too many downvotes.

The reason I dislike this, is that besides obviously racist or otherwise inappropriate comments, there are regularly normal seeming comments that are dead. Now, there may be reasons for this I am just not privy to, but I feel it hinders discussion when some opinions that don't seem problematic are just silenced like this.

[Edit]: And rereading my own comment, I think I want to clarify that I am not talking about free speech issues or political discussions here, but I regularly encounter factual seeming or explanatory comments in technical discussions that are dead and it just baffles me.

As far as I understand it, they plan to do that. [0]

The history of the project is a bit confusing though. Not sure if a name change will not confuse things even more. Though the new name sound better to me as well.

[0] https://github.com/codimd/server/issues/452

I occasionally wonder where forums have gone.

There are communities still out there, but there seems to be no modern forum software? They have either been around forever or, if a bit newer, do nothing without mbs of JS.

Now that activitypub is here, there seem to be half a dozen reddit clones in development. Microblogging and social media are also everywhere, but what about forums? What about topic-centric, lasting conversations instead of hot-topic and people-centric chats with no history?

This sound interesting. Do you have some more details or maybe even some code somewhere?

I would love to find ways to more easily identify users on here. The username, despite my best efforts, I mostly overlook or can't remember.

On Forums, with Avatar images, this used to be so much simpler.

Well, just goes to show you how out of date I am! Though after reading up on it, I still don't like it much. It makes the web behave in ways I don't expect it to and I don't really see why anyone would really need this, unless they want to fundamentally change the way the web is expected to work.

I am not up to date on this kind of technology, but reading the article, this sound terrible! Not the guardians implementation, but the concept of locally "caching", though I would call it installing, executable code, that can then intercept network requests and basically do whatever it wants? Why would we think this is a good idea?

I am not surprised by Chrome doing something like this. But firefox too? I hope this will be opt-in.

I am not sure I get the benefit of looking just at one rss feed at a time.

But that said, for the longest time, firefox did just style the feed directly and I am still sad they removed this. Maybe there is a browser plugin which just adds the style back?

Traditionally, RSS Readers are programs run on your computer and thus require no login.

The only variants are popular, because you get the same experience from every device to sync subscribed feeds, read/unread counts etc.

You could host such a service yourself with something like tinytinyrss for example[0].

But you can just as well use any feed reader available for your platform of choice. Thunderbird for example has provided this feature for ages besides email.

They do of course also exist as terminal applications. One example would be newsboat[1].

[0] https://tt-rss.org/ [1] https://newsboat.org/

I really struggle with the UI on this one. Some notes:

- No title bar makes using the window harder than it needs to be.

- Huge symbols I have to hover over to see what they do + a hamburger menu. A traditional menu would be easier to use for me at least.

- Speaking of hover, whats with the weird, animated back-button for folders that when it appears overlaps other elements?

- Font sizes. Really, they seem to big even for me as a visually impaired person

- General non-nativeness. That Options dialog as a website modal is just weird and jumps around when switching categories.

I don't mean to be to negative here, maybe I am just getting old, but this really seems not to be my cup of tea, though apart from the UI, I really like the idea and the use of pandoc/latex, YAML Frontmatter, saving as just files etc.

If this had a more traditional UI and would use less ressources it would come pretty close to a note taking app I often thought about but was to lazy to try my hand at myself.

I guess this has to be expected these days. This is not a small, tight knit community and there seems to be a part of the general population who revels in this kind of comments.

But I see far more of them on other platforms, for example in comments sections on news sites.

The fact that the most egregious ones get downvoted quickly here is something that speaks in favor of this community, I would say.

I am always a bit surprised how often people call hacker news toxic. Has that word changed or am I just to old and jaded? I mean, sure, it's opinionated, it's got quite a few blind spots, it's a bit rough around the edges sometime. But the only comments I would really call toxic are already dead [0]. Now, I am not saying hacker news could not be nicer, but many people here seem to at least try to make reasonable arguments and I have yet to see it devolve into shouting matches like so many other places on the Internet. Maybe I just read to many Forums back in the day, but Hacker News by and large seems civil enough to me.

This is of course enforced through the only thin sheer of community, where you really have to look out for peoples usernames to get even an idea of who you are talking to. While probably beneficial in this regard, I often wish there were some sort of avatars or other features to more easily recognize people from thread to thread.

[0] Though it is interesting, that among the dead comments is nearly always one that just seems harmless and often even a valid argument. So turning dead comments to display seems kind of important to not miss those. I wonder what is up with that?

Does the gopherpedia just strip out inline links? This seems like a big trade off to me. And the formatting seems also a bit plain which makes things like source code hard to read.

Though I think this is my biggest gripe with Gopher or Gemini. I love the idea of going back to a more text focused web where the user decides how to consume content, but I really don't get the like for plain text. I still want it to be rich text, regarding formatting and semantic meaning. Plain Text just seems tedious.

I would say the difference is that forums are about topics/discussion while social media is about people.

There is a difference if you use it to discuss your interests with like minded individuals or if you broadcast to an audience. I think this is why social media mostly works in small groups or why many people on facebook still find groups with limited topics useful even if they hate the rest.

It is also my main gripe with things like SSB or the fediverse. They work much better than other social media, because they encourage smaller, more tight knight communities, but they are often still people focused, not discussion focused.

Well, I wanted "Save to my calendar" when our self-built date inputs still opened new windows with html tables as calendars to pick a date, but I get your point and I lumped this under "forms suck". I still shudder when thinking about implementing multi-file uploads in php.

I think this is an interesting and important argument, because I always felt many shortcomings of the modern web were actually caused by browser vendors and their reluctance to improve their platforms and the web.

We have so many custom UI Elements, because forms did and still do suck. RSS always had a back seat, because it always was second class in browsers. Semantic web died outside of search engines, because browsers did not offer features like "Save event to my calendar". And boy, have I been promised for a long time I might someday be able to sort HTML tables by click.

Just a non exhaustive list of my pet peeves, but there are many more examples.

The Gophersphere seems to prosper and I have seen some interest in Project Gemini[0] over on Mastodon in the last weeks. So I guess People are trying and somewhat succeeding.

Personally, I am also quite skeptical of the benefits of these approaches. I would like a web more focused on documents, but many of the "forbidden" features these communities define are actually things I was excited about when they were introduced and still would not want to miss on the web. At the same time, just limiting the technology will not make it magically better.

I would love to see more experimentation towards more hypertext and the things it could offer to the user, but just using a subset of old technology seem not really like a great way forward.

At the same time, why can having a cleaner, more performant web not be a social movement amongst developers? I still remember when many of our websites features "Valid XHTML" or "Made with Web Standards" Badges, to show our peers and the world what was important to us. Maybe setting some rough guidelines what we envision a modern, performant and user respecting web to be and whipping up a few badges to show our colors could get as further then trying to reinvent the technology from scratch?

[0] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

HN must do more to block spam than to filter it out by hand. The dead links are far from the kind and number of automated spam you see elsewhere.

That Email is a hassle but not a big one is exactly the point why sites ask for one.

And Captcha? You talked about spying before and this is exactly what captcha does these days. Its massively invasive, plus it was always annoying and never really worked well for its intended purpose.

I have to say, it seems a bit like your argument is stuck a few decades ago. While I quite like the thought experiment of how the internet could work with essentially anonymous and frictionless participation, I don't think it ever has or at least not for decades. And examples like hn and reddit are interesting, but every other blogs open comments section show that this working is rather the exception than the norm.

I consider myself privacy conscious, and from the options captcha, email and BTC, email for me strikes the right balance of ease of use, anonymity and effectiveness. More options would always be welcome though. Conecpts like Indieauth for example, look promising, but let's not kid ourselves, privacy wise, they require more of me than providing a fake address to get an email. And just like the BTC solution, it would probably keep many more people out if it were the only option.

This seems a bit harsh to me in response to asking for a valid email address for proof of realness and to be contacted when necessary. Reddit surely requires one. Can't remember if hn did, but don't know how they keep out spam.

I also like the idea of using BTC you mentioned in another post to state good intentions, but acquiring BTC to use in the first place seems like much more hassle, registrations and sharing of data is required.

I think there does not need to be just one or the other. Talking to NPCs is just as much fun as killing the monster and if the talk actually aids in killing the monster or brings complications, it's even more fun, because overcoming obstacles of any kind is what's fun in roleplaying games. I am mostly focusing on tabletop here, because computer games often pale in comparison, but regardless, a good mix makes a good game.

It's personal preference if you lean more into action or social, but I find either end of the spectrum to be to limited to just one thing.