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john-ajon What's it like to be an Octopus? (2017)

Hm, that is a good question. Evolutionarily, there is not necessarily any benefit for the octopus to being conscious of color, but there has to be some way in which its body, if only mechanically, "perceives" color and imitates it.

john-ajon Why I still use an old PowerPC Mac

What's wrong with that? I happen to prefer a "lower" resolution on a laptop (and by "lower" I mean the same pixel density as my IPS monitor, which is 1920x1200). Unless I use an operating system that has completely solved the problem of GUI scaling, I don't see the benefit of higher pixel densities, only constant issues with incompatible applications.

john-ajon Mimalloc – A compact general-purpose allocator

I never like names that require a “pronounced like” note, but cool project regardless.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

The thing is, I don’t want any generation at all, at least not with my actual HTML pages.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

It absolutely is a fair criticism of Jekyll, because I have experience with it. I want it to work without having to manually set some key – I want my posts put in specific subdirectories by ... actually putting them in specific subdirectories. Which is impossible with Jekyll.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

Well, I guess we’ll see if my script (that doesn’t even exist) grows.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

I think people mention Jekyll especially because it’s supported directly by GitHub – that is, they generate it for you (which is a bad idea, really, because of the differences between the various versions of Jekyll).

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

> But I guess my broader point is that if I have to create a shell script to quickly generate the boilerplate file stuff for a new post/page, I’m _basically_ already doing what early PHP was designed to do.

I don’t think my proposed shell script (which I don’t even use) adds any complexity. (See my other comment [1] about it.)

Of course, I agree that it can go too far, and yes, sometimes we’re reinventing old stuff, but sometimes, we’re rather discovering that something that happens to be old actually works pretty well, if not better than whatever modern method we were using.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241438

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

> Well I have this script processing all my directories...

I didn’t suggest that; I suggested something like the following:

    cp -r "$1" "$2"
    sed -i '...' "$2/index.html" # remove old text

Not at all like PHP.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

Yeah, I’m considering changing that.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

I used Jekyll before, but I found myself always having to fight it to do what I wanted. That’s why I switched to my current approach.

> The only caveats I see on this websites is, when they setup the width of the content. I love fluid pure HTML websites.

Hm, thanks, I might change that.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

Somebody else in this thread said it right, I think: the primary reason that PHP, CMSs etc. got popular is that people wanted the same header on every page, with the same links, instead of just a “back” link. I really have no need for that, which is why pure HTML works for me.

Of course, if I want an RRS feed, I need some dynamic generation. But I also think it stops there.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

> fine if you're learning stuff by doing it but for god's sake don't go suggesting it's "easy"...

This is exactly what I’ve come to realize. Static site generators are not at all as simple, easy or intuitive as you might think.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

I agree, especially with the part about retroactive breakage. It’s very easy with static site generators; with just HTML and CSS, not so much.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

I don’t think this is as simple as you suggest (because I’ve tried things like it). First, you have to keep track of which documents need the same header/footer (unless all are exactly the same). Second, you have to extract the title from the content somehow. There are a bunch of little steps like these that make it more complex (in my mind) than just writing HTML directly.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

Hm, I’m interested, but isn’t SMGL practically a different language? Apart from syntax, are those concepts translatable to HTML? I mean, can I use it to write web pages?

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

I hear you, but the benefit of HTML (especially in a WYSIWYG editor like Seamonkey that doesn’t support CSS) is that your style sheet and basic page layout is already done. When you start writing, you very rarely need to adjust it.

john-ajon Writing HTML in HTML

HTML Notepad looks really interesting...! Thanks for the tip!

john-ajon Bash 5.0 released

Judging from this thread, Bash doesn’t seem to be the only shell to support these types of variables, but I agree – it’s unintuitive and surprising.

john-ajon Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier

> I also run XMPP server for friends and family and actually all of them are very happy with it. With Conversations this entire experience looks like any other modern messenger.

Does Conversations do something extra to support sending messages to people who are offline? If so, how well does it work? Because that's what I find to be the biggest gripe people have (myself included) with XMPP.

john-ajon The Eno notation language

> What you're seeing there is actually validation :), the lat/lng type is not magically inferred but instead explicitly requested by the code - if it were not valid it would generate a user-friendly, localized error message. Also the underlying document hierarchy that holds the data is validated. So on the contrary it is actually hard not to validate content in eno.

Please make this clear on the website! I think it’s a clever idea.

Also, this has garnered some attention on Lobste.rs [1], if you’re interested to read the discussion there as well.

[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/jno6gb/eno_notation_language_libraries

john-ajon Crooked Style Sheeding – Webpage tracking using only CSS

This could easily be stopped by a change in browser behavior. If web browsers downloaded contacted every address specified with `url()` automatically on page load, without considering the conditions, this type of conditional requests would be impossible.

Conceivably, you could solve it through a simple browser extension that looks through all of the page’s stylesheets and calls all URLs present in the CSS before the page is rendered.

In an ideal implementation, though, URLs dependant on “static”, non-identifiable conditions, such as an image with `display: none`, would be left alone.

john-ajon Let’s Kill JavaScript (and Replace It with Something Better)

Hello! I'm the author of this article. I created a new account to post this. I hope it's not too long, but if you're in a hurry, reading the abstract/introduction is enough to understand the gist of it. I'd gladly answer any questions, criticism or feedback :-)

Edit: I removed "kill" from the title of the article, because I now realize it sounded a little harsh. That harshness wasn't intentional :-)