Personal website and blog of Dan Q: life, technology, magic, games, the Web, relationships, and more.
Visit danq.me → On Hacker News Jan 2023 – Jul 2026
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I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
View Source shows nothing, but the page has content. The Page With No Code is the kind of puzzle that makes web developers unhappy.
Dan explores the history of two (much-maligned) HTML tags of the yesterweb. With blinking marquees!
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?