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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 262 posts.

2011
34

Broken Links

I’ve been getting madder and madder about the increasing use of dorky web links; for example, twitter.com/timbray has become twitter.com/#!/timbray . Others have too; see Breaking the Web with hash-bangs and Going Postel . It dawns on me that a word of explanation might be in order for those who normally don’t worry…

41

RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried

RSS makes it possible for me to check 100s of sites a day. I only actually implicitly go and read two, everything else goes through the RSS reader. If I didn’t have RSS then I wouldn’t bother keeping an eye on that many sites in the first place. Because me and you—dear technical readers—don’t have to suffer that…

46

Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6

Feb 2015: 3½ years later, we’re in a better place. The new IE Spartan project has killed off document modes . (Technically, still possible in firewall environments, but… effectively dead for us.) These days, our IE support landscape is IE8 (still), IE11, and IE Mobile. 3 is definitely better than 72.

47

Skype 5 for Mac

A while back, when Skype's group videochat feature was still free, a friend of mine sent me a Skype message, asking me whether it was possible to do videochat with more than one person in Skype. "Sure," I replied, "you can do that, but you need to install the new Skype 5 beta." I sent her the link. A few minutes…

56

Dear Mozilla: Fix Your Damn Browser

Longtime Readers of this blog will be aware that I have been a fan of Mozilla for a long time. There’s nearly ten years of Mozilla advocacy tucked away in the JWM archives. I’ve been on the Mozilla fanboy train since before Firefox even existed — all the way back to the original Mozilla Suite’s Milestone 17 release…

57

Why the Quick Bar (“dickbar”) is still so offensive

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “ dickbar ” and often abandoning the…

58

What's In A GIF

We sill start off by walking though the different parts of a GIF file. (The information on this page is primarily drawn from the W3C GIF89a specification .) A GIF file is made up of a bunch of different "blocks" of data. The following diagram shows all of the different types of blocks and where they belong in the…