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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 224 posts.

2015
121

HTML is done

Item: The W3C HTML Working Group charter is expiring . Item: Discussion on what to do is inconclusive . Item: Things are pretty quiet in the WhatWG. Conclusion: The best thing to do about HTML is nothing .

124

Dark corners of Unicode

I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…

126

A new Microsoft browser?

Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I’ve come to the conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12. Still, I think we web…

133

Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the…

134

React Performance

React is very popular at the moment, and I can see why: its developer ergonomics are very attractive. JSX and vDOM are really nice to work with, and it certainly enables composability. But, being the performance-minded person that I am, I wanted to test the claims that it's default-fast.

141

JavaScript Modularity Shaming

Pete Hunt of React fame recently got into an online discussion about the pros and cons of Webpack vs. Browserify . In the discussion he inadvertently coins a hilarious term for a form of rhetoric in some circles of the JavaScript community - “Modularity Shaming”. React itself has been on the receiving end of…

144

Playing Fasttracker2 .XM files in JavaScript

Hit the play button above and it will play music; specifically, music composed with (or at least, compatible with) a program released in 1994 called FastTracker 2; this is a Javascript homage I wrote in a fit of nostalgia. The source code is on GitHub if you'd like to check it out.