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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 236 posts.

2018
217

“Stylish” is back, and you still shouldn't use it

2 days after I published ‘“Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history’, Stylish was pulled from the Chrome and Firefox stores. The story echoed around parts of the internet for a few days, my name was misspelled on several right-wing British news websites, and I felt that I’d helped make the world a…

221

Union Types in Flow and Reason

Union types are powerful yet often overlooked. At work, I've been using Flow which thankfully supports union types. But as I've refactored more of our code to use union types, I've noticed that our bundle size has been steadily increasing!

223

About rel=noopener (2016)

2021 update: Browsers now implicitly set rel=noopener for any target=_blank link, following a spec change . If the demo on this page no longer seems scary, congratulations — you’re using a modern browser!

225

Serverless QBasic

My first exposure to programming was on an HP-85 . This must have been around 1992 or 1993; the machine was then already largely obsolete, having been first produced in 1980.

226

Paradigm shifts for the decentralized Web

Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?) . Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to…

229

Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters

Unicode contains a range of symbols which don't get much use. For example, there are separate symbols for TradeMark - ™, Service Mark - ℠, and Prescriptions - ℞. Nestling among the "Letterlike Symbols" are two curious entries. Both of these are single characters: Telephone symbol - ℡ Numero Sign - № What's interesting…

231

Securing your users' authentication

A few days ago, I saw an article about someone’s Playstation Network account getting stolen . The problem wasn’t so much that the account got stolen, as this apparently happens more often than not, but that Sony has created a system so convoluted that it’s possible for the thief to keep your account, without you…

234

Incrementally Improving the DOM

Last time , I tried to convince you that you might not need the virtual DOM, and that many common UI patterns can be reproduced with a completely static page, with changes only happening at the leaves of the tree - attributes and text nodes. For some trickier UI patterns, I added back a limited form of dynamic…

236

Metacrap

Version 1.1, May 18 2001. Changed section orders for better organization. (Thanks, Raffi). Clarified "metrics" in 2.6 (Thanks, Andy).