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Web & Frontend

The most popular blog posts about web & frontend on Hacker News. 541 posts.

2020
394

The web as a GUI toolkit

The web is kinda weird because it was originally created as a typesetting system, rather than a GUI toolkit. While this definitely has its drawbacks 1 and isn’t suitable for everything , I personally rather like the “web as a GUI toolkit” exactly because of its typesetting roots; it provides some features that few…

402

Scammers registering date-based domain names

Yesterday, January 2nd, my wife received a billing alert from her phone provider. Luckily, she's not with EE - because it's a pretty convincing text. That domain name is specifically designed to include the day's date. If you're stood up on a crowded train, with your phone screen cracked, would you notice that a . is…

408

What if we'd had better HTML-in-JS syntax all along?

I have a theory that a grave mistake was made in 1995 - the decision not to have a neat, succinct and declarative way of representing html elements in javascript. [On reading the hacker news comments this is pretty historically inaccurate, however, I think this article still stands as "look just how close javascript…

409

Humans Are Bad at URLs and Fonts Don’t Matter

Been a lot of "victim blaming" going on these last few days. The victim, through no fault of their own, has been the target of numerous angry tweets designed to ridicule their role in internet security and suggest they are incapable of performing their duty. Here's where it all

410

What is the value of browser diversity?

In May 2019 I attended a talk by Mike Taylor who works on webcompat at Mozilla. Mike told the sordid story of window.event, a non-standard IE invention that was replicated in Konqueror, which showed up in Webkit, which stuck around in Blink, and was now Mike’s problem in Firefox. It was a good story fraught with ups…

414

You probably don't need PostGIS

PostGIS is a fantastic, battle-tested suite of GIS extensions for Postgres. It handles most aspects of it, and is widely used, for example in OpenStreetMap’s Mapnik. But for your project, it’s most likely overkill. In a Q and A fashion, let’s discuss reasons for (not) using it.