Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 191 posts.

Web & Frontend
63

Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

AMP is Google's attempt to re-fight the transcoding wars of the early 2000s. It is actively dangerous to the web ecosystem, helps disseminate propaganda, and is disliked by many users. If, like me, you made the mistake of trying out AMP on your website - you're in a tricky position if you try to remove it. Google…

68

MathML is a failed web standard

Since I'm expecting more than my 1 2 regular readers to read this, let me add a preface. I've been managing the MathJax project for 4 years now. In the last two years, I've also been consulting for publishers regarding math-related workflows, in particular TeX-to-XML and XML-to-web, both on the back and front-end. Not…

69

Twitter's missing manual

I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell: We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usag

81

My url isn't your url

When I started the precursor to the curl project, httpget, back in 1996, I wrote my first URL parser. Back then, the universal address was still called URL: Uniform Resource Locators. That spec was published by the IETF in 1994. The term "URL" was then used as source for inspiration when naming the tool and … Continue…

88

HTML Kong

There are two things I’ve always wanted to try in HTML : generating a photorealistic image using CSS , and creating an interactive game without the need for JavaScript. HTML Kong is the end result of those two ambitions – a reproduction of the Game & Watch video game, Donkey Kong , using just HTML and CSS .