Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 248 posts.

Web & Frontend
67

The Case for RSS

For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS format. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a way to queue up and serve content from the internet. The MacSparky RSS, for example, gives RSS applications a list of all the articles I post here since you last checked int. It... Continue reading →

71

Unicode is hard

In the last couple of months, I've been seeing the ú symbol on British receipts. Why? 1963 - ASCII In the beginning* was ASCII. A standard way for computers to exchange text. ASCII was originally designed with 7 bits - that means 128 possible symbols. That ought to be enough for everyone, right? Wrong! ASCII is the…

72

The Web in 2050

If you’re reading this page it means that you are accessing a ‘darknet’ web page. Darknets used to refer to places where illicit drugs and pornography were traded, these days it refers to lonely servers without any inbound links languishing away in dusty server rooms that people have all but forgotten about. Refusing…

77

Towards a JavaScript Binary AST

In this blog post, I would like to introduce the JavaScript Binary AST, an ongoing project that we hope will help make webpages load faster, along with a number of other benefits. A little background Over the years, JavaScript has grown from one of the slowest scripting languages available to a high-performance…

90

ProseMirror 1.0

Two years ago, I started the ProseMirror project because I wanted to take a stab at a better approach to WYSIWYG-style editing. Today, I'm releasing version 1.0 of the library . The architecture and scope of the project have changed quite a bit during its lifetime, but I feel that the original goal has been met.