Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 291 posts.

Web & Frontend
216

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…

223

Better Box Shadows (CSS)

Hi, my name is Adam Ramirez. I am a UX Designer who focuses on Design Facilitation and Product Analytics with 10 years of experience under my belt. In the past 5 years, I have been working to deliver the best possible user experience to my clients and their users.

233

In Defense of XML

When I started my career, XML was ubiquitous. The meta-information in a Java JAR file - the manifest - follows a proprietary format. But Java EE designers built it from the ground up on XML: meta-information of all artifacts is in XML format e.g. web.xml, ejb-jar.xml, application.xml, etc. Java EE is one example I…

235

MathJax Turns 3.0

When I launched bit-player.org in 2006, displaying any sort of mathematical notation on the web was torture. I would typeset an equation in LaTeX, convert the output to a JPEG image, upload the image file to a directory on the server, and embed a reference to the file in an HTML img tag. The process was cumbersome and…