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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Actually, it doesn’t just benefit “geeks who use NoScript”. The original audience for accessibility was disabled users, which is why some of the best websites ever made are for government agencies. But sure, they don’t count much when there’s a deadline to keep. I know what you’re talking about, I know that progressive enhancement and respecting WCAG etc is just time-consuming and time is money. I was in the meetings. But it’s also just hard, for the reasons you describe, and few developers have ever been able to do it. Maybe precisely because the skillset straddles different domains: not just programming but also UX and graphic design and information architecture. The first web developers were tinkerers and lots of them came from the world of print. Now they’re all just IT guys who see everything as an app. Even when it’s in essence a document.


  • This seems to be the argument that the web was designed for documents and that we should stop trying to shoe-horn apps into documents. Hard to disagree at this point, especially when the app in question is, say, a graphics tool, or a game. I still think that, in the case of more document-adjacent applications, a website implemented with best-practices progressive enhancement is about as elegant a solution as is imaginable. Basically: an app which can gracefully degrade to a stateless document, and metamorphose back into an app, depending on system resources and connectivity, and all completely open source and open standards and accessible. That was IMO the promise of the web fulfilled: the separation of content from presentation, and presentation from functionality. Unfortunately there were never more than a tiny minority of websites that achieved this. Hardly any web developers had the deep skill set needed to pull it off.

    I was once skeptical about WASM on the grounds that it’s effectively closed-source software - tantamount to DRM. But people reply that functionally there’s not much difference between WASM and a blob of minified JS, and the WASM security can be locked down. So I guess I accept that WASM is now the best the web can hope for.













  • Here’s one that probably nobody else here is doing. The backup goes on my mobile device. Yes, the thing in my pocket.

    • Mount it over SSHFS on the local network
    • Unlock a LUKS container in the form of a 30GB sparse file on the device
    • rsync the files across
    • Lock, unmount

    The backup is incremental but the container file never changes size, no matter what’s in it. Your data is in two places and always under your physical control. But the key is never stored on the remote device, so you could also do this with a VPS.

    Highly recommended.