Once again I have put an apology between the <noscript> tags
Sorry friends, I would have made this work without Javascript, but I didn't have time and at this point, seriously, most websites don't work for you, do they?
Yeah, I occasionally see completely blank pages. At that point it's usually about 50/50 whether I just go elsewhere or I enable (some) third-party JS sources for the site. And that's fine; that's my choice.
Inconsiderately-implemented CAPTCHAs are a little annoying: I'm talking about the one where the CAPCTHA is completely invisible unless it gets to run, and the form validation says something unhelpful like "Validation failed" or no error at all (maybe the hidden field is highlighted!) rather than "CAPTCHA failed" which at least gives me a clue what went wrong.
Building pages that fail gracefully isn't specifically about non-JS users, but it helps everybody. The gold standard might be progressive enhancement. But sometimes it just means showing a friendlier message to people who're missing out on something.
@aardrian It turns out that once spam reaches a medium, it never leaves, even when there's nobody left who'll respond to it. There's still spam on Usenet, too.
@stefan More-embarrassing is the number of times I've gone looking for an answer on the Web, found a likely source, and while reading it gradually comes to realise that the author is... Past Me.
You spend enough time on the Internet, eventually you meet yourself as a stranger.
From an artist's point of view, is there any difference between you buying a donated CD from a charity shop and downloading pirated music from a torrent site?
Neither gives the artists, songwriters, producers, publishers, or distributors any money.
Neither reports to a charts authority to show popularity.
Both have the same impact on secondary revenue like gig tickets & merchandise.
(a) even from a solely economic standpoint, you're increasing the value of the artist's work and theoretically increasing the chance that somebody, deprived of the bargain, will hit it first hand,
(b) the money goes, in theory at least, to a worthy cause rather than nowhere,
(c) assuming that the donator is playing fair, which is a civikized society's assumption, they don't retain a backup copy of the contents of the CD and so the total number of copies in circulation and/or available for simultaneous play is unchanged, much like library books,
(d) charity shop music purchases are, because they're cheap, more likely to be impulsive/less specific and therefore introduce you to a corpus of work you might not otherwise have fully explored, creating the potential to make you a fan in future,
(e) also, you get to rip it with the encoding settings you want, not what some dweeb half way across the Internet thinks is best 😎
🆕 blog! “Bank scammers using genuine push notifications to trick their victims”
You receive a call on your phone. The polite call centre worker on the line asks for you by name, and gives the name of your bank. They say they're calling from your bank's fraud department. "Yeah, right!" You think. Obvious scam, isn't it?…
@Edent Yet another reminder about why one should (and I do) always, always call your bank back if you get a call from them. Never "go through security" with anybody who calls you.
It's funny, when I started doing that in ~2000, most banks were pissed-off when I did it. Nowadays, they all "get it".
Makes me wonder if I'm ahead of the inevitable curve in other ways. You'll all be browsing with JS disabled-by-default in 20 years! (maybe not)
In response to @adactio's provocation "A blog post doesn't need a title", @Edent argues that, as a HTML document, it necessarily does (even if it's blank).
If you've ever found yourself missing the "good old days" of the #web, what is it that you miss? (Interpret "it" broadly: specific websites? types of activities? feelings? etc.) And approximately when were those good old days?
No wrong answers — I'm working on an article and wanted to get some outside thoughts.
@JasonW@molly0xfff This. You wanted to identify a song? Type some of the lyrics into a search engine and hope that somebody transcribed the same lyrics onto their fansite. You needed to know a fact? Better hope some guru had taken the time to share it, or it'd be time for a trip to the library
Not having information instantly easy to find meant that you really treasured your online discoveries. You'd bookmark the best sites on whatever topics you cared about and feel no awkwardness about emailing a fellow netizen (or signing their guestbook to tell them) about a resource they might like. And then you'd check back, manually, from time to time to see what was new.
The young Web was still magical and powerful, but the effort to payoff ratio was harder, and that made you appreciate your own and other people's efforts more.
@aardrian In around 2001, I suggested my friend call his band "MP3" to make it near-impossible for people to pirate his songs. (This was before bands started providing legitimate MP3 recordings, of course!)
Why has the Internet never produced a recipe site that provides a flowchart instead of list of ingredients? It's such a more intuitive way to do recipes, and I have to mark up all of mine.
@ZachWeinersmith Do your recipes often have forks in them? (The decision kind, not the dining kind.) Or loops? (The procedural kind, not the spaghetti kind.)
@adriano@ZachWeinersmith It feels to me that putting a loop into a recipe to explain a "while you're waiting, do this" is a bit like writing a program with a polling loop. Cooking for me feels more like an event-driven paradigm: "when this, do that" with the "while you're waiting" tasks on a lower priority thread.
In Medieval Latin, magpies were "pica". It probably comes from Greek "kitta", meaning "false appetite" (possibly related to their propensity for theft), and/or from a presumed PIE root meaning "pointed" (referring to its beak shape).
In Old French, "pica" became "pie". They're still called la pie in French today. From there "pie" was adopted into Old English.
By the 17th century, there came a fashion in English slang to give birds common names.
Sometimes the common name died out, like with Old English "wrenna". This became "wren", which got extended to "Jenny wren". You still hear that sometimes today, but mostly people just say "wren".
Sometimes the original name disappeared, like with Old English "ruddock". This became "redbreast", which got extended to "Robin redbreast". That's where w e get the modern name "robin" (you'll still sometimes hear "robin reabreast").
Magpie, though, retains both parts! Mag in this case is short for Margaret, a name historically associated with idle chatter and probably chosen with reference to magpies' "kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-" call.
So we get "pica" > "pie" > "Maggie pie" > "Mag pie" > "magpie"!