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    Paul Kinlan

    paul.kinlan.me · Personal blog · on HN since 2010

    Paul Kinlan, a Chrome developer advocate, writes about web platform features, bookmarklets, web apps, and browser-based architectures.

    Visit blogRSSHN submissions
    Web DevelopmentProgramming
    What HN says

    HN links it for practical web platform how-tos, such as bookmarklets on Chrome for Android and adding ActivityPub to a static site.

    Stats for nerds
    46HN people shared it
    58linked in comments
    1.1Kstory points
    Jan 2026last shared
    2012people per year2026

    Top posts on HN

    1. 1
      Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent
      3 people · 256 points · first shared 2016 · 55 comments on HN
    2. 2
      Sorry Safari Team
      2 people · 207 points · first shared 2021 · 153 comments on HN
    3. 3
      Web Intents - the future of web apps
      2 people · 200 points · first shared 2011 · 39 comments on HN
    4. 4
      The headless web
      1 person · 91 points · first shared 2016 · 22 comments on HN
    5. 5
      I spent an evening on a fictitious web
      1 person · 74 points · first shared 2024 · 38 comments on HN
    6. 6
      We need to kill off the localStorage API
      2 people · 68 points · first shared 2012 · 56 comments on HN
    7. 7
      Use Bookmarklets on Chrome on Android (2020)
      5 people · 39 points · first shared 2022 · 19 comments on HN
    8. 8
      Rise of the meta-platforms and the new 'web browser'
      3 people · 28 points · first shared 2015 · 8 comments on HN
    9. 9
      Hackathons don't win you customers
      2 people · 27 points · first shared 2013 · 10 comments on HN
    10. 10
      IndexedDB as a Vector Database
      2 people · 14 points · first shared 2023 · Discussion on HN

    What HN people wrote when they linked it

    • niftichAug 2016

      The Richardson 'REST API maturity model' describes how people commonly exchange HTTP payloads, how those systems can be augmented to get closer and closer to the ideas behind REST. Most people are perfectly happy with staying at levels 0 through 2, because HATEOAS is hard in the sense that you actually have to think about stuff like link relations, hypermedia mediatypes, and the semantic web. This is something most people on the 'normal web' don't even do properly, even though the 'normal web' is quite obviously hypermedia, and quite obviously an embodiment of REST. But despite its lack of deployment, Level 3 describes an API that has truly and unambiguously earned the right to call itself a 'REST API'.

      In REST, these 'link relations' are extremely important, because they represent well-specified ways of relating one resource to another. They are as critical to REST as mediatypes (MIME types) are. In the graph theory sense, link relations are the label on an edge, URIs are the nodes, and mediatypes are formats that can be used as concrete representations of the nodes. The IANA maintains a Link Relations registry [1].

      But since the 'normal web' is used by humans, we don't need link relations to traverse a website; we can instead use context clues, familiarity, or other techniques to achieve what we want on a website; the entire discipline dedicated to coaxing humans into interacting with websites is called 'UI/UX'.

      Meanwhile, Kinlan envisions... well, to be frank I'm not…

    • goblin89Sep 2017

      How do we refer to the type of architecture without server-side component proper[0][1][2] though? Makes it surprisingly hard to find material and research on those topics.

      Recently I was looking for one insightful talk (with a PoC) where websites run completely on users’ machines. It’s been a couple of years since I saw that talk for the first time, “cloud” was the term of choice to refer to what’s “serverless” now. I had to give up after pages upon pages of search results talking about Lambda or Azure (otherwise I’d have linked the talk here, of course).

      [0] https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud
      [1] https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly
      [2] https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/

    • vageliMay 2020

      Software companies are not infallible, and I've received updates in the past that have broken things. Enterprises don't get compensated for lost productivity when an auto-updating app results in broken workflows. Also, we recently got hit with a bug in a new auto-updated version. [0] It's great that this was finally fixed but silently rolling out updates like this make it harder to catch these issues before they are problems in the wild.

      [0]: https://paul.kinlan.me/correct-image-orientation-for-images-chrome-81/

    • johnnymellorSep 2025

      This would be useful in Chrome for Android (which doesn't yet have this feature built-in), but activating bookmarklets on Android (via https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/) clears the text selection. So instead I've put together an alternative bookmarklet that lets you select the text to link to after activating the bookmarklet: https://gist.github.com/johnmellor/ef5ecf555f28b324b045e0c93548f0da

    • mikelwardJun 2021

      Are you sure you're looking at the native share sheet? It scrolls vertically, at least on Pixel on Android 11.

      There's some intent: links on https://paul.kinlan.me/sharing-natively-on-android-from-the-web/ that you can use to trigger it. The first one there doesn't work for me, but the second one does.

      intent:#Intent;action=android.intent.action.SEND;type=text/plain;end

    • wonger_Feb 2025

      There's another way! Instructions: https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/ Summary:

      1. bookmark any page 2. change the url to your code 3. give it a title like !script 4. to activate, tap the address bar and type !script Works on Android Chrome and Firefox, and probably other browsers too. More people ought to know about mobile bookmarklets.

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