Terence Eden

Yes, of course, that goal is utopian (well, I hope we don't follow the definition too closely and actually reach the dream). But the good thing is that they don't depend on time, money or anything else. It's a belief, and the people's mind will change over time.

You could draw a parallel with ecology. 50 years ago, no one would care about the environment; resources were basically free, pollution was seen as "minor". A world were everyone cared about the planet was seen as utopian. After half a decade of fights, the minds have now switched to a different mind (at least in the western world): pretty much every single piece of electronic hardware you can buy has some notion of "we-are-green" to it. While it's not 100% eco-friendly (just take a look at how electronics are "recycled"), people's mind certainly have changed. The guys behind the Libre software movement certainly don't expect anything big happening in the next 10 years (remember that RMS has been fighting for the last 30 years), but things will change, you can be sure of it. Just take a look at the recent plans to to "take control back" on the internet infrastructures initiated by Europe and Brazil. Sure, technically the things will more or less remain the same; but the mindset is changing, and it will keep spreading.

> How about a less grandiose goal like "making software better and more accessible"

This is a really noble goal in itself, and Google can be praised as one of the biggest enablers in this field,…

> 2020: UK National Cyber Security Centre: Figure 1 shows that NameCheap became the most popular host of UK government-themed phishing during 2020. By December 2020 we found that it hosted in excess of 60% of phishing in this category.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/

https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/files/Active-Cyber-Defence-ACD-The-Fourth-Year.pdf

> 2017: As of today around 38% of the domains reported to us since we began recording on 8/23/17 are sponsored by NameCheap INC. These domains are allowed to continue to scam consumers long after they are reported. An example of this is “ecojetexpress.us” which has been reported repeatedly by both petscams.com and victims who have lost money. When victims of this scam filed an abuse report NameCheap did not “take reasonable and prompt steps to investigate”. Instead they forwarded the abuse report with the victims information to the criminal. 5 months later, ecojetexpress.us was still online scamming new victims.

https://petscams.com/news/namecheap-hurting-internet/

> Facebook sues Namecheap to unmask hackers who registered malicious domains. The social networking giant claims that Namecheap has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered through its service and which impersonated the Facebook brand.

> Some of the sample domains included the likes of instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com, and whatsappdownload.site.

> Dubois said…

As others have pointed out, IE is a poster child. There are many, many outdated browser versions and devices beside IE.

If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers.

And when it comes to government agencies, "afford" does not mean "profit" because you can't measure everything in terms of profit. And no, not every "boomer" has the money to upgrade their 2012 Android phone bought for them by their kids. And not every millenial sports the latest iPhone. Etc.

--- start quote ---

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable...

Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

--- end quote ---

There's a reason ADA exists: it's because people only view everything through the lenses of "how much profit do I get from these people even if I am government"

From a quick search right now, the term seems to have come from that same system, but the first reference appears to be older than 1988. It looks to be possibly 1985.

Following this link here: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/06/where-is-the-original-overview-of-shard-paper/

In a comment at the bottom it references a paper published by a few people working jointly with Computer Corporation of America, MIT & Boston University.

If you view that referenced paper "Correctness Conditions for Highly Available Databases" by N. Lynch, B. Blaustein & M. Siegel (https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA171427.pdf), and look at section 1.2 it clearly describes "SHARD: (System for Highly Available Replicated Data)" as being underdevelopment at CCA. It also says if you want to learn more about Shard, see the paper's reference [SBK]. Checking out the references section of that paper it lists the following for [SBK]:

Sarin, S. K., Blaustein, B. T., and Kaufman, C. W., "System Architecture for Partition Tolerant Distributed Databases," IEEE Transactions on Computers C-34, 12 (December 1985). pp. 1158-1163.

Which means there was a paper published in 1985, describing the in development Shard system.

It is possible that in 1985 they hadn't yet named the system "Shard", and it only got that name by 1988 - but it'd be interesting to check out that 1985 paper and see if they used the term Shard at all.

I have to admit I get very disappointed when I see new form abstractions that don't take this seriously — especially if they make bold claims like 'the new paradigm'!. The whole point of forms is that they're part of HTML. You should not need JavaScript to submit a form, period.

I think about the woman in this story — https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/ — as an industry, we've lost our way if we don't care enough about people like her to make our apps work reliably. Not everyone has JavaScript: https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html

Moreover, validation is something that belongs on the server. Client-first approaches to form validation are at best duplicative (because you need to repeat the validation on the server) and at worst dangerous (because it tricks you into thinking that's unnecessary).

I also notice that one of the first forms on your website doesn't adhere to common accessibility guidelines — the email field is marked invalid as soon as you start typing. Ordinarily, you shouldn't validate a field until it has been blurred.

So what I'd like to see from people building form abstractions is a) a full stack approach, b) progressive enhancement, and c) adherence to accessibility guidelines.

FWIW this is how we think about forms in the Svelte project: https://svelte.dev/docs/kit/remote-functions#form

As an admirer of Paul Butler's TreeVerse.app (@paulgb), I have to say this is some amazing work done here and also what was done in the past by OP in this same direction.

Working with mulidimentional Graph/Tree presentation is so possible now and just makes everything easier to approach as a user confronted with Too Much Information to process.

I definitely think TreeView would benefit from some Three.js or Babylon.js WebXR visualization in VR/AR Headsets. There is a lot left "to-be-done" on the UI side to make that a proper useful experience, but it is a much better fit than trying to keyboard/video/mouse your way around a 4000 tweet force-balanced network graph node cluster in normal 2D pancake land mode.

Anyway, Thank You So Much OP for making my new favorite opensource project ! Look forward to playing with this as it develops...

PS- I'm basing this mostly on the blog posts/video links [1] as the site may be going through a HN_Hug-of-Death moment. Minor Aside: the link to Lucy Pepper on GitHub is broken the updated one is [2]

[1] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/visualising-twitter-conversations-in-3d-space/

[2] https://lucypepper.com/ptf/

EDIT: There is some work already using A-Frame (Three.js frontend) only for AR but it's a start !! [3]

[3] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/09/augmented-reality-twitter-conversations/