Web Directions is the blog of a web conference organizer, with posts on web development trends, mobile web, and talks.
HN links it mainly for Maciej Cegłowski's talk "The website obesity crisis" and for its post on native-versus-web thinking.
I’m a developer at Fastmail, and I’m going to bite.
Personally, I prefer binary formats where feasible, because I like pursuing efficiency to extremes, and write all my own code in Rust.
Professionally, I happen to write mostly JavaScript, and no Rust at all, but we do still focus on performance at Fastmail. (It’s in the name!)
If you’re comparing JSON to s-expressions, it’s a wash in efficiency. They’re both “inefficient”, both representing generic data structures in regular text. They use slightly different punctuation, but that’s about it. The differences are negligible.
But when it comes to support, JSON is well-supported in all mainstream languages, while s-expressions have no central specification on precise syntax, and you’ll need to do your own thing. One of the deliberate design advantages of JMAP over IMAP is doing away with custom parsers, and using the standard tools people are familiar with, HTTPS and JSON.
When talking efficiency, you might then ask why not to use Cap’n Proto, protobufs or one of those sorts of things. Due to the need for extensibility (e.g. in Fastmail we add a few custom fields to JMAP core and mail data structures), rigid structures are unsuitable; you do need arbitrary key-value arrangement, despite it being larger over the wire.
All in all, JSON is a robust choice for just about any API.
Fun fact: at Fastmail we compress both request and response, even using a custom dictionary primed on real JMAP stuff, to improve the compression…
I have been fighting for years to get people used to "90s aesthetics." Then again, I think (bitmap) aliased fonts, bitmap gif patterns, classic bitmap icons (susan kare, early KDE, IRIX, BeOS, Plan9, Mac OS 9, etc.), Netscape, CDE etc. were all incredibly beautiful. I have railed against complexity since as early as I can remember.
It's even more important for web design. Give me simple HTML with a touch of css, and javascript only if it's absolutely necessary. I can think of hardly any websites that I would consider "beautiful" these days for exactly this reason.
http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis/
PS: I'm not sure I would classify these sites as brutalist; perhaps 'utilitarian' or 'functional' would be better descriptors.
Comments on the thread are good -- here's the one that pointed me to the article in the first place: http://www.webdirections.org/blog/help-stop-the-spread-of-nibs-native-is-better-syndrome/comment-page-1/#comment-221668
Website Obesity Crisis, a witty talk by Maciej Cegłowski (2015):
https://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis/
I would post the text version, but somehow the CDN is down.
Its called "The website obesity crisis"
http://www.webdirections.org/blog/the-website-obesity-crisis/