It's even worse than it appears.
Good morning beer drinkers! 🍺 #
Summer Streets is tomorrow. Park Ave is open to bike riders from 72nd down to the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a treat to experience the city largely without cars on three Saturdays in August. #
Einstein and his therapist. #
Probably Russian secret police wanted Secret Service out of Trump Tower.#
The next episode of Game of Thrones has leaked. Here's a poll that asks if you would watch it tonight or wait until Sunday. #
  • Suppose I wanted to add a feature to one of my Electron apps that allowed a user to hook it up to an S3 location that they own and pay for. #
  • What's the best way to provide access?#
  • I imagine that's what IAM is for. #
  • I need to dig in. If you know of any easy howto's please post a note here. #
  • Also just revisited their Elastic Filesystem docs and they seem to have come a long way since the last time I looked. #
  • TL;DR: New sample code for getting started with feed parsing in Node. #
  • I use the feedparser package in River5. So all my news flows through this code. That's a lot of news, and it's been working solidly for years.#
  • Back in 2013 when I was getting started on Node, it was a little tricky adapting to feedparser, because the package is designed for maximum efficiency at the expense of a bit of ease-of-use, especially for a Node newbie. #
  • In the spirit of giving back to a product I use a lot, I pulled out a bit of code from River5 and simplified it so it makes a good demo of feedparser. #
  • If you're new to feedparser, this might help you get started a bit faster with less head-scratching. 🍺#
  • I was reading a bit about the history of CSS, and kept thinking -- what a shame, they did it totally backwards. This is what I would have done. First I would have made a design tool that worked really well. Then I'd have it spit out XML (sorry JSON didn't exist at the time) and teach the browser to render that. All this would happen iteratively. #
  • The priorities would be:#
    • Leverages the talents of designers.#
    • Good performance in the browser and on the net (considerations: how long to render, how big the files are, latency, bandwidth, out over time).#
    • Elegance of the format used to communicate the design to the browser.#
  • The third item is way way down the list. Yes it should be easy to do it by hand. But we shouldn't always be doing it by hand as it works now. #
  • What we ended up using was impossible to create a tool for, is utterly perplexing to everyone who has to use it, and is missing huge features that cripple everything we do. The whole world is now built around the crazy design system called CSS. Everywhere and everything.#
  • Also I have to say we were working on exactly this at Living Videotext in 1986 and 1987. Had done a lot of prototyping. It was rules-based and you could see the impact of your rules immediately on the screen. Made iteration fast. Would have been perfect for responsive design. #
  • It's one of those "if only" things -- if only we had been in position to do this, in a competitive way. That's one of the big tradeoffs of going the standards route. You often get really bad designs and have to live with their limits, for a generation or two. #

© 1994-2017 Dave Winer.

Last udpate: Thursday August 31, 2017; 7:08 PM EDT.