It's even worse than it appears.
Friday, July 6, 2018
Something changed somewhere and the blogging I was doing in 2012 and 2013 stopped working. Turns out that files without extensions were previously interpreted as text/html even if the returned Content-Type was text/plain. So I added a feature to PagePark that lets you set the default type for a site. That was what was needed. Here's a list of the posts from March 2013 that now should work properly, again. When you have as much web history as I do, keeping things running is a lot of work.#
I'm reading some of the pieces that have just come back online. For example this one -- good software design is ageless. It talks about removing features from software, and how that breaks users. I think I understood why that happens when I wrote the piece, but disclaimed it. It's because the people who do the breaking weren't the ones who fought for the users, who made the product successful. They don't have a feel for how much they had to do to get them to commit. We're having the same argument over and over, when a new generation comes of age and wants to throw out the accomplishments previous generations made. I don't know why software is particularly afflicted by this. I read an article today about a pair of 100-plus-year-old tunnels under the Hudson River, and now if they fail it will do severe damage to the country's economy. We have similar technology in software. But we wreck the tunnels, willfully, every generation. This is why progress is so elusive, and also imho why people don't trust tech.#

© 1994-2018 Dave Winer.

Last update: Friday July 6, 2018; 11:42 AM EDT.