Dave Rupert

daverupert.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2010

Dave Rupert, a web developer and ShopTalk Show co-host, writes about front-end development, browsers, and running his own website.

What HN saysHN links his post on a Bing indexing ban as a documented case study, and commenters discuss his posts on web standards and feeds.
106HN people shared it
22linked it in comments
133stories submitted
2.1Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2010people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Technical debt as a lack of understanding
    4 people · 668 points · first shared 2020 · 291 comments on HN
  2. 2
    What is the value of browser diversity?
    4 people · 157 points · first shared 2020 · 117 comments on HN
  3. 3
    UI = f(statesⁿ)
    3 people · 169 points · first shared 2024 · 101 comments on HN
  4. 4
    This website has been gaslighting you
    3 people · 11 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    One-offs and low-expectations with Safari
    3 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  6. 6
    Solved the case of the bing ban theory
    3 people · first shared 2023
  7. 7
    Bad month for the main thread
    2 people · 75 points · first shared 2018 · 32 comments on HN
  8. 8
    I'm Shadow Banned by DuckDuckGo (and Bing)
    2 people · 45 points · first shared 2023 · 15 comments on HN
  9. 9
    Why would anybody start a website?
    2 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
  11. 11
    The RSS Club
    2 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
  12. 12
    #​Edge​Goes​Chromium
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
    Where Web Components Shine
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
  15. 15
    The Web is industrialized and I helped industrialize it
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

aunch · 2023-02-09
To each their own! We were motivated to blog about it by others who have had issues like this: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/solved-the-case-of-the-bing-ban-theory/ And at the end of the day, we got a lot of great SEO tips here. Thanks HN!
pointlessone · 2023-02-09
Someone else recently notice their website wasn't indexed by Bing and they've got a similar message. The whole story is thoroughly documented. Maybe Codeium can follow their steps to resolve the issue? https://daverupert.com/2023/02/solved-the-case-of-the-bing-ban-theory/
Looking around his page, I see some interesting aspects on his atom page: https://daverupert.com/atom.xml First, he sends it with a "content-type: application/xml" header. In contrast to most sites that send it with "content-type: application/atom+xml". Which seems to have the nice effect that it renders in Firefox instead of opening the usual "What should Firefox do with this file?" popup. Secondly, he provides this nice header text "Yahaha, you found me! This is my RSS feed.". It seems to be fetched via this part of the code: <?xml-stylesheet href="/pretty-feed-v3.xsl" type="text/xsl"?> Pretty nice. Are those best practices? Or will "content-type: application/xml" mess with users who have a native feed reader installed and expect the reader to kick in when they click on a feed url?
mysterioushat · 2022-05-07
I’ve tried similar myself but I love the visual simplicity of this. Much nicer than a list. If you’re interested I came across this year’s ago … some nice inspirations and ways of finding new stuff. https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/ My favourite is this one with the little toggle for reviews or comments: https://daverupert.com/bookshelf/
no_wizard · 2021-04-24
As discussed in the podcast ShopTalk Show[0], of which Chris Coyer is a host. this is actually a more complex idea than this article let’s on, a corollary article from the co-host of that show, Dave Rupert, on why it’s a difficult idea and maybe not the best thing to do[1] To quote the article: >tl;dr - <summary> is a button and buttons eat semantics [0]: https://shoptalkshow.com [1]: https://daverupert.com/2019/12/why-details-is-not-an-accordion/
kthejoker2 · 2021-03-09
Reminds me of "tech debt as a lack of understanding" https://daverupert.com/2020/11/technical-debt-as-a-lack-of-understandi… > If there’s been enough organizational turnover or enough feature creep in a product, then maybe doing a rewrite is the best option so your team has a collective understanding of the code. You can’t expect people to be productive in something that was a culmination of [complicated "here be dragons" code] made by people who no longer work there. At that point your technical debt balloon has popped, you are in possession of a toxic asset.
neilsimp1 · 2018-04-23
There is a series of blog posts by Dave Rupert detailing his transition from MacOS to Windows, it may be useful to you. https://daverupert.com/2015/04/davegoeswindows/ Also, if you're on Windows I highly, highly recommend Cmder or ConEmu for your terminal.
rektide · 2020-10-12
> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies, mentoring the other developers, helping the team to grow, but I was doing this just because I liked my job. I was not considering this as something important in my career, simply because I didn’t want too. To develop my career, I was spending a lot of time outside work reading technical books, doing toy projects, going to meetups, browsing Hacker News. This is a very good & important assessment, realization, & I appreciate the author's reassessment. > Secondly, I don’t think that multiplying the side projects is useful unless they are substantial. A phrase that recuringly comes to mind when hearing of a lot of side projects is, "Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men." I very much want to see a world where computing is a good & sensible place, for scratching your own itch. But at the moment, just getting started on a modest web project is pretty hard. Even if you don't need user accounts, it's still a lot of grunt-work, gulp-work, webpack-work, and or babel-work. Oh you want users with their data? Now multiply the number of hours by 20x. Folk like hood.ie & UserGrid have attempted to lower the effort-to-start, Firebase & others are certainly selling themselves on trying to accelerate the mid-level lift here, the 200's & 300's level courses of "getting your app going". But it's hard. We're not great. So at the moment, scratch your own itch is hard to do…
JeremyHerrman · 2026-07-16
Haha, yes flex apps definitely had a feel to them! It's easy to criticize but remember, this was back in the days of supporting IE6 and XHR was still relatively new! Flex's standard UI library was filled with bluish-gray gradients and verdana :) Here's an article which has a screenshot with a bunch of controls: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/the-case-for-flex-applications/
qwery · 2024-07-07
That website/page is a bit weird. It seems to be based on a TV show[basedon]? What I assume is the actual IBM report[0] might interest you. [0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102751398 [basedon] https://daverupert.com/2015/06/doherty-threshold/
tobr · 2024-02-20
Is this a response to UI = f(statesⁿ)[1] or are they both a response to something else? 1: https://daverupert.com/2024/02/ui-states/
darekkay · 2023-02-09
Bing is known for removing websites for no apparent reason. My website was de-listed for 2-3 months one year ago (personal blog, writing for 10 years, no spam, no ads). It happened recently to another dev blogger: https://daverupert.com/2023/02/solved-the-case-of-the-bing-ban-theory/
RandomWorker · 2023-01-16
https://daverupert.com/robots.txt Maybe change this? Simply add: User-agent: * Disallow: To allow all crawlers to the site.
canyonero · 2022-01-10
I really liked an article on the subject of sustainability in open source by Dave Rupert. See https://daverupert.com/2021/12/sustaining-maintaining/ One of the of the points Rupert drives home is that open source with the goal of sustainability doesn’t have a framework in place that doesn’t lead to burnout. Everyone just learns lessons the hard way without any real manual for successful outcomes.
ksec · 2021-07-30
I thought the most important part of the article wasn't about the missing API. ( Many of them are draft status ) It was the buggy implementation of a feature that go unfix for years [0]. It say it is supported only to find out it really doesn't. Or those one-offs, I think [1] is a much better take on the problem. And as a Web page browser. I dont have much complain. But in terms of Web Apps.... there is where the fuss is all about. [0]https://github.com/adobe/react-spectrum/wiki/Tracker-for-External-Brow… [1] https://daverupert.com/2021/07/safari-one-offs/
leovander · 2019-04-18
Reminds me of several people that peeled off the covering on the Pocket Chip, thinking it was a sort of protector. You can see the bubbling in this picture which could lead someone to believe they should remove it. https://daverupert.com/images/posts/2017/IMG_1194.JPG
runjake · 2018-04-23
For those interested, here's the direct finale link for the #davegoeswindows series. https://daverupert.com/2016/07/davegoeswindows-finale/
wezm · 2017-01-03
Reading Dave's (https://daverupert.com/tag/davegoeswindows) experience switching to Windows turned me off considering it as an option. However I've ordered an Eve V so will try it out when that comes later in the year.
hunterloftis · 2015-11-11
There are hiccups, but as a general statement I stand by it. "Node is pretty impressive on Windows. You get the feeling that JavaScript (as well as HTML and CSS) are a first class citizen in the Operating System. I already have a list of dozens of Native Windows Apps I want to build using Node." http://daverupert.com/2015/08/developing-on-windows/ (good contrast with other experiences from a polyglot) "Node is quite awesome on Windows to be honest." https://medium.com/@vernonk/surface-pro-4-the-ipad-i-always-wanted-and…
evilduck · 2025-09-03
There have been many that have hit the front page over the years. If you're not aware of a technology's shortcomings then you're a bad proponent of said technology. They're also almost the antithesis of what the HTMX crowd also preaches as "the one true way" and meanwhile, Wordpressers will continue developing the majority of the world's websites blissfully unaware that either technology even exists. https://dev.to/ryansolid/web-components-are-not-the-future-48bh https://dev.to/richharris/why-i-don-t-use-web-components-2cia https://daverupert.com/2023/07/why-not-webcomponents/ https://paularmstrong.dev/blog/2023/03/11/why-we-do-not-write-web-comp… https://nolanlawson.com/2024/09/28/web-components-are-okay/ https://www.zachleat.com/web/good-bad-web-components/ https://mayank.co/blog/web-components-considered-harmful/ https://adamsilver.io/blog/the-problem-with-web-components/ https://web-highlights.com/blog/are-web-components-dead/ along with some criticisms from very knowledgeable people: https://x.com/youyuxi/status/1839833110164504691 (author of Vue) https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1839785839036887361 (author of Svelte) Web Components solve a few problems and introduce a few others, use them when they make sense for your needs.

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