Paul Kinlan

Software companies are not infallible, and I've received updates in the past that have broken things. Enterprises don't get compensated for lost productivity when an auto-updating app results in broken workflows. Also, we recently got hit with a bug in a new auto-updated version. [0] It's great that this was finally fixed but silently rolling out updates like this make it harder to catch these issues before they are problems in the wild. [0]: https://paul.kinlan.me/correct-image-orientation-for-images-chrome-81/

How do we refer to the type of architecture without server-side component proper[0][1][2] though? Makes it surprisingly hard to find material and research on those topics. Recently I was looking for one insightful talk (with a PoC) where websites run completely on users’ machines. It’s been a couple of years since I saw that talk for the first time, “cloud” was the term of choice to refer to what’s “serverless” now. I had to give up after pages upon pages of search results talking about Lambda or Azure (otherwise I’d have linked the talk here, of course). [0] https://github.com/jhiesey/peercloud [1] https://github.com/lucaspiller/shortly [2] https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/

Shameless plug: I've been using it to get Chrome on Google home - https://paul.kinlan.me/chrome-on-home/ (Disclosure: I'm a developer advocate for chrome so I'm heavily biased, but I love everything people are doing g with browsers on the server https://paul.kinlan.me/the-headless-web/ )

For basic functionality, it is possible! https://paul.kinlan.me/adding-activity-pub-to-your-static-site/

This would be useful in Chrome for Android (which doesn't yet have this feature built-in), but activating bookmarklets on Android (via https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/) clears the text selection. So instead I've put together an alternative bookmarklet that lets you select the text to link to after activating the bookmarklet: https://gist.github.com/johnmellor/ef5ecf555f28b324b045e0c93548f0da

this isn't new at all, ten years ago I used it to open an Android app without a user gesture https://paul.kinlan.me/deep-app-linking-on-android-and-chrome/

There's another way! Instructions: https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/ Summary: 1. bookmark any page 2. change the url to your code 3. give it a title like !script 4. to activate, tap the address bar and type !script Works on Android Chrome and Firefox, and probably other browsers too. More people ought to know about mobile bookmarklets.

Nice touch in the HN bio! > RSS is alive https://paul.kinlan.me/index.xml

Good tip, thank you. Bookmarklets work as normal(?) on Firefox on Android, and can be invoked via the address bar on Chrome: https://paul.kinlan.me/use-bookmarklets-on-chrome-on-android/ A random intro to bookmarklets: https://betterprogramming.pub/are-bookmarklets-still-useful-48e2672795…

That is a common misconception, CSS support in Safari is as good as Firefox, and just a hair worser than Chrome's. (latest webcompat test results were 96/92/92 for Chrome/Firefox/Safari https://paul.kinlan.me/sorry-safari-team/ )

Are you sure you're looking at the native share sheet? It scrolls vertically, at least on Pixel on Android 11. There's some intent: links on https://paul.kinlan.me/sharing-natively-on-android-from-the-web/ that you can use to trigger it. The first one there doesn't work for me, but the second one does. intent:#Intent;action=android.intent.action.SEND;type=text/plain;end

The site is currently down https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/ but there was a good tutorial here on how to build a serverless message app.

Please don't use local storage. It's synchronous and will hang the entire browser or tab while the script is loading: http://paul.kinlan.me/we-need-to-kill-off-the-localstorage-api

Yup, that page links to http://paul.kinlan.me/web-intents-a-fresh-look

The Richardson 'REST API maturity model' describes how people commonly exchange HTTP payloads, how those systems can be augmented to get closer and closer to the ideas behind REST. Most people are perfectly happy with staying at levels 0 through 2, because HATEOAS is hard in the sense that you actually have to think about stuff like link relations, hypermedia mediatypes, and the semantic web. This is something most people on the 'normal web' don't even do properly, even though the 'normal web' is quite obviously hypermedia, and quite obviously an embodiment of REST. But despite its lack of deployment, Level 3 describes an API that has truly and unambiguously earned the right to call itself a 'REST API'. In REST, these 'link relations' are extremely important, because they represent well-specified ways of relating one resource to another. They are as critical to REST as mediatypes (MIME types) are. In the graph theory sense, link relations are the label on an edge, URIs are the nodes, and mediatypes are formats that can be used as concrete representations of the nodes. The IANA maintains a Link Relations registry [1]. But since the 'normal web' is used by humans, we don't need link relations to traverse a website; we can instead use context clues, familiarity, or other techniques to achieve what we want on a website; the entire discipline dedicated to coaxing humans into interacting with websites is called 'UI/UX'. Meanwhile, Kinlan envisions... well, to be frank I'm not…