I know it’s tagged satire but for all the real benefits of this idea it isn’t very mobile friendly. The hard wrapped lines get wrapped again at weird places and the “images” turn into gibberish: https://files.wezm.net/lobsters/IMG_2403.PNG
Hey not sure if someone else has recommended this but you can serve your page secretly wrapped as an HTML file and use css unit vw to get the viewport width, setting the font size based on that value when the viewport gets small enough. Kills the txt part though lol
I don’t know what to do about images or “hypermedia” (other than just post a link and don’t try to do ASCII art) but text is a solved problem on mobile. Use your browser’s reader mode (if your current browser doesn’t have it, please consider Mozilla Firefox).
No matter which way I cut it, somebody is going to have to do a little bit of extra work. If I soft wrap, desktop users are going to have to know about reader mode and bother to use it — and unfortunately, reader mode doesn’t offer a monospaced font, so it breaks all plaintext “formatting” and ascii art. If I hard wrap, mobile users are going to have to turn their phones on their sides (or change the fontsize).
Plaintext has a long history of being hard-wrapped, and I figure that plaintext-appreciators are more likely to be using a half-fossilized ThinkPad or a DOS box than the latest iPhone. So I hard wrapped it.
One workaround would be to offer a soft-wrapped mobile version at m.blog.txt. (Of course, even on mobile, you can read it in Vim, which gives you total control over text wrapping… :)
Blog.txt supports multiple options for the chronological order of posts. If
you start writing new posts below old posts, the default post sort is
descending. If you start writing new posts above all the old posts, like I do,
then the post sort algorithm will default to ascending. But if the user would
like to change the sort order of the posts, they can press the “End” button on
their keyboard to reverse the default chronological order!
This text-only blog idea is brilliant, highlighting how many features are built into editors and viewers of plain text. Too bad that OP missed one such essential feature: soft line wrapping.
Hard wrapped lines being a good thing in 2021 seems to be a general misunderstanding among vim users. The idea that a text editor should not support soft line wrapping to a custom length is astonishing to me.
I suspect vim users are the only reason that there are still pre-commit hooks that check line lengths for a maximum of 80 characters in commit messages.
Gee, I wonder how we dealt with books and documents having hard newlines for millenia.
If I want to rewrap something, I can pipe it though fmt(1), or par(1), being plain text and all. I don’t need any “essential” soft-wrap anti-feature. In fact, format=flowed in e-mails is one of the most frustrating enterprise-grade MUA anti-feature.
As for commit message line length, people want a limit for the same reason we limit the length of lines of text in any other context – they are easier to read. I has absolutely NOTHING to do with one’s preferred text editor.
One would think you would agree with that since your website uses hard-wrapped lines…
I don’t even use monospace fonts, yet I pipe my text in commit messages and e-mails through fmt(1). More importantly though, I don’t pipe my code or logs or whatever through fmt(1), something that client-driven auto-wrappers can’t do with plain text. As long as you want to have plain text, the decision to wrap can only be decided by the producer. If you want for the consumer to decide, you are arguing against plain text.
On a side note, what’s really frustrating are tools, or even people, that hard wrap their code in order to artificially keep lines short. I keep my lines as narrow as possible, last I checked about 98% of my lines are under 80 columns, yet if I need a longer line, let it be long, dammit! Sometimes a longer line is the correct tool! gofmt(1) will not break my lines, but rustfmt(1) will break lines even if they are short. Infuriating.
Keeping lines as short as feasible is a good idea for readability. Breaking lines to fit some arbitrary standard is dumb and destroys readability.
Plain text is good, but the most important feature of a blog, at least for me, is its RSS/Atom feed, which this one lacks. If you don’t want to generate a RSS feed, you might as well write these posts to a mailing list.
For you as a reader. For the author? Not necessary. I’m thinking about old-school daily journal you’d write in a notebook. For one, it’s not as if you shared it publicly. For two, you probably knew exactly where to find a certain sketch or idea or text.
Now, as a blog in sense of a web platform to disseminate your thoughts to others, then yes, RSS could be somewhat important.
Not that satire I think, this is a no-bs-format that loads with every stone-age mobile network and just gets the content over. Another good exanple to name here is https://blog.fefe.de
I know it’s tagged satire but for all the real benefits of this idea it isn’t very mobile friendly. The hard wrapped lines get wrapped again at weird places and the “images” turn into gibberish: https://files.wezm.net/lobsters/IMG_2403.PNG
Yes, unfortunately hard-wrapping on (portrait) mobile is the project’s Achilles heel. (See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981248)
Hey not sure if someone else has recommended this but you can serve your page secretly wrapped as an HTML file and use css unit
vwto get the viewport width, setting the font size based on that value when the viewport gets small enough. Kills the txt part though lolAhh I see you’ve already given it some thought :)
I don’t know what to do about images or “hypermedia” (other than just post a link and don’t try to do ASCII art) but text is a solved problem on mobile. Use your browser’s reader mode (if your current browser doesn’t have it, please consider Mozilla Firefox).
Previously on HN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28286493
There is no need to hand wrap. Let the browser do its job.
No matter which way I cut it, somebody is going to have to do a little bit of extra work. If I soft wrap, desktop users are going to have to know about reader mode and bother to use it — and unfortunately, reader mode doesn’t offer a monospaced font, so it breaks all plaintext “formatting” and ascii art. If I hard wrap, mobile users are going to have to turn their phones on their sides (or change the fontsize).
Plaintext has a long history of being hard-wrapped, and I figure that plaintext-appreciators are more likely to be using a half-fossilized ThinkPad or a DOS box than the latest iPhone. So I hard wrapped it.
One workaround would be to offer a soft-wrapped mobile version at m.blog.txt. (Of course, even on mobile, you can read it in Vim, which gives you total control over text wrapping… :)
Do any browsers support RFC-3676?
I like this. Fun quote:
Keyboard shortcuts built in :)
This text-only blog idea is brilliant, highlighting how many features are built into editors and viewers of plain text. Too bad that OP missed one such essential feature: soft line wrapping.
Hard wrapped lines being a good thing in 2021 seems to be a general misunderstanding among vim users. The idea that a text editor should not support soft line wrapping to a custom length is astonishing to me.
I suspect vim users are the only reason that there are still pre-commit hooks that check line lengths for a maximum of 80 characters in commit messages.
Gee, I wonder how we dealt with books and documents having hard newlines for millenia.
If I want to rewrap something, I can pipe it though
fmt(1), orpar(1), being plain text and all. I don’t need any “essential” soft-wrap anti-feature. In fact,format=flowedin e-mails is one of the most frustrating enterprise-grade MUA anti-feature.As for commit message line length, people want a limit for the same reason we limit the length of lines of text in any other context – they are easier to read. I has absolutely NOTHING to do with one’s preferred text editor.
One would think you would agree with that since your website uses hard-wrapped lines…
I don’t even use monospace fonts, yet I pipe my text in commit messages and e-mails through
fmt(1). More importantly though, I don’t pipe my code or logs or whatever throughfmt(1), something that client-driven auto-wrappers can’t do with plain text. As long as you want to have plain text, the decision to wrap can only be decided by the producer. If you want for the consumer to decide, you are arguing against plain text.On a side note, what’s really frustrating are tools, or even people, that hard wrap their code in order to artificially keep lines short. I keep my lines as narrow as possible, last I checked about 98% of my lines are under 80 columns, yet if I need a longer line, let it be long, dammit! Sometimes a longer line is the correct tool!
gofmt(1)will not break my lines, butrustfmt(1)will break lines even if they are short. Infuriating.Keeping lines as short as feasible is a good idea for readability. Breaking lines to fit some arbitrary standard is dumb and destroys readability.
Plain text is good, but the most important feature of a blog, at least for me, is its RSS/Atom feed, which this one lacks. If you don’t want to generate a RSS feed, you might as well write these posts to a mailing list.
For you as a reader. For the author? Not necessary. I’m thinking about old-school daily journal you’d write in a notebook. For one, it’s not as if you shared it publicly. For two, you probably knew exactly where to find a certain sketch or idea or text.
Now, as a blog in sense of a web platform to disseminate your thoughts to others, then yes, RSS could be somewhat important.
Lovely blog! The smolnet folks on gemini and gopher are applauding you with ascii claps.
This reminds me just a little bit of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/… though of course significantly less profane 😂
I feel like this should also be mirror on gemini for maximum meme effect
I can’t believe I’m saying this seriously but the website (especially the images) isn’t very accessible. I think this proves that HTML is pretty cool.
Not that satire I think, this is a no-bs-format that loads with every stone-age mobile network and just gets the content over. Another good exanple to name here is https://blog.fefe.de