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    JohnCarter avatar JohnCarter 1 year ago | link | on: Open Letter to Calendar Developers about HTTP (2013)

    So… you open your calendar to work out which meeting room you need to be in in two minutes time and…..

    ….it pops up an error message to inform you….

    410 Gone Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged. Upon receiving a 410 status code, the client should not request the resource in the future. Clients such as search engines should remove the resource from their indices.[40] Most use cases do not require clients and search engines to purge the resource, and a “404 Not Found” may be used instead.

    …and that it now doesn’t know what the phase of the moon is.

    Instead of just telling where you need to be, in ahh, a minutes time, it pops up a complex dialog requesting a new Phase of Moon resource.

    If you are http savvy, you understand all this, google for a new phase of moon server and enter it, and sprint to the meeting you’re now late for.

    And hopefully your administrator hasn’t been a BOfH and lock the calendar config down and you can update that…

    Or if your meeting is about how to decorate the lobby, you probably have no idea what the hell this thing is doing / saying and you start clicking stuff at random, or freeze, or reboot, or…

    …or the calendar just quietly deletes that agenda from its list…..

    … and later that month you get expelled from your coven for missing the new moon rites.

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      ysth avatar ysth 1 year ago | link

      This feels like a red herring. All those problems still exist if the calendar service keeps hitting the server and getting 410s (or any other error, for that matter). How the calendar reports to the user that a resource is failing is indeed a difficult UX problem. But the point here is, if you are getting a 410 there is no benefit to anyone to keep trying, regardless of how you expose errors to the user.

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        JohnCarter avatar JohnCarter edited 1 year ago | link

        I know, I’m partly joking.

        I’m partly jokingly pointing to a fundamental problem with the UX of something that relies on remote services, not just calendars.

        I doubt if there are really nice solutions, and there are doubtless a flock of really horrid solutions that take less time and thought.

        An no doubt all the nice solutions do not fall into the definition of a Minimal Viable Product.

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      ysth avatar ysth 1 year ago | link | on: Open Letter to Calendar Developers about HTTP (2013)

      And I would add, Permanent Redirect means just that (at least up to max-age).

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        calvin avatar calvin 1 year ago | link | on: Should array indices start at 0 or 1?

        Clearly, it should be a user definable setting. At runtime. If Perl can do it, why can’t anyone else?

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          tedu avatar tedu 1 year ago | link

          Visual Basic can.

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            porges avatar porges 1 year ago | link

            Anything .NET-based supports it (although many things will break if you do this).

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            ysth avatar ysth 1 year ago | link

            Perl has “highly discouraged” this for a very very long time. It was finally deprecated in 5.12 and the old “feature” removed in 5.16.

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              puffnfresh avatar puffnfresh 1 year ago | link

              Haskell’s array allows specifying bounds: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/array-0.5.1.1/docs/Data-Array.html#v:array