Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
RSS. It’s still around but slowly dying out. I feel like it only gets added to new websites because the programmers like it.
Theres quite a few sites that still use it and existing ones in the Fediverse have it built in (which is really cool). But your right, the general public have no concept of having something download and queue up on a service rather than just going to the site. And the RSS clients are all over the place with quality…
WebSub (formerly PubSubHubbub). Should have been a proper replacement for RSS with push support instead of polling. Too bad the docs were awful and adopting it as an end user was so difficult that it never caught on.
I still want something push based (without paying for those rss as a service)
It’s part of the RSS 2.0 standard. Of course it requires adoption by feed publishers.
I wouldn’t say that it never caught on. I run a feed reader and ~6% of feeds have WebSub. Most of these are probably wordpress.com blogs which include it by default.
YouTube also sort of supports it, but they don’t really follow the standard so I don’t think it counts.
But the nice thing about WebSub is that it is sort of an invisible upgrade to the existing feed (or any other HTTP URI) so it just works when blogs enable it.
Most major feed reader services support it. One problem is that you need a stable URL to receive the notifications. So it is hard to make work with client-side readers. But I don’t think there is really a way around this other than holding a connection open to every feed you follow. So I would say that it does its job well. I don’t really see a need to get to 100% adoption or whatever. If you have a simple static-site blog that updates every month or so I don’t think it is a big deal that it doesn’t support WebSub.
How so? Outside very niche stuff or podcasts I just don’t seem to it used that often.
Most websites still use standard back ends with RSS support. Even static site generators also do it. The only difficulty is user discovery.
Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).
Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.
Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.
Commonmark leaves some stuff like tables unspecified. That creates the need for another layer like GFM or mistletoe. Standardization is not a strong point for markdown.
Have you read the CommonMark specification? It’s very complex for a language that’s supposed to be lightweight.
Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.
There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.
Just set up pandoc and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll convert markdown to anything. You’ll never have to open another word processor.
Nice! Thanks for the tip!
Edit: holy shit, how have I never run across that before? That’s a brilliant program right there.
For sure, I bet full fledged editors like word don’t even let you import it.
Silly question why can’t you convert markdown to PDF and pass that to publishers?
Because it isn’t doc is docx.
Publishers are pissy about such things. Even self publishing (which is what I do now), the various outlets still have limits to what they will use. Amazon accepts something like three file formats, including their own, and pdf isn’t on the list.
I could just do pdf for directly giving them away to people, but even then, epub is usually a better pick in terms of readability since that’s the standard for actual books since ereaders tend to display it better than pdfs. Most people reading books via files would be using something that can give a better experience with epub vs pdf.
Markdown is awesome, I agree! I did not realize you could extend markdown with anything other than html. The html extension is quite nice to do anything that markdown doesn’t support natively, but I wish there was an easier way to extend markdown. Maybe the ones you listed are what I need.
Typst is a typesetting format - an alternative to LaTeX. Asciidoc is more of a competitor to markdown.
IPv6. Lack of IPv4 addresses it’s a problem, specially in poorer countries. But still lots of servers and ISPs don’t support it natively. And what is worse. Lots of sysadmins don’t want to learn it.
My university recently had Internet problems, where the DHCP only leased Out ipv6 addresses. For two days, we could all see which sites implemented ipv6 and which didn’t.
Many big corpo sites like GitHub or discord Apperently don’t. Small stuff like my personal website or https://suikagame.com do.
IPv6 is great, but NAT is quite functional and is prolonging the demise of IPv4.
My isp decided to put me behind a CGNAT and broke my access to my network from outside my network. Wanted to charge me $5 a month to get around it. It’s not easy to get around for a layman, but possible. More than anything it just pissed me off that I’d have to pay for something that 1 day ago was free.
NAT is functional as long as you like NAT, which im pretty sure nobody likes, so uh.
NAT is not for security, that’s what the firewall is for. Nobody can access your IPv6 network unless you allow access through the firewall.
You’re thinking of a firewall. NAT is just the thing that makes a connection appear to come from an IP on the internet when it’s really coming from your router, and it’s not needed with IPv6. But you would not see any difference with IPv6 without it.
Say this to my very large Canadian ISP who still doesn’t support IPv6 for residential customers. Last I checked, adoption in Canada was still under 50%.
Unified Push.
Unbelievable that we have to rely on Google and co for sth as essential as push messages! Even among the open source community, the adoption is surprisingly limited.
Nobody knows about unifiedpush. Last time I checked, their Linux dbus distributor also wasn’t ready. There has to be a unified push to get it adopted.
Fuck Unified Push. Just use the Web Push standard. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8030
It is what is used for browser push messages, is already widely supported. Is compatible with existing push infrastructure and users and is end-to-end encrypted. IDK why Unified Push felt the need to create a new protocol when a perfectly good one already existed.
Although there is no “client side” spec. The Unified Push client side could be useful. But they should throw away their custom backend protocol and just use Web Push.
IPv6
I mean, why the hell is IPv4 still a thing??
Yeah I’m anti IPv6 so I’m not going to ever use it personally. Ipv4 is enough for me
Because SecOps still thinks NAT is security, and NetOps is decidedly against carrying around that stupid tradition.
In the world of computers, why would remembering numbers be the stop for new technologies?
Do you remember anyone’s public key? Certificate?
I don’t even remember domain (most) names, just Google them or save them as bookmarks or something.
The reason IPv4 still exists is because ISPs benefit from its scarcity. Big ISPs already paid a lot of money to own IPv4 addresses, if they switched to IPv6 that investnywould be worthless.
Try selling static IPv6 addresses as they do now with IPv4. People would laugh at them and just get a free IPv6 address from an ISP that wants to get new users and doesn’t charge for it.
The longer ISPs delay the adoption of IPv6, the longer they can milk IPv4 scarcity.
damn if only we had a service that like, obfuscated and abstracted these hard to remember IPs that aren’t very user friendly, and turned them into something more usable. That would be cool i think. Someone should make that.
