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  1. Today is my 10th Twitterversary.
    For ~6.8 years of that 10, my tweets have come from my site: tantek.com

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  2. Google Search date-based search stopped working (0 results), so I switched to @DuckDuckGo site-search. More:

    Things DuckDuckGo shows that Google Search does not:
    * 😄 emoji in search result summaries
    * 👤 author/icon of a post

    Compare searches for "site:tantek.com Before Tomorrowland" in each.

    Note also that Google Search has taken other steps backward (e.g. dropped support for rel=author).

    For those that value privacy, less tracking, etc. note that DuckDuckGo is also “The search engine that doesn't track you” https://duckduckgo.com/about

    I’ve been using DuckDuckGo (which also offers an HTML-only version that works without JavaScript!) as my default search provider in Firefox for some time now, and the results have been quite good, including being much faster than Google Search.

    These reasons are sufficient to switch from Google Search to DuckDuckGo:
    * Good enough search results
    * MUCH faster page loading including links to results
    * HTML version that does not require Javascript

    And yes, DuckDuckGo’s HTML-only version is FASTER than Google Search’s (now) bloated Javascript-required site.

    I remember when I switched to Google for web search over a decade ago because Google was faster and good enough compared to Yahoo! Search.

    Now DuckDuckGo is faster and good enough compared to Google Search.

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  3. Kudos Google Maps: US Election day reminder & polling places for #Everyonein2016: a png.
    From https://www.google.com/maps.

    When you click the blue SHOW ME button, it sends you to a Google Search Results page with a "onebox" for finding your polling place:

    a png.
    And once you enter your address and press return or click the magnifying glass it will show you a map of where to vote with additional information.


    In comparison:
    * maps.bing.com: no such prompt
    * www.mapquest.com: no such prompt
    * maps.yahoo.com: redirects to a Yahoo Search for the word “maps”. I had no idea Yahoo Maps was shutdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Maps#Shutdown)

    Well done Google with letting everyone (presumably in the US) know that “Election day is around the corner” and prompting everyone to “Make sure you know your polling place”.

    Aside: At some point (recently) Google Maps switched their canonical URL from https://maps.google.com/ to https://www.google.com/maps, dropping yet another use of a subdomain.

    Wikipedia entries updated a bit accordingly:
    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Maps

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  4. a jpg. “If it’s not curlable, it’s not on the web.” 📷 @jkphl
    js;dr in print! Thanks to Joschi for the photograph of page 88 of  @heydonworks’s new book “Inclusive Design Patterns”.

    From: https://twitter.com/jkphl/status/792452368562618369

    This book will last longer than all your fashionable JS frameworks no matter what your coding schools are teaching you. Except maybe jQuery. You can still use jQuery to build reliable web sites.

    #IndieWeb #JavaScript #content #curlable #jsdr #book #hardcopy #printmedialives


    When I showed this photo yesterday to @adactio, he noted that the quote from my js;dr post:

    tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead

    “If it’s not curlable, it’s not on the web.”

    sounded like something @benward had said in one of his blog posts from long ago. So we both researched it last night and found this post of Ben’s from 2011-02-11 “Hash, Bang, Wallop” https://benward.uk/blog/tumblr-3231388630

    In which he notes:

    “(It turns out that it was me who wrote “if site content doesn’t load through curl it’s broken”, and I'll stand by that.)”

    Where the phrase  â€œwho wrote” links to:

    developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-users-have-javascript-disabled/#comment-17071

    Unfortunately that link now 404s. I assumed it was due to Yahoo shutting down all of YDN and so found this archive.org version instead (as noted tantek.com/2016/311/t1/site-content-load-through-curl)

    https://web.archive.org/web/20101016010319/http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-users-have-javascript-disabled/#comment-17071

    While writing this post, and about to claim that YDN shut down (it did not), I double checked and remnants remained (top level blog URL etc).

    There was no archive navigation (I’m not one to talk, I still need to build that on my site, maybe today at IndieWebCamp LA), so I paged through the "Previous" pages of the blog (eventually hacking the URL directly) and found:

    “How many users have JavaScript disabled?” https://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript-disabled-14121.html

    Looks like YDN changed their CMS and broke all their permalinks.

    This is pretty clear even from their own blog, e.g. the follow-up post to that post:

    “Followup: How many users have JavaScript disabled?” https://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/followup-many-users-javascript-disabled-16191.html

    Which itself still links to the old permalink of the post it is following-up to.

    In addition to breaking all their permalinks, they also removed all their comments, including Ben Ward’s comment, so we still have to go back to the archive.org link:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20101016010319/http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-users-have-javascript-disabled/#comment-17071

    With Ben’s comment, which I’m going to quote in full because it provides a lot of the thinking behind js;dr before I wrote it up, and I figure providing yet another copy will help it stick around:

    @BenWard on 2011-10-13:

    “One additional piece of information I’d be interested in here is whether the ‘JavaScript disabled’ measure is just that—the user’s browser having a featured turned off—or whether it factors in some scenarios of ‘JavaScript unavailable’. For example, where variable or poor network performance causes external JavaScript to load slowly and execute late, or not at all. And then, how much of an increase that can give to the numbers if it’s possible to factor it in.

    “Increasingly, I find that the ‘some users turn off JavaScript’ argument is difficult to make—not because they don’t, your graph illustrates that—but because even presented with percentages, developers are sceptical and evasive of those users (I think there’s a suspicion that the kind of use who might make such a decision to turn off a cool browser feature is not the kind of user that would want their cool product… or something like that, less grossly over-slimplified.) The argument that instead JavaScript-less versions of the pages can be served to anyone if their network degrades is more universal: Not just second or third world scenarios without robust communications infrastructure, but anyone tethering through AT&T in San Francisco. Poor network performance seems to be something that developers relate to more easily than an alien configuration decision.

    “Of course, all of this is elaborate: The truth is that if site content doesn’t load through curl it’s broken.”


    In particular, Ben’s point about:

    “[…] variable or poor network performance causes external JavaScript to load slowly and execute late, or not at all.”

    This is really the key behind js;dr.

    We still have this problem, six years later.

    You CANNOT depend on external JavaScript loading quickly, or at all.

    I *just* experienced this, this morning due to bad hotel wifi while trying to write this up! (as noted tantek.com/2016/311/t2/js-dr-pages-not-rendering-bad-hotel-wifi)


    Networks are still slow or unreliable, no matter what device you may be using (like a laptop), no matter what country you may be in (here in the US, or in Europe, or elsewhere).


    Lessons: make sure your sites and pages:
    1. Show content immediately without waiting for ANY external JS.
    2. Have meaningful readable text alternatives for all non-decorative images and other embedded content.


    Previously, previously, previously:
    * tantek.com/2016/229/t3/content-viewable-links-buttons-inputs-work
    * tantek.com/2016/229/t2/ad-driven-js-dr-web-breaking
    * tantek.com/2016/229/t1/fail-slow-internet-ad-driven-js-react-angular
    * tantek.com/2016/228/t2/slow-flakey-internet-use-cases
    * tantek.com/2016/226/t1/rare-slow-flakey-internet-simple-ok-js-useless
    * tantek.com/2015/069/t1/js-dr-javascript-required-dead

    See Also:
    * https://indieweb.org/js;dr

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  5. Ironically trying to write about js;dr while pages to cite are not rendering due to failed JS loads on bad hotel wifi.

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  6. “The truth is that if site content doesn’t load through curl it’s broken.” @benward 2010-10-13 https://web.archive.org/web/20101016010319/http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/10/how-many-users-have-javascript-disabled/#comment-17071

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