mpalmer
17 hours ago
II. Solve problems instead of creating them
We want to solve concrete problems, not anticipate the tasks
others might have in the future, so we create applications
instead of frameworks. We write editors, not text-editing
Me: zooms in so I can read the tiny ascii webpage II. Solve problems instead of creating them
We want to solve concrete problems, not anticipate the
tasks
others might have in the future, so we create
applications
instead of frameworks. We write editors, not
text-editing
Brutalism 0, Problems 1bmacho
17 hours ago
It is a txt file, not a tiny ascii webpage.
If you can't read a txt file, that's more or less a you problem.
mrob
16 hours ago
It's a hard-wrapped text file, which is objectively worse than simple HTML because there's no reliable way to reflow it for different screen sizes. You have to apply heuristics to guess if line breaks are semantic or not.
samatman
16 hours ago
C'mon you really don't. Two newlines in a row isn't even a regex, let alone a heuristic.
mrob
15 hours ago
Here's some Stack Overflow discussion showing why it's a non-trivial problem:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/400359/algorithm-for-re-...
Modern LLMs could probably do a better job, but there's no perfect solution. Hard wrapping text loses information. There's no guarantee you can reconstruct the original.
llm_trw
16 hours ago
They are serving a raw text file from the endpoint of an http server. In case you don't know what http stands for: Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
This is very much a _them_ problem. They want the ease of use of the www with the simplicity of the early internet.
You can't have both.
Back in the day you'd use an ftp server for textfiles. Of course in this day and age I doubt even 20% of the people on here can fire up an ftp client, connect to an ftp server, download a text file, open it in a text editor, read it and not get lost somewhere along the way.
bmacho
16 hours ago
> They are serving a raw text file from the endpoint of an http server. In case you don't know what http stands for: Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
???
It has the valid http content type: text/plain
If your browser can't display text/plain properly, then it should open an app to do that, or offer it for a download.
I am not sure what do you want with this http = html.
llm_trw
16 hours ago
If you're using a http sever to serve plain text files you're doing internet wrong.
bmacho
15 hours ago
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/MIME_types...
Common MIME types
This topic lists the most common MIME types with corresponding document types,
ordered by their common extensions.
The following two important MIME types are the default types:
text/plain is the default value for textual files. A textual file should be human-readable and must not contain binary data.
user
16 hours ago
timeon
15 hours ago
Not sure if wrong, but definitely gimmick instead of Brutalism.
pavlov
16 hours ago
It renders wrong in iPhone Safari because of the hard line breaks.
This is a fine example of how you can be technically right and simultaneously obviously wrong for a large part of your audience.
(Maybe like the original Brutalism, which was loved by architects and often hated by the people who had to spend time in the buildings.)
throw10920
9 hours ago
Hard line breaks aren't even technically right, though - they're obviously and completely wrong.
The user's device is responsible for deciding what the width of the content should be - not the content.
As a very trivial example of why - if you hard-wrap your text to 80 characters, and someone has a window that fits 100 characters at their desired text size - you're wasting 20% of their screen space. If they have a narrow viewport that's only 70 (either because it's a physically small device, or because they've vertically split their display/terminal), then you get the extremely terrible experience of having lines that alternate between full and having 10 characters.
There is no excuse for hard-wrapping text.
enriquto
4 hours ago
> There is no excuse for hard-wrapping text.
How else are you going to write a poem, or an address, in a text file?
> if you hard-wrap your text to 80 characters, and someone has a window that fits 100 characters at their desired text size - you're wasting 20% of their screen space.
No. Long text lines are unreadable. Hard-wrapping text at 60 or 70 characters is perfectly appropriate and does not waste anybody's screen space. I'd go further and say that publishing or sending non-hard-wrapped text files is terrible bad taste. Wraps are part of the content and should not be messed with.
You'll take hard wraps from my cold, dead hands.
bmacho
8 hours ago
It's just a better alternative for pdf. At least on desktop. I can imagine that it is not that friendly on phones, that's why Apple is killing it deliberately.
cam_l
14 hours ago
A brutalist might now argue that rendering wrong in safari is obviously right.
This attitude amusingly mirrors the shift from early to late brutalist architecture. Where early brutalist architects were reacting against the inhumainty of the internationalist style, and concerned with recreating the monumentality of historic buildings in line with modernist principles. Like human spacial organisation, function over form, honesty in materials, and lack of ornamentation.
of course that quickly gave way to cheap concrete and poorly built units. The problems that surfaced with these buildings of course became the selling point. You should be shivering in the cold and dark and damp, cowering before the might of the state. Architecture found it's responsibility was to express frugality and indifference towards the populace.
So now, brutalist web design is no longer finding a level of simplicity which works for both creator and user, it is about fucking with your bloated browser. You should, after all, just be using a Teletype.
kazinator
12 hours ago
If your setup cannot properly show text which conforms to the 72 column rule, it represents the serious regression in display capability.
This should be a test case: can our browser, on our device, in portrait mode comfortably display 80 column monospaced pre formatted text.
throw10920
9 hours ago
This doesn't have anything to do with technical capabilities.
Hard-wrapped text is just completely and obviously incorrect. The 72/80-column "rule" was valid in probably the 90's at the latest, and now is pure downside.
The odds that the user's font choice and physical screen size will exactly line up with whatever width you decided to impose on them is very small. And if they don't align, then you waste space at best (when display lines are longer than hard-wrapped lines), and cause massive reading headaches (because when your hard-wrapped lines are longer than display lines, you alternate between full lines and those with a few extra spillover characters) at worst.
There's also no correct algorithm to reverse hard-wrapping.
And it has the potential to cause accessibility problems.
Putting hard-wrapped content on the web like this is inexcusable. Don't do it. It actively makes the lives of your readers worse.
enriquto
16 hours ago
> It renders wrong in iPhone Safari because of the hard line breaks.
If your device fails to display a 70-column text file, then your device is broken.
eddd-ddde
16 hours ago
Immediately 60% of the devices most be broken.
__d
16 hours ago
Maybe so, but the fact remains.
It’s a very common format for large amounts of older information, almost anything online from prior to the mid-1990’s.
timeon
15 hours ago
Fact remains but breaks manifesto:
'V. Strive for robustness'
Using http server to serve hard-wrapped txt.
That is just ornament.
True Brutalism would be unwrapped text.
This is just gimmick.
kazinator
12 hours ago
Except for the title, the material stays well within the 72 column rule.
Your device cannot properly show text that can be easily read on a terminal from 1975.
throw10920
9 hours ago
This is a very bad argument. The 1975 terminal literally had about 72-80 physical columns, and you couldn't adjust the font, and most terminals were like this - these are the circumstances that enabled hard-wrapping and made picking a specific value (72/80) reasonable.
Today, we have a massive variety of different screen sizes, and we can pick different font sizes to accommodate users' eyesight and preferences. These differences make hard-wrapping an extremely bad idea.
There's zero excuse for hard-wrapping - it actively makes the lives of readers worse. Safari is doing the sane and normal thing - soft-wrapping text, because most sane people do not hard-wrap their text, for obvious reasons.
xigoi
6 hours ago
My device is physically narrower than a terminal, so it doesn’t make sense to use the same width.
user
16 hours ago
krapp
16 hours ago
I can't think of anything more Brutalist than a text document formatted for an 80 column terminal like it's still the 1970s.
user
12 hours ago
curtisblaine
14 hours ago
> Maybe like the original Brutalism, which was loved by architects and often hated by the people who had to spend time in the buildings
Exactly like that. Brutalism was an attempt to apply the principles of socialism to architecture. Like all 1:1 transpositions of theory into practice, it missed a lot of nuance and consciously ignored the contingencies of history -those discoveries made by trial and error that don't necessarily fit neatly into theory - resulting in terrible buildings.
mpalmer
16 hours ago
If that word choice annoys you, I'm rather glad I chose it.
Speaking of "you problems", I assumed that most people are using web browsers to read this. We can hardly be blamed for this. But contrarian that you are, I won't be surprised if you try anyway.
Pannoniae
16 hours ago
The good thing about serving plaintext is that the reader can view it any way they want. Want to read it using text-to-speech? Sure. Want to replace the font with Comic Sans size 30? Sure. Want to make the background turquoise? You also can :)
mpalmer
16 hours ago
I want text that wraps within a paragraph. Also all of that is extremely possible with HTML.
persnickety
16 hours ago
Plain text has text wrapping built in on any modern computer.
kazinator
13 hours ago
Line breaks don't play along with that though. You must represent each paragraph as one giant line, using two line breaks to separate paragraphs.
(The problem with that is that excessive line widths are bad.)
wakawaka28
12 hours ago
This text has line breaks, which will be wack if you try to wrap them. So, you MUST open it on a screen that is wide enough to show the whole line at a comfortable font size. This is not code. I should not have to struggle to read this shit on my phone (which surely counts as "any modern computer) when even the most rudimentary HTML would fix the problem.
timeon
16 hours ago
> any way they want
Except for the line breaks.
mepian
17 hours ago
It zooms in just fine for me? https://i.postimg.cc/PJpz8xBn/image.png
mpalmer
16 hours ago
Try making your window skinnier.
kayo_20211030
16 hours ago
> We do not create abstractions for abstraction's sake but to simplify our current task
So far, so good.
> We are not smarter than others, others are usually not smarter
Nope. That's _almost_ a non-statement. I'll readily admit that there are many more people smarter than I am. They've done good prior work, why would I not use it? Yeah sure, let's write our own crypto code. Guaranteed recipe for disaster.
senko
16 hours ago
A strange straw man to pick a fight with, since the text agrees with you:
> Avoid cryptography, if possible, as you should write all the code yourself and doing your own cryptography is a well known mistake.
giomasce
16 hours ago
The point is that there are a lot of other things which easily become a problem if you do them by yourself instead of using known good implementations.
user
12 hours ago
beepbooptheory
16 hours ago
I think you might of missed the point of this one!
Brian_K_White
16 hours ago
It's not tiny, it's not any size.
If you have your browser configured to use a tiny font by default, that is entirely on you genius.
mpalmer
16 hours ago
If you're going to miss the point this substantially, you should be a little more humble about it.
Brian_K_White
16 hours ago
If you don't want to be called genius, don't say genius things.
mpalmer
15 hours ago
Your compulsion to belittle strangers doesn't affect me one way or the other.
I do wonder why you don't feel embarrassed posting weak dunks like this under what is apparently your real name.
Brian_K_White
14 hours ago
Wait, so you can "dunk" on the authors of title article, but cannot be dunked on yourself?
They didn't even say anything stupid as you did. And voluntarily and unsolicited. No one made you or asked you, you just volunteered this thought to the public.
Well the public has heard it and some have judged it. It's all on you if you don't like it.
I speak under my real name because I'm not ashamed of what I say. Or when I am occasionally, I honestly accept it.
mpalmer
14 hours ago
You're just name-calling; it's juvenile and unprovoked.
Like, I'd muster some respect for your efforts here if they were substantive and responsive to the actual point. But you choose to make a different first impression.
throw10920
9 hours ago
I would just flag their comments and move on. Their behavior is clearly against the HN guidelines, and until they start getting downvoted, flagged, or have dang show up, I don't think that their attitude will change.
mpalmer
28 minutes ago
Nah I'm good, thanks anyway. I prefer to preserve the commenting culture by gently ridiculing people who don't get it. Downvotes and flags don't discourage nearly as well.
rob74
16 hours ago
Yeah, looks like they failed to apply the manifesto to the manifesto's website...