Testing from 9 - binrc - 2024-03-29 02:21:23 - cc-by-nc-sa

Testing From 9

Typically, when I build a website, my design philosophy is that the website should work on the broadest possible combinations of operating system and web browsers. This design philosophy intentionally prevents the use of javascript in any capacity and forces me to develop dynamic, interactive websites that only do server side scripting. In addition to the "server side only" constraint, I attempt to minimally style websites so that they are parsable and readable in browsers that lack support for CSS (and even certain modern HTML5 tags to some extent but this largely falls into the "useless tags" category).

As an indirect result of this philosophy, connections coming in over a 56k modem don't have to load hundreds of megabytes of unnecessary javascript and assets. Simple websites that work without javascript also means that any website I build can be easily mirrored to Tor or i2p where connections are unreliable and javascript is disabled by everyone with a three digit IQ.

This philosophy has some limitations and unwieldiness for users who are more familiar with the "all websites are webapps" paradigm that modern web development has fallen into. For many users, they expect to see a single page interactive webapp. Justletmewrite is a multi page PHP project that does not feel "elegant and cohesive" but rather a patched together series of PHP scripts. I personally find that websites that feel like this have more π•Šπ•†π•Œπ•ƒ than the bloated mimicry of corporate garbage that everyone else is doing.

Further limitations are imposed because of my ethics regarding encryption and following best practices:

  • if a website takes user input, don't let users input data over an unencrypted connection
  • as a result, security will always take precedent over compatibility
  • To enforce this security policy, all requests on :80 will be forwarded to :443
  • if your system does not have current certs or does not support SSL your system is unsupported
  • it is preferable to leave a system unsupported than it is to expose potential users to sending their login information over an unencrypted connection

For web devs, test your site in a wide array of web browsers. Test the ones that don't support CSS. Test the ones that don't support JS. Test the text only browsers like links or w3m. Fail to "it just werks" rather than failing to "please enable javascript to view this page" with a mangled mess of broken html.

see also: "What is a website?": my summary of web design philosophy in a similar style of motherfuckingwebsite.com

Written and published from ⑨front in order to prove a point.

I do not use 9 all that much anymore. I enjoy the system and it's simplicity but I have built my skill set around Linux and OpenBSD. At this point in time I mainly use 9 for testing my websites and the occasional "I want computers to be fun again".

Close the world.txen eht nepO
cpu%

9front screenshot



Community grade: 100% A+



binrc - 2024-03-29 02:33:15

This is an addendum test comment. The redirects do not work in Mothra so users must manually click the link to redirect. The catches for posts/comments that are either too short or fail to produce an original shasum work but the content entered by the user is not placed into the textbox automatically (I suspect this is actually an issue with Mothra using an incomplete implementation of an ancient HTML specification). Aside from these two primary issues the core functionality of the website is still perfectly fine. I am still surprised that this even works in a web browser that does not support CSS, let alone the modern HTTP standard or modern HTML.