The HTTP TTY (htty.github.io)

Sometimes installing an entire programming language just to use one tool is not worth the time I could possibly waste just trying to figure out how to get it working (assuming it works). Instead looking for alternatives built around tech that's already available in my system makes more sense to me, because of a higher chance of familiarity and the benefit of less time possibly wasted.

There's also the curiosity of wanting to see the project implemented in a language you're familiar with.

The ones I've tried have been dependant on a specific version of ruby. So you have to work through that. I'm not a resident of the ruby ecosystem, and I don't want to figure out the "why didn't you just" method of managing that. As the saying goes, it's hard to remember your objective was to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators.

IIRC, vagrant just includes the version of ruby it depends on. Or maybe it just includes a ruby in case you don't have one. I like and use vagrant.

Say I want to run two programs an a server, both written in Ruby. Those programs depend on a bunch of libraries. Ok, so I go on and just install those libraries. WRONG. The programs need specific versions of those libraries (both of which differ from the one coming with my Linux distro) and there's no single library version that works with both of them. To make things worse, one program needs a different version of the Ruby interpreter than the other. Only one of those is included in the Linux distribution I'm running.

So instead of being able to (at least partially) rely on the maintenance done by my Linux distro, I'd have to maintain my own Ruby interpreters and libraries. Yeah, right.

For that reason I consider running Ruby programs a liability. Sure, you have to deal with stuff like that everywhere but I never encountered an ecosystem where things are that bad and things break with any other update. I've heard the Javascript/Node people do an equally crappy job but I'm not going to find out personally.

So while I saw a couple of quite nice things written in Ruby, we're not going to use them if their maintenance is such a pain.

http://htty.github.io/htty/javascripts/scale.fix.js

which appears to add a 'gesturestart' event, and a weird conditional comment at the bottom that shouldn't appear for non-IE, but whose condition is to explicitly run the function defined in that script in non-IE browsers...

  .wrapper::before {
    content: ' ';
    position: fixed;
    height: 100%;
    width: 100%;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    background: url('data:image/png;base64,...');
    will-change: transform;
  }