there's also botit!

it's the plural of botti not bot but here you go en.wiktionary.org/wiki/botti

njsg: pronounced bot-ee or bot-eye

?

not sure how to translate to english pronunciation indications

I mean, it's bot-i, so bot-ee?

njsg: heh

nsITobin: /. even multiplied. when they tried to accelerate the ui stuff too fast to ensure ad placements work, soylentnews split off as a nonprofit operation.

ah, the #FuckBeta fiasco

furthermore, that's when I learned that the /. crowd really took it badly when the new management of that era (Dice?) referred to them as "the audience"

since then, Slashdot has been going in freefall

that, the ads, and the JavaScript disease didn't helped

And of course the trolls... the problem had become so badly that they ended temporarily disabling Anonymous Cowards and forcing everybody to register before posting

which kinda killed the Slashdot spirit, but brought a few weeks of much needed sanity

...until trolls figured out that registering in was a necessary evil for their "cause"

I dropped the site in 2020 as the signal to noise ratio had become unbearable again, and jumped ship to HN

...but HN has become more and more the same crap, just with SV dudebros and JS/Rust fanboys

if I may add something to the comments about js-backed custom UI elements: these sometimes aren't tested to handle lack of visibility, say, a drop-down box that's obscured because it grows below the visible area, while platform UI elements would probably handle this better

When the final cockroach breathes her last breath, her dying act will be to scratch her date of death in a CSV file for posterity.

Honestly the last *big* improvement wasn't in Javascript, it was in CSS: inline-block support.

The old web technology that I desperately want to reintroduce, is <a href="foo.pdf">Click here to open the thing you need to print.</a>

I am *so* tired of helping users navigate Javascript-based in-page PDF viewers that don't interact correctly with printing.

And both of the users who don't have any software installed that can open PDFs, don't have it on purpose for ideological reasons.

ha, 99% of them are hacked up forks of pdf.js

eh, I do not want external PDF readers if I can avoid them :P

Adobe touched me in a no-no place~

but yeah, site-specific PDF readers are dumb

and a waste of bandwidth and resources

my web browser already has a perfectly fine PDF reader, thanks, just serve me the stupid PDF and let's go on with life~

I'm not surprised a lot of them are forks of one original thing. They tend to all have certain things in common.

a fork of which was originally a Mozilla product

From the website's perspective, I don't see why it should matter whether the software the user has that opens PDFs, is the web browser or a third-party helper app or what.

Everybody's got *something* that can do it.

Heck, using pdf2ps and then sending the thing to a PostScript printer, is probably more common than downloading a PDF and then having no way to open it.

Agreed

maybe not everybody, but not forcing people to handle it in a specific way would be great

let the user be in control

^

Most users will just use whatever came pre-installed, but that's their problem. And it does still work.

a longer trend has been to hide the direct links and default to indirect in-browser or in-page viewing

pastebins, download sites...

at least dropbox allows changing the hostname to dl.[...] to download

that even survived the end of "public folders"

a extreme case is when websites abuse their own custom PDF readers as makeshift DRM

Eww. I think that is less common. Fortunately.

for example: utm_source=bnn&utm_medium=main-nav

they used to sell PDFs, but not anymore

instead they claim you can only use their online viewer to read the files you've paid for

internally they're still PDFs

Also, the user ultimately *can* print anything that can be displayed, even if they only way they know how to do it involves their phone's Photos app.

with some clever hax (i.e. lrn2devtools), you can download the PDFs you're not entitled to have despite paying a hefty subscription for that

the guardian picture thing *is* a button too, a trend I had seen somewhere else (was it at Yle?)

but in that case I think it wasn't a sibling (but maybe I'm misremembering)

andr01d: from a quick test, it might be worth testing adding '@-moz-document url-prefix("theguardian.com") { .open-lightbox{display: none !important;}}' to userContent.css

what I don't know is whether that gets rid of something else that's actually useful, but it does hide the <A> and <BUTTON> in a way that you can get "View Image"

(didn't test directly in userContent.css yet, though, only with devtools inspector)