this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 8 months ago (5 children)

JSON5. it's basically just JSON with several QoL improvements, like comments, that make it usable as a format for human consumption (as opposed to a serialization format).

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

IPv6. Stop engineering IoT junk on single-stack IPv4, you dipshits.

Ogg Opus. It's superior to everything in every way. It's free and there is absolutely no reason to not support it. It blows my mind that MPEG 1.0 Layer III is still so dominant.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The semantic web and social linked data. We could have applications share data without depending on big tech, but rather based on application standards.

It can be used today and gains traction but I wouldn't mind it going faster. Especially the interoperable personal app space could use some love and attention.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

PGP or GPG, however you spell it. You can encrypt stuff, protect your email from prying eyes!

Also FOSS in general.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It's completely bonkers that JPEG-XL is as good as it is and no one wants to actually implement it into web browsers

[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Adobe is backing the format, Apple support is coming along, and there are rumors that Apple is switching from HEIC to JPEG XL as a capture format as early as the iPhone 16 coming out in a few weeks. As soon as we have a full blown workflow that can take images from camera to post processing to publishing in JXL, we might see a pretty strong push for adoption at the user side (browsers, websites, chat programs, social media apps and sites, etc.).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Basically smaller file sizes than JPEG at the same quality and it also automatically loads a lower quality version of the image before it loads a higher quality version instead of loading it pixel by pixel like an image would normally load. Google refuses to implement this tech into Chrome because they have their own avif format, which isn't bad but significantly outclassed by JPEG-XL in nearly every conceivable metric. Mozilla also isn't putting JPEG-XL into Firefox for whatever reason. If you want more detail, here's an eight minute video about it.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (3 children)

i'm a plan 9 from bell labs fan. Imagine how excited I was when wsl used 9P for its plumbing. then they scrapped it all for wsl2.

just, the power they managed to get out of those union mounts... your application wants access to the mouse? sure, here's a file named "mouse". it's got the coordinates in it. you want to draw to the screen? here's a file called like "bitmap" or whatever, just write to it. you want to start a process on another machine? just cd to it and start the process there. want to have the UI show up on your machine? symlink your bitmap file to that directory.

I also wish early web composability could have stayed and expanded. like, the old vlc embed player, which would just show up in your browser and could play any file inline? great stuff. Imagine if every application composed with everything else, like the android Activity and Intent concepts but for anything, just by virtue of living in the same os. need an image? just ask the os and it will present the user with many ways to procure an image, let the selected one run , and hand you back an image. you don't even have to care where from. in a way, it's what the arcan guy is doing with his experiments, although that's more for stitching together graphical pipelines.

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (23 children)

ISO 8601 date format. Not because it's from a standards body, but because it's simple, sensible, clearly defined, easy to recognize, and very effective.

Date field placement in any order other than most-significant-digits-first is not only counterintuitive, but needlessly complicated to work with. Omitting critical information like the century is ambiguous and confusing.

We don't live in isolated villages any more. Mixing and matching those problems by accepting all the world's various regional and personal date styles, especially with no reliable indication of which ones apply in any given case, leads to the hodgepodge of error-prone date madness that we have today.

The 2024-09-02 format should be taught in schools and required in official documents. Let the antiquated date styles fall into disuse outside of art and personal correspondence, like cursive writing.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I love this standard. If you dig deeper into it, the standard also covers a way to express intervals and periods. E.g. "P1Y2M10DT2H30M" represents one year, 2 months, 10 days, 2 hours and 30 mins.

I recall once using the standard when writing a cron-style scheduler.

I also like the POSIX "seconds since 1970" standard, but I feel that should only be used in RAM when performing operations (time differences in timers etc.). It irks me when it's used for serialising to text/JSON/XML/CSV.

Also: Does Excel recognise a full ISO8601 timestamp yet?

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago

And it can be sorted alphabetically in all software. That's a pretty big advantage when handling files on a computer

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

I had the fortune of being hired to build up from zero my department, and one of the first "rules" I made was all dates are ISO-8601 and now every process runs with 8601, if you use anything different your code is going to fail eventually when it finds another column date in 8601.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is ipfs usage growing? Stagnant? No idea... Diatributed serving of content seems great

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (8 children)

I never really quite understood IPFS and why it gets used where I see it today. What problem is it solving?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (7 children)

ISO 216 paper sizes work like this: https://www.printed.com/blog/paper-size-guide/

It's so fucking neat and intuitive! How is it not used more???

[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago (2 children)

sorry to tell you this bud...

map of which countries use iso 216. guess which one just had to be different

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

Clearly the rest of the world are communists! It's not us, it's you! I'm not crying you're crying! 😭😭😭

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

It's also worth noting that switching from ANSI to ISO 216 paper would not be a substantial physical undertaking, as the short-side of even-numbered ISO 216 paper (eg A2, A4, A6, etc) is narrower than for ANSI equivalents. And for the odd-numbered sizes, I've seen Tabloid-size printers in America which generously accommodate A3.

For comparison, the standard "Letter" paper size (aka ANSI A) is 8.5 inches by 11 inches. (note: I'm sticking with American units because I hope Americans read this). Whereas the similar A4 paper size is 8.3 inches by 11.7 inches. Unless you have the rare, oddball printer which takes paper long-edge first, this means all domestic and small-business printers could start printing A4 today.

In fact, for businesses with an excess stock of company-labeled #10 envelopes -- a common size of envelope, measuring 4.125 inches by 9.5 inches -- a sheet of A4 folded into thirds will still (just barely) fit. Although this would require precision folding, that's no problem for automated letter mailing systems. Note that the common #9 envelope (3.875 inches by 8.875 inches) used for return envelopes will not fit an A4 sheet folded in thirds. It would be advisable to switch entirely to A series paper and C series envelopes at the same time.

Confusingly, North America has an A-series of envelopes, which bear no relation to the ISO 216 paper series. Fortunately, the overlap is only for the less-common A2, A6, and A7.

TL;DR: bring reams of A4 to the USA and we can use it. And Tabloid-size printers often accept A3.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Alright, but seriously: IPv6.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

The term open-standard does not cut it. People should start using "publicly available and sharable" instead (maybe there is a better name for it).

ISO standards for example are technically "open". But how relevant is that to a curious individual developer when anything you need to implement would require access to multiple "open" standards, each coming with a (monetary) price, with some extra shenanigans ^[archived]^ on top.

IETF standards however are actually truly open, as in publicly available and sharable.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

how about FOSS, free and open-source standards /s

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (4 children)

https://cuelang.org/. I deal with a lot of k8s at work, and I've grown to hate YAML for complex configuration. The extra guardrails that Cue provides are hugely helpful for large projects.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Hmm, what alternative? XML :-)? People hate Grade DSL just for not being xml

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (1 children)

ActivityPub :) People spend an incredible amount of time on social media—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and YouTube—so it’d be nice to liberate that.

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