I took over stewardship of the Spaces Chrome extension recently (open source repo). Dean, the original developer, no longer wanted to maintain it. Chrome Extension Manifest V3 had caused the extension to be broken for a couple years, and then eventually taken down from the Chrome Web Store. I have been a heavy daily user of this extension for over a decade.
Ok, he wants to sell me on this "Spaces" thing now...
Read the rest of this entry ...
Once upon a time, I ported a turn-based strategy / tactical combat game to the web. The average play time for the game is quite long (many hours), so saving games is an important feature.
PC/Console games have two ways to do "game saves":
1) is easy to implement (writing and reading a file to disk). 2) is much harder to implement, costs money to run, and requires the gaming machine to have network connectivity.
Read the rest of this entry ...
Oh, remember that time six years ago when I said one day soon we'll be able to use ES Modules everywhere, even inside Web Workers and Service Workers? Well that day is next week when the last browser ships support for ES Modules in Workers - finally!
Yes, I know that ES Modules are terrible, actually - but the fact is that they are the future of JavaScript / TypeScript / Node / Deno development so we all might as well accept it. I actually think they're great. I've been using them for hobby projects forever - though I rarely use transpilers, bundlers, etc.
Sure, it will be some time before CommonJS modules are resigned to the ash heap of history, until then https://esm.sh/#docs can help... but I for one welcome our Isomorphic JavaScript overlords.
I decided to learn a bit of React again for some toy projects (my day job JS framework is Angular). Most of the tutorials for setting up a React project "from scratch" ultimately result in using the create-react-app library to hide a lot of the complexity (transpilers, bundlers), but I'm not interested in Webpack or Babel - primarily because I know browsers don't need them anymore. Also, I like to learn about how the bits and bobs work together for small projects like this. Here are the 3 things I want: Typescript, JSX, and compile/deploy to ES modules. Can this actually be done? Yes, and it's not that difficult.
Read the rest of this entry ...
The elder days of my blog are littered with useless musings on XML and JSON. So why not throw another one on the pile? 🙂
I wish JSON supported:
Of course none of these will probably ever happen, but having any of these three would keep JSON wonderfully simple but vastly improve the user experience of those who have to hand-tweak JSON files (which is a lot of people!). I kept these feature requests to only things supported by ECMAScript itself. I also note that several parsers seem to accept JSON with #2 and #3.
YAML has all these, but of course it has many other features that, I assume, make it burdensome to write a fully compliant parser.
[Update Jan 2023: I finally filed a bug on VS Code for this idea of back-ticked string support in their tasks.json. Maybe it's crazy, I haven't decided... but feel free to vote it up!]