I've been hacking more on kthoom and I want to upgrade it so that it can load reading lists (think playlists-for-comic-books). Anybody have any thoughts on a decent file format? OPML? A custom JSON file format?
This is a pure client-side web app, so a couple caveats here:
Happy New Year! Inspired by jfmherokiller, I updated the kthoom comic book reader to allow for fetching comics books over the InterPlanetary File System.
I still have lots to learn about IPFS. I have some code locally that lets you put books up on the IPFS, but I haven't committed that yet as I'm still working out the concepts and debugging things...
[Update 2021-06: Chrome and Edge have supported ES6 Modules in Dedicated Workers since Nov 2019. The equivalent Webkit bug is https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164860 which seems fixed since April 2021. Yay! The equivalent Mozilla bug is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247687 which work seems to have now started. Yay! Follow along on Can I use!]
I've been playing around a bit with React, since that's where all the hot and shiny is lately. I really like it, but I can see some of the hot and shiny warts - I'll blog about that later after I've been fully brainwashed had more time to play with it.
For the purposes of this exercise, one thing I'm trying to do is go the no-build-step route, where it's all pure HTML and JavaScript. This means no JSX, no npm, no Babel. It's really not too bad at all (unfortunately almost all examples I've seen online use JSX - and understandably).
It's also given me a good stretch at using ES6 modules natively, one hot and shiny wart I've noticed there too.
The last piece heralding the dawn of modern JavaScript (sometimes thought of as ES6, but we're past that now) arrived last month when two browsers (Chrome and Safari) shipped support for ES6 modules natively without developer flags. It's now possible to write all this stuff (modules, classes, arrow functions, const/let variables, Promises) using just your code and not relying on transpilers!
As promised, I have a tiny thing to announce here. I recently split off and refactored the code that deals binary data in kthoom into a new open source project: https://github.com/codedread/bitjs, Binary Tools for JavaScript.
The faster and faster JavaScript engines in modern browsers and the rise of new technologies like Typed Arrays, Web Workers, and the File APIs mean that browsers can actually be used to read in binary formats completely on the client-side (as long as native performance isn't a requirement).
For now the library includes two main capabilities: