I was surprised to see an Eckart Walther cited as an co-creator of RSS. That was news to me, and I followed the RSS wars since 2000. I thought I knew the names of everyone involved.

Turn's out: he really is. RSS was created by Ramanathan Guha, Dan Libby and Eckart Walther at Netscape first as an RDF Site Summary but only Guha and Libby are named on the original specs. That format then got transformed into a pure XML-based format, then merged with Dave Winer’s format, who then became chief author for the following RSS 0.9x and 2.0 versions. And of course in parallel there were the rivalling RSS 1.0 specs (again RDF based) and the Atom effort.

Should anybody be interested in now obscure histoy: Twobithistory did a longer retrospective of the feed wars:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html

And the (slightly disputed) RSS Board, its own fractal in the RSS history, keeps copies of the original specifications:

https://www.rssboard.org/rss-history

Also: They don't really work in other countries or demographics. Generational bins presume that shared experiences form a somewhat comparable outlook on life.

I am a Xennial. I grew up in Western Germany. Are my life experiences the same as someone who grew up in Eastern Germany, experienced the fall of the Wall and all the economic and political disruptions afterwards in their formative years or by witnessing their family's experiences? My life didn't change, the country got a little bit bigger. Theirs in many measurable and unmeasurable ways. Are we the same generation?

And that was a peaceful revolution. Other countries weren't/aren't such lucky.

I hadn't heard of "Xennial", but the existence of the word and defining yourself that way demonstrates the horror of generational labels.

... in a diminished state.

There isn't one. It's Google's web now. You should be thankful that you are still allowed to use it.

Some modern electrical solutions seem to be very near this ideal. Take a look a Mahle, their rear hub motor and small in-frame batteries only seem obvious I you take a close look.

https://mahle-smartbike.com/ebikes/

(What I'd love to see are more cheap bikes and bike components. I'm currently searching for an “acoustic” commuter bike and I find solid bikes are rather soon outside my preferred budget.)

Interestingly there was a real attempt to build an E-Puzzler for shredded documents, to reconstruct the torn Stasi files after the German reunification. But while the system worked for defined stuff, but failed for mass reconstruction of documents with different formats:

https://www.bundesarchiv.de/en/stasi-records-archive/the-rec...

That's depends very much on age, class, geographic location. Someone could have grown up imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, hence learning Russian as a second language. Nonetheless they deserve appliances, websites and infrastructure which they can use and understand.

One about the annoying things about Maciej is that he acquired Delicious the domain .icio.us, but never did anything auspicious, maybe suspicious or malicious with the latter.

I remember when purl.org namespace URIs where the thing for RSS 1.0 modules. 25 years ago,

Here: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Easter egg: The example is named dogcow, after a 90s Mac icon, designed by Susan Kare, which later became a small mascot: https://512pixels.net/dogcow/

Regarding .length: Effectly that is just the result of Unicode, there is no one-to-one equivalent between characters code points, the code units in an encoding and the resulting grapheme clusters. That is in effect a result of the complexity of the world's alphabets, including Emoji.

Yeah I get the justification for the lack of .length, but they eventually added it for a good reason too, which is that anyone calling that doesn't really care and those who do care can use something more specific.

The other aspects of strings are also centered around things being of uncertain length, like how it's O(n) to take the nth character of a string, and how there are rather complicated objects involved in taking substrings. There's a lot more thought and resulting complexity than other languages' default strings. And yes a few languages use extended grapheme clusters, but I feel like emojis were the real motivation.

To clarify, this tradeoff makes sense when you care a lot about complex emojis, but not so much otherwise. Other programming languages' strings can store grapheme clusters too but don't optimize around them. The only other example I found back then was a non-modern alternate Korean script.