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πŸ‘¨β€πŸš€ Client side only! How far can we go? πŸ‘©β€πŸš€

Adam Crockett πŸŒ€ on March 11, 2020

In a nutshell, serverless means to use sombody else's server, I find it unfortunately named because the term PWA is misslabeled as well, it used to...
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FΓ©lix Dion-Robidoux • Edited

You could go even further, and deliver the website by paper and include with that paper a setup to use a AI-powered software that can translate the blury picture of the 5-feet piece of paper containing the website and translate it to an actual website on your browser using machine-learning that uses how most websites look as a model.

I mean, we have it WAY too easy.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€ • Edited

This is roughly how people learned to write "Basic" before the internet.

basic language instructions manual

It's a magazine you would have subscribed to in order the hand write the program back out, you could make full games this way.

If anyone is wondering what a magazine is, it's a folding internet that goes out of date extremely quickly.

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FΓ©lix Dion-Robidoux • Edited
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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Good job FΓ©lix, Good job. πŸ˜‚

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Guney Ozsan

Back in those days, in order to download an app or a digital video you needed to write a letter with pen and paper to the creator and they mail a floppy disk back to you. Slowest API call ever.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€ • Edited

Haha, amazing! We should always remember how things where, there is much to be learned.

The mail, it's UDP based, you might get it, eventually.

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manish srivastava

GWBASIC !!! When I was 6 years old I created a small addition substraction program on it. Still miss it

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

That must have helped with homework 🀫

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Sorin Costea

My latest Firefox just searched for your example string hmm

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Nihar Raote

I got an Address doesn't look right the first time and also got Firefox to search the string the second time.

These are my tries. You have to look carefully at the comma and the full string you enter in the address bar.

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Guney Ozsan

Maybe it works like a USB plug. You try with a comma and it doesn't work. Then you try without a comma, and it doesn't work. Then you try again with a comma and this time it works.
(Also sounds like my debugging session.)

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Nihar Raote

Haha, sometimes it feels as if code has a mind of its own

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

3rd times the charm.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€ • Edited

Did you add the l based on my instructions, I mentioned in the note above the instructions?

This absolutely does work in all browsers. Infact this example is based on the example from Mozilla Development Network.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Did you take it out of the quotes of the a href

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Guney Ozsan

What I first imagined after a few paragraphs was a webpage directly consuming a remote database without an API. Then you went further. Nice and fun thought experiment.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Something like SQL straight into html? Hmm this has got me thinking about the inverse of this post. How far can you go without a frontend of any description. I think it would probably be quite far.

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Guney Ozsan

Yes exactly! I can’t progress my thinking as further as you because my speciality is very far away from web. But I like reading about interesting use cases and edge cases for any tech stack.

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Spyros Argalias

Very interesting. It's cool to see use cases like this.

As you mentioned, I'm not sure how practical it is, but cool nonetheless!

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Agreed, fun trivia but rarely used, I think I used it once in a server environment when I needed a simple index page and couldn't be bothered to read a file, this style of URL is also locked down in some ways (can't remember what you can't do with it) something to test.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

fail

Oh yes, despite what I said about a 4 page website. navigation is disabled in chrome and electron, meaning the only way to navigate is actually, through an SPA. I should get my facts straight. However I am sure that there are flags to turn off, I am also sure that in an Electron style app, this could be turned off as well.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Firstly wierd bits of trivia is why I write on Dev. It's what I like to talk about.

  • pasting text into a URL bar does not require a server.
  • I didn't stipulate that this "website" needed to be shared to anyone, personal client side storage is absolutely storage, but even so pouchdb can sync this with remotes - if you where absolutely determined to use this crazzy idea.
  • the point of the post is silly, it's a thought experiment, nothing more, it didn't warrant bullet points that's very serious impactful way of telling me to stop talking ☹️.
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Nizar Boussebsi

Interesting little trick and was a good read. Maybe one day an Open Source framework would leverage this feature and make client-side somehow possible.

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Adam Crockett πŸŒ€

Perhaps, I can't think of many real world uses but it's got some potential in the caching department for sure. Maybe it's possible to do some sort of SSR in browser.