GavinAnderegg (u/GavinAnderegg)

GavinAnderegg commented on Snow Simulation Toy potch.me/2026/snow-simula... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

I feel like playing lemmings now!

I loved Christmas Lemmings so much back in the day! The snowfall visualization and the little Santa lemming clearing it. I made a much less impressive snowfall demo a while back based on that (minus the clearing lemming, because I always wanted to watch the snow pile up). https://anderegg.ca/projects/flake/

GavinAnderegg commented on XHTML Club xhtml.club/... · Posted by u/bradley_taunt

direwolf20 · 16 days ago

You're annoyed when people are trying to keep the dream alive?

Since HTML5 specifies how to handle all parse errors, and the handling of an XML self-closing tag is to ignore it unless it's part of an unquoted attribute value, it's valid HTML5.

GavinAnderegg · 16 days ago

I'm not annoyed by it when people are trying to make XML compatible documents, but effectively no one is. Platforms like WordPress use self-closing image tags everywhere, but almost no one using WordPress cares about document validation. This ends up meaning that the `<img ... />` is just an empty gesture.

GavinAnderegg commented on XHTML Club xhtml.club/... · Posted by u/bradley_taunt

GavinAnderegg · 16 days ago

In the early 2000s I was 100% sold on the idea of strict XHTML documents and the semantic web. I loved the idea that all web pages could be XML documents which easily provided their data for other sources. If you marked your document with, an XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1 doctype, a web browser was supposed to show an error if the page contained an XML error. Problem was, it was a bit of a pain to get this right, so effectively no one cared about making compliant XHTML. It was a nice idea, but it didn't interact well with the real world.

Decades later, I'm still mildly annoyed when I see self-closing tags in HTML. When you're not trying to build a strict XML document, they're no longer required. Now I read them as a vestigial reminder of the strict XHTML dream.

EDIT: I just checked, and my site (at least the index page) still validates! https://validator.nu/?showsource=yes&doc=https%3A%2F%2Fander...

EDIT2: Hey, look, if you still want to use self-closing tags where they're not required: go nuts! I'm just explaining why I don't use them anymore.

GavinAnderegg commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam

GavinAnderegg · 25 days ago

Nice! You can check my site out here: https://anderegg.ca

About page here: https://anderegg.ca/about/

And the feed is here: https://anderegg.ca/feed.xml

GavinAnderegg commented on Recreating the Canon Cat document interface lab.alexanderobenauer.com... · Posted by u/tonyg

GavinAnderegg · 4 months ago

I just learned about the Canon Cat a couple of days ago! I wrote up a blog post with some resources and tidbits: https://anderegg.ca/2025/10/13/the-canon-cat

I had a lot of fun with this emulator on Archive.org, and included some quick notes about using it with macOS: https://archive.org/details/canoncat

GavinAnderegg commented on Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability anderegg.ca/2025/10/12/ni... · Posted by u/ulrischa

CognitiveLens · 4 months ago

Actual Nielsen Norman Group article here https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/

Can mods change the linked article away from the thin blog post?

GavinAnderegg · 4 months ago

Author here. I was also surprised to see this getting a bunch of HN traffic suddenly. I guess the Liquid Glass hate is pretty strong when a dashed-off blog post about a real blog post can randomly do numbers! Heartened to see that others are annoyed by this design as well, though. Hopefully Apple will do something about it, but I'm not holding my breath.