I've always thought SVG was a terrible format and I hate that it has become synonymous with "vector". The only thing it has is interoperability because of XML. Any binary format would be more performant. Then we have Inkscape that is basically a SVG editor so it has to stay compatible with the SVG standard. Proprietary vector image editors like Affinity, Illustrator, and Corel Paint all use their own formats, so they can add and change any functionality they want. It's just Inkscape that's confined to SVG.
That said, I don't think a single vector file is a good solution for icons. If you take a look at Windows 98 icons[1], you'll see that many icons are manually re-drawn for lower resolutions, which is something that ICO format can do which nobody else can do for some reason. A simple example is the calendar icon. Because a calendar has a "grid" for all 7 days of the week, it would need to have 6 vertical lines, which would look too busy in 16x16. So the 16x16 icon just uses fewer grid lines instead of turning everything into a blurry mess.
Anecdotally, I've tried using 16x16 pixel icons on the web before, but fractional scaling made them look bad on my phone.
SVG has a lot of warts, but it actually has two big things going for it: it's everywhere, and it's DOM-programmable. Anyone who knows js can start animating SVGs the same way they animate the DOM. It is somewhat more primitive, given how z-ordering is source-code dependent, and its weird compound attribute values for things like transforms. It's also true that if you try to code seriously with raw SVG you're just going to redefine a new library like D3 or Three.js or chart.js, but worse.
Inkscape is not really "confined" to svg, because saving to pure svg is lossy. Only svg with extra specific inkscape metadata is lossless- clearly legit svg, but with specific bits under the "sodipodi" namespace IIRC.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, Haiku solves the detail issue by allowing shapes/paths etc to be marked to only render in certain resolution ranges.
Do we really need 128 permutations just to express an alphabet of 26 letters?
I think we should use a 4 bit encoding.
0 - NUL
1-7 - aeiouwy
8 - space
9-12 - rst
13-15 - modifiers
When modifier bits are set, the values of the next half-byte change to represent the rest of the alphabet, numbers, symbols, etc. depending on the bits set.
>A good "this work is done for free pleading emoji" message can get you some decent cash
Source?
As far as I know you will need to put banners so users know you accept donations (as OP accepts donations in their support page and you literally missed that), and most people don't donate, so what tends to happen is you replace banners that everyone hates but that pays money with banners that everyone hates that don't pay money.
I know from work I've done with voluntary contributions that you can get near the amount that ad sense will give you, but that's on the high end, and will depend on the type of content and how you push it. But it would have at least been worth trying, given the public service nature of the content. Certainly enough to cover the costs of the domain name and hosting.
Also, people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
Also, the OP DOES NOT have a support page linked on the original, or meme page of apportionmentcalculator.com. Don't know why you're giving me snark when it seems you yourself didn't even look at their site.
I think I saw a banner when I scrolled to the bottom as well, but it isn't showing again for some reason.
I assume that they already had this page before they chose to monetize with adsense, which kind of implies that asking for donations hasn't been very effective for OP.
>people are far more receptive to a message asking for a contribution than an ad.
I disagree. Do you want to know what my hot take is?
Imagine, for one moment, that we didn't have ads on the internet.
Instead, every page was full of banners begging for donations.
Instead of ad-blockers, everyone would be using donation-blockers.
All that "concern" I keep hearing about about privacy and tracking and long lists of partners in cookie banners would disappear in an instant, and everyone would show that what they really care about is just being mildly inconvenienced by distracting banners telling you to do things and nothing more.
That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
> That's what I really think about it. The instant ads disappear, whatever replaces it, people are just going to hate it the same if not even more, specially when it comes to free stuff on the internet.
I'd guess that'd be true so long as what replaces ads is also annoying/distracting/intrusive, misleading, a security/privacy risk, gets in people's way, and/or prevents them getting to what they requested/came for. Hopefully, something intended to replace ads wouldn't be any of those things.
Ideally the ads wouldn't be replaced with anything at all. It seems unlikely that we'll go back to how things were when people published content online because they just wanted to share something cool or useful with anyone who was interested, but maybe it'll get to the point where it's easy and affordable enough that publishing a table of data, or a recipe, or a simple calculator doesn't cost a person enough to justify worrying about ads or whatever replaces them.
Here we all are on this website after all, typing up comments without demanding payment from anyone and everyone who reads what we have to say or putting flashing ad banners on them. It doesn't cost us much to do it, so we do, without any profit motive.
Yeah I know they have a donation button hidden away on their main site, on a different domain. That's not what we're talking about. The problem is that OP is so fucking stupid that they didn't realize they basically cut their conversation rate by several orders of magnitude with their design. It doesn't take a genius to make a large highlighted message at the top and bottom begging for a donation.
As for your hot take, I see no reason why I should take that seriously. Plenty of contribution requests exist today and have not been blocked, and they seem to drive okay conversation. Ads and contributions are not the same, and different strategies will emphasize them differently.
The craziest thing to me is that if you let Google manage the ads, it will create exactly the ad-infested website the article mentions, and that OP's website turned into, with vignettes and sliding ads from the bottom of the screen, and ads half the size of the screen above the fold. That isn't the result of the website's owner's hand. It's actually Google's autoads feature.
It's entirely possible that we have tons of people making websites that don't really know a lot technically, they just use Wordpress or something like that, and they add adsense and let Google manage it, and Google just does THIS every time. And if Google didn't have this autoads features, the entire web would have a lot less ads, because it's just more ads than a human being can manually place in a webpage every time.
If you have cheap electricity and a $5,000 AntMiner you can mine profitably. I would expect the halving to push out those who have more expensive electricity, not necessarily the smallest operators.
Yeah, it's a joke. You can't take "HTML semantics" seriously when you often depend on actual element position IN THE HTML CODE to make things work, specially when modern web design demands elements to just JUMP AROUND all over the page when the width changes.
If they really wanted semantics you would think there would be actual support for that.
By the way, I've asked this question here some other day, but nobody has any idea if most "semantic" tags are being used for anything at all (and Wordpress naturally uses all of them wrong, so there is no point even bothering).
There's not much software that takes semantic HTML as input, because barely anyone writes semantically-valid HTML. It's a vicious cycle. (Look upon the parsing rules for a high-quality screen reader, and weep.)
No point making a semantic web browser before we get a semantic WYSIWYM HTML editor. Maybe those could be the same program, like in olden times?
They probably thought we would ditch HTML/CSS for something better but then PHP came around and fixed many of HTML's shortcomings and then AJAX came around and we kept sinking DEEP into this fundamentally broken ecosystem and now it's just too late to leave.
Although, honestly, how hard would it be for Chrome to support some new language called Super Text Markup Language that is designed for modern use with support for templating, portals, actual semantic layouts that don't rely on position on the code, etc.? Perhaps it's time.
> Although, honestly, how hard would it be for Chrome to support some new language called Super Text Markup Language that is designed for modern use with support for templating, portals, actual semantic layouts that don't rely on position on the code, etc.? Perhaps it's time.
"Google Web". Like what Google did to USENET. First they connected to USENET. Then they called it "Google Groups". Gradually, free USENET declined, and now, there is only Google Groups.
It would be so much more convenient. No more need for hosting providers, domain services, and most of AWS. Just host on Google Web.
That said, I don't think a single vector file is a good solution for icons. If you take a look at Windows 98 icons[1], you'll see that many icons are manually re-drawn for lower resolutions, which is something that ICO format can do which nobody else can do for some reason. A simple example is the calendar icon. Because a calendar has a "grid" for all 7 days of the week, it would need to have 6 vertical lines, which would look too busy in 16x16. So the 16x16 icon just uses fewer grid lines instead of turning everything into a blurry mess.
Anecdotally, I've tried using 16x16 pixel icons on the web before, but fractional scaling made them look bad on my phone.
1. https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/