ttj - Tom Jones

Total state capture and moral bankruptcy are not the only problems facing Google.  They are also giving an increasing rate of 500 Internal Server errors.  This is the sort that means they've messed up, but not in a way that they should have messed up.  On the other hand, they have drawn a lovely picture of a robot falling apart. Today's example is from Google Calendar under calendar.google.com.  I was trying to make an appointment, and now I'm doing this. I remember, in 2018, a friend trying to convince me that 500 Internal Server Errors no longer happened, or if they did it was my fault, and that they hadn't seen any for years, and some other things.  They assured me that they would love to see screenshots of such a rare specimen, which I bored them with for a while.  That friend happens to be a Google employee. Well, there are plenty of others posting about Google Calendar on twitter today, including screenshots of 500 Internal Server errors, so I doubt t...

 There used to be a web design principle "graceful degradation".  The idea was that web sites could be made so that a richly-functioning web site, should it find itself on a user agent not supporting every aspect of the platform it wanted, still worked well, doing the best it could with the features available.  No web site was ever created that adhered to this principle.  The weak thinking behind the "principle" was representative of everybody involved in creating the edifice of shit passing for the "architecture" of the web. There followed a related design principle, "progressive enhancement".  The idea with this one was that a web site should function correctly on a minimal set of platform componenets (not that anyone would or could know what that minimal set consisted of, in general or per site).  If the user agent happened to support additional features, the web site was allowed to use these to enrich the experience. Neither design principle ...