Programming

ISO 8601 date format. Not because it's from a standards body, but because it's simple, sensible, clearly defined, easy to recognize, and very effective.

Date field placement in any order other than most-significant-digits-first is not only counterintuitive, but needlessly complicated to work with. Omitting critical information like the century is ambiguous and confusing.

We don't live in isolated villages any more. Mixing and matching those problems by accepting all the world's various regional and personal date styles, especially with no reliable indication of which ones apply in any given case, leads to the hodgepodge of error-prone date madness that we have today.

The 2024-09-02 format should be taught in schools and required in official documents. Let the antiquated date styles fall into disuse outside of art and personal correspondence, like cursive writing.

The metric system, f*ck the imperial system. Every scientist sticks to the metric system, and why are people even still having an imperial system, with outdated measurements like stones for weight blows my mind.

Also f*ck Fahrenheit, we have Celsius and Kalvin for that, we don't need another hard to convert temperature measurement.

IPv6. Stop engineering IoT junk on single-stack IPv4, you dipshits.

Ogg Opus. It's superior to everything in every way. It's free and there is absolutely no reason to not support it. It blows my mind that MPEG 1.0 Layer III is still so dominant.

It's completely bonkers that JPEG-XL is as good as it is and no one wants to actually implement it into web browsers

Zigbee or really any Bluetooth alternative.

Bluetooth is a poorly engineered protocol. It jumps around the spectrum while transmitting, which makes it difficult and power intensive for bluetooth receivers to track.

I'll give my usual contribution to RSS feed discourse, which is that, news flash! RSS feeds support video!

It drives me crazy when podcasters are like, "thanks for listening to our audio podcasts. We also have a video feed for our YouTube subscribers." Just let me have the video in PocketCasts please!

Depending where you use it, but often tables are available in markdown.

 |markdown|table|
 |--|---|
 |x|y|

Fixed..cos you could only see rendered and not code.

This isn't exactly what you asked, but our URI/URL schema is basically a bunch of missed opportunities, and I wish it was better designed.

Ok so it starts off with the scheme name, which makes sense. http: or ftp: or even tel:

But then it goes into the domain name system, which suffers from the problem that the root, then top level domain, then domain, then progressively smaller subdomains, go right to left. www.example.com requires the system look up the root domain, to see who manages the .com tld, then who owns example.com, then a lookup of the www subdomain. Then, if there needs to be a port number specified, that goes after the domain name, right next to the implied root domain. Then the rest of the URL, by default, goes left to right in decreasing order of significance. It's just a weird mismatch, and would make a ton more sense if it were all left to right, including the domain name.

Then don't get me started about how the www subdomain itself no longer makes sense. I get that the system was designed long before HTTP and the WWW took over the internet as basically the default, but if we had known that in advance it would've made sense to not try to push www in front of all website domains throughout the 90"s and early 2000's.

JSON5. it's basically just JSON with several QoL improvements, like comments, that make it usable as a format for human consumption (as opposed to a serialization format).

Since nobody's brought it up: MQTT.

It got pigeonholed into IoT world, but it's a pretty decent event pubsub system. It has lots lf security/encryption options, plus a websocket layer, so you can use it anywhere from devices, to mobile, to web.

As of late last year, RabbitMQ started suporting it as a supported server add-on, so it's easy to use it to create scalable, event-based systems, including for multiuser games.

GRPC for building APIs instead of REST. Type safety makes life easier

I wish standards were always open access. Not behind a 600 dollar paywall.

When it is paywalled I'm irritated it's even called a standard.

ActivityPub :) People spend an incredible amount of time on social media—whether it be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, and YouTube—so it’d be nice to liberate that.

IRC.

Jabber.

IPFS.

TOML instead of YAML or JSON for configuration.

YAML is complex and has security concerns most people are not aware of.

JSON works, but the block quoting and indenting is a lot of noise for a simple category key value format.

I don't use XMPP but it seems like such a no-brainer

(Holocene or) Human Era calendar

That would represent all human history as one.

Org-mode is like md but has tables and more. Emacs will even run computation as a party of interpretation. GitHub accepts it in place of markdown.

PGP or GPG, however you spell it. You can encrypt stuff, protect your email from prying eyes!

Also FOSS in general.

i'm a plan 9 from bell labs fan. Imagine how excited I was when wsl used 9P for its plumbing. then they scrapped it all for wsl2.

just, the power they managed to get out of those union mounts... your application wants access to the mouse? sure, here's a file named "mouse". it's got the coordinates in it. you want to draw to the screen? here's a file called like "bitmap" or whatever, just write to it. you want to start a process on another machine? just cd to it and start the process there. want to have the UI show up on your machine? symlink your bitmap file to that directory.

I also wish early web composability could have stayed and expanded. like, the old vlc embed player, which would just show up in your browser and could play any file inline? great stuff. Imagine if every application composed with everything else, like the android Activity and Intent concepts but for anything, just by virtue of living in the same os. need an image? just ask the os and it will present the user with many ways to procure an image, let the selected one run , and hand you back an image. you don't even have to care where from. in a way, it's what the arcan guy is doing with his experiments, although that's more for stitching together graphical pipelines.

Problem Details for HTTP APIs - I have to work and integrate with a lot of different APIs and different kinda implementations of error handling. Everyone seems to be inventing their own flavor of returning errors.

My life would be so much easier if everyone just used some 'global unified' way to returning errors, all in the same way

About s-expressions, what i read about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20120206034439/https://shinkirou.org/blog/2010/06/s-expressions-the-fat-free-alternative-to-json/

Seems rather niche, for non-key-value-pair data structures (aren't no-sql databases good for that?), considering that lightweight markup fulfills that role for readable document source.

ISO 216 paper sizes work like this: https://www.printed.com/blog/paper-size-guide/

It's so fucking neat and intuitive! How is it not used more???