alt Hacker NewsExample.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
Comments
I'm wondering how many automated tests this change broke.
Yes, I know it's not the example.com's fault, and it's a side effect of Hyrum's Law:
> This is not a service, avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.
Don't we all have a few fragile tests?
> there's a gradual opacity transition
Looks like they removed this and instead just show all languages with no CSS animation now.
Discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915060
The page mentions example.com 14 times and not a single one is a link
> There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.
I guess this is also done to prevent bad actors from abusing the fact that this domain is hit by people who might not know what they're doing (the ones copy-pasting code without reading it)
It's been about 10 years since I last saw this site and accidentally visited it a few days ago and thought "I don't remember it looking like this"
So they made a prior tweak to reduce fetches of favicon.ico ( by link rel="icon" href="data:," ) but why do they still serve the overlarge meaningless html page to requests for robots.txt ?!
Given that they have gotten spiked by automated requests lately, aka agents, wouldn't this at least be respected by the big players?
Also, as they are using Cloudflare, wouldn't a discussion (or a note from IANA or CF) about how they configured CF request rejection and how one should love CF's flat rate static serving be appropriate?
Am I missing something?
Here is some context: https://kimdavies.com/being-exemplary
I just don't understand why the operator, IANA, has to use Cloudflare for example.com
It cannot manage a one page website. WTF
There are no page "aseets", no need for images, CSS, etc. It was a text-only website to test connectivity
iana.org forwards to Cloudflare, too
Fortunately the FTP server service still works
Without assistance from a third party
If it's been a sensible decision to use Cloudflare for some period of time then why did IANA wait until now
Really funny coincidence, I noticed amazon wasn't loading a couple hours ago. Thought it was my internet so went to example.com to check and noticed the redesign. Figured it was a while ago though.
This is mine now! <link rel=icon href=data:,>
I’m curious… who hosts and controls this content? IANA? Never really considered this question until now…
> Along with introducing multi-language support, the JavaScript code also inserts an SVG book icon.
Wait - using JS for dynamic content is understandable, but why using it for inserting a static SVG?
who's job was it to make incremental stylesheet changes on example.com in the 2010s?
I find the text shown on this site passive agressive.
When a newbie learning programming sees this message, then this is a downer.
"Hello World from example.com [more info]"
Static test is still, IMHO best, but if they want that fancy transition they could at least have used a gif. All that js is terrible overkill.
Ive been using example1.com recently for availability type testing for what its worth.
IANA, a natural monopoly, can't even host simple html page is kinda funny.
the copy on example.com looks llm-generated now...
it's nice, and it surprised me when I saw the redesign.... I use it to navigate into captive wifi portals that always seem to be misconfigured.
It's down?
We (IPinfo) have a practice of adopting low-maintenance, high-utility services. Generally, we adopt websites that would have become defunct and run them as services.
Even though IANA says example.com is intended for documentation purposes and not as a service, I feel that it nonetheless serves as a service to the broader internet. I think there are some cornerstone services on the internet, regardless of the maintainers' intentions or their legal definitions.
For example, we ourselves sometimes have to recognize that we are not a standard API service. Considering that we expect to process 3 trillion requests this year, a major outage could take down a good chunk of IT systems everywhere. So, we invested in infrastructure to avoid outages. We then started adopting other cornerstone services and running them indefinitely because we might as well support the users who depend on them because we have infrastructure to support them and us.
What would have been nice is that depending on the visitors IP address’s region, showing a localised message instead of fixed number of languages
I actually noticed that! I was debugging some HTTP proxy and typed out an HTTP/1.1 request by hand in netcat, and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.
(This was when it had the language scroll though, I think moving the extras to JS should have resolved that issue; maybe I was misremembering the details too.)
example.com is not a user-facing service. I don't want to disparage the designer, but it's not meant to be pretty. It's meant to be small so you can copy its response to an automated test or visually verify its correctness, or just out of the bandwidth consideration you'd still be serving it to billions of requestors, even if you insist it's not meant to be used that way.
I just wonder how much unintended traffic they receive.
eg If they put DNS, NTP etc on it... Likely billions per hour or something equally ludicrous.
Deluge is likely an exponential understatement.