Thread: Here's the most fun & frivolous tech news today: Railway Operation Depot in the Chinese city Dalian just published an article on their harrowing journey racing to restore the old version of Flash after Adobe's ban, which collapsed their system and paralyzed the railway /1

The article was written a bureaucratic, propaganda, war diary style, with a detailed timeline down to minutes. "Jan 12, 8:16, Depot received malfunction report. The computer system stopped displaying pages...within 30 mins, computers in the entire depot had the same prob" /2
"After calls and online searches, we identified the source of the issue is American company Adobe's comprehensive ban of Flash content" /3
"8:41, IT department held an emergency meeting & took on four urgent measures: 1. informed supervisors and higher-ups 2. immediately started searching for alternatives to solve page inaccessible issue 3. founded a software task force 4. founded a hardware task force" /4
..."12:10 we temporarily maintained the stability of the depot"
..."13:00 a second crisis meeting was held to address three deeply rooted issues"
..."14:11 another crisis erupted. We are no longer able to print pages, again" /5
...
"20:20 A third wave of bugs was upon us. Flash we restored from Ghost system was disabled from all computers again...We held the third emergency meeting. The only goal: fix the Flash from (pirated) Ghost windows system" /6
..."Jan 13, 01:09 Wan Jia Ling stop is fixed!...we all gathered and confirmed. The room burst with cheers." /7
The article is so long and surprisingly entertaining, and it ends with "20+ hours of fight. No one complained. No one gave up. In solving the Flash problem, we turned the glimpse of hope into the fuel for advancement." link: https://t.co/2evuiGmkkT /8
Honestly, this is the Y2K content the world owes us for 20 years. /END
the article reads like dozens of parents coming together to overcome the insurmountable challenge of updating Flash. They then wrote a war diary on those 20 brutal hours. Not sure if my sense of humor is wicked, but this made my day.

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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
740 selectors
757 declarations
730 unique declarations
0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.

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