obml-parser

This August 10 the service will have been online for 20 years. It's certainly the most long-lived service I ever co-created. I'll probably even feel a bit sad whenever they shut it down. The version launched in 2005 did simple line breaking in the client. It could only do what we called SSR (small-screen rendering), breaking up the site layout into a vertical strip. With version 4 in 2007 we moved to a model where font metrics are calculated/checksummed/uploaded if needed and then the layout happens on the servers using the full Presto engine. This enabled a full "iPhone-like view" (mobile-friendly web pages were a rarity back then - and being able too zoom in/out and pan around was exciting stuff). This is basically the protocol that's still running. Someone reverse-engineered the protocol here: https://github.com/grawity/obml-parser/b