The implication, that one should make a plan for that, is a valid reminder not enough of us probably do.
But it hardly needs to be difficult. If you're running dovecot and postfix on a server somewhere then yes, family is screwed. But it's simple to use either some mail forwarding service that you pay for with a credit card, or something like fastmail (etc). Leave 2 pages of instructions for how to log into and renew the domain (print the QR code used for the 2fa enrollment!) and how to log in and pay for whatever the underlying services are. Place in a binder and label "Family.Name Email Management" and put it with your other important documents.
But more seriously, my domain and VPS is on auto-pay, so it doesn't just shut off the day I die. My survivors will have plenty of time to back up their emails and do whatever they want with them afterward.
Plus, the password for my computers and keychain is in a safe-deposit box if they feel like handing it over to a trusted tech-savvy friend of the family to shut down properly.
There's a document explaining how it all works, and I have Google's Inactive Account Manager setup to transfer credentials to my trusted contacts if I go permanently offline.
You can look through my history how many times I’ve brought this up to people and they just don’t seem to care. A defence is that they’ll buy the domain for a century and not care once they’re dead which is fair but the situation in this article is a valid one. I will always stick with Big Email for accounts.
I moved to a third-level .name domain in 2005 precisely because one of the Big Email providers (Google) locked me out of my account with no recourse; presumably because I had a very common email address that was getting a large number of login attempts from other people which had triggered some abuse automation.
At the time - before the explosion of new gLTDs - third-level .name domains were advertised as the 'correct' domain to register for individuals wanting personal email addresses.
Your response seems to imply those people are irrational, but it's really just different priorities. Yeah, you need to make sure you don't lose the domain. With Google/etc, you need to make sure you don't break any of their usage policies across their suite of apps, etc. Neither are super likely to happen. Neither are impossible, either.
Personally I like having a custom domain as I like the idea of being able to move between providers. So far, over the past decade, I've hosted my email with Google, Fastmail, Hey.com and then Fastmail again. I like being able to move it around if I find one provider better than another. Others won't care, that's fine too.
> for most web apps, you’re much better off with good old DOM elements. Take the humble <input type="text"> element, for example. With it, you get crispy rendering at any resolution, support for tab, focus, selection, mouse interactions and arrow key navigation, internationalization for right-to-left text and Asian compound characters, accessibility for screen readers…
I did read the article. It is not a balanced piece. The title is “You might want to build your webapp in canvas instead”. Almost the entire article - basically everything except for that paragraph - is talking about canvas rendering. About when and why it might be better. There is nowhere near enough discussion of the downsides. If you read this article you could walk away thinking Google docs is implemented entirely on top of the canvas API. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
There are a lot of comments in this thread excited by the idea of turning my web browser into a dumb frame buffer for someone’s home grown, laggy, half baked UI framework that cannot function on par with the DOM for hard technical reasons. I don't want to run software like that.
The author is not obligated to lay down every single pro and con for something, it's just a blog post with some examples and if the reader wants, they can research more into the topic themselves.
Just because people use a technology incorrectly does not make the technology bad, especially when people like the author explicitly state where it does and does not make sense.
