I’ve done a lot of web development and never heard the term. I even use them a lot but called them popup notifications or other terms. I’ve used lots of frontend toolkits that call these something else.
Interesting... I am a longtime Bootstrap user, and they offer a large number of other things that can be configured for the same purpose- alerts, popovers, modals, etc.
I've never actually noticed the toasts component itself, but have done the same thing with other components. I wonder if the feature was added after I started using bootstrap ~14 years ago, and I mostly just kept using the components I was used to.
Looking at it, I don't see myself using it because of the 'dismiss' button. I don't like things that obscure the UI, or encourage unneeded extra interaction, when I can pass info to the user without doing that.
Bah, you think you were confused? I thought it was about toasting, as in with drinks. (Yeah sure, "Are Bad UX" -- but since when is "Cheers!" a software metaphor? Weird AF.)
It seems like they put a lot of effort into trying to create a coherent extended metaphor, yet it doesn't make any sense. You create a tap by putting bottles and casks together, and then it puts itself into a keg? Your own cellar is a prototype for someone else's keg?
The Homebrew nouns are one thing. It’s the verbs that trip me up: update/upgrade is different to everything else on the Mac but at least is familiar to me from Debian but then I mix up list, info, show etc.
I'm sorry to say this, but I don't think it's fair that you (a moderator) should be allowed to pin comments to the top. There may be dozens of helpful links sharing or clarifying context in the discussion. The community can use the upvote feature to sort comments.
Exceptions might be made in cases of misinformation or abuse.
I guess for me the "pin the comment" thing is a workaround for a limitation in the software that we haven't had a chance to fix it—that is, there should be a way in the standard HN UI to associate multiple links with a story (including the archive links that many users post into the threads). Whatever mechanism we build for that, it will certainly be community-driven in the sense that users will be the ones submitting alternative links, and perhaps voting on their relevance somehow. This is related to karma too, of course.
That doesn't resolve your objection, which I think is legit. But I wanted to share why I do that.
There are other forms of pinned comment too, such as the "if you're going to comment in this thread, please make sure you're follwing the site guidelines" admonishment that I sometimes put into threads on inflammatory topics.
Thank you! That did puzzle me, especially because I had pulled some bread out of a toaster just seconds before sitting down to read Hacker News this morning.
In all of the years I've been dealing with "toasts", I never realized this until just now. I always thought it was some kind of weird reference to toasting with a drink or something.
Update: On consideration, I think my disconnect was because the plural of the notification method is "toasts", but the plural of the recooked bread slices is "toast". The plural of benedictions given prior to a drink is "toasts". So I mentally connected up with that.
That does make a certain amount of sense... much more sense than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(honor) which for some weird, unexplainable reason my brain had decided was where the name came from...
It was originally the name of a popular CD burning application for the Mac. Only much later, following the discovery of bread, did the term become popular for describing a slice browned by radiant heat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(food)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toast_(computing)