Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

boingboing.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

891–900 of 1001 posts

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#891

Post by jdmichal »

theSpaceOctopus wrote: post #536
jdmichal wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I love ASP.NET as much as the next guy. But there's no mistaking the large trend from what used to be entirely server-side rendering (LAMP days) to REST services with JavaScript front-ends.

> But there’s no mistaking the large trend... You didn’t say that, you said “server side rendering is basically dead”. Believe it or not, lots of people are still building things without JavaScript front ends.

So is the only argument here that "basically dead" was a bit carelessly hyperbolic?

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#892

Post by byuu »

dannyw wrote: post #841
near wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…

Should a single developer working full time be able to implement an OS within a year? The web is pretty much an operating system.

Ideally, yes. It may not've been popular at that point, but Linus did. But what about the next Linus of 2017? Something like that's not going to be possible anymore. Just the basic necessary hardware drivers alone. The hardest challenge for Linux was just avoiding Winmodems. These days the entire nouveau project with years of research can't even manage to change the clock speed of your GPU. VESA's been all but abandoned so there's not even a way to set a widescreen framebuffer anymore for pure software rendering.

Nothing is gained from having hopelessly complex technology.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#893

Post by nradov »

swiley wrote: post #880
near wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…

ehhh HTML parsers/DOMs are trivially easy to write. after that you need to go get a JS lib (like ducktape) and write a css and json parser. After that all you need is a layout engine, which GUI tookits like tk and gtk+ already have for text editing.

Parsers for valid HTML are trivially easy to write. The hard part is dealing with garbage HTML tag soup and still rendering something that looks good. Browsers have to figure out what the page author intended and work around all the content defects.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#894

Post by nradov »

byuu wrote: post #892
dannyw wrote: post #841

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should a single developer working full time be able to implement an OS within a year? The web is pretty much an operating system.

Ideally, yes. It may not've been popular at that point, but Linus did. But what about the next Linus of 2017? Something like that's not going to be possible anymore. Just the basic necessary hardware drivers alone. The hardest challenge for Linux was just avoiding Winmodems. These days the entire nouveau project with years of research can't even manage to change the clock speed of your GPU. VESA's been all but abando…

The next Linus of 2017 will be on a completely different platform, not PCs or smartphones. That's the nature of disruptive innovations.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#895

Post by codelitt »

guelo wrote: post #107

For perspective here is W3C CEO's post about it https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/09/reflections-on-the-eme-debat... And Tim Berners Lee's original decision https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017J...

The reply by Harry Halpin is worth a read: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017J...

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#896

Post by pera »

DCKing wrote: post #241

Can anybody explain to me what will change because of this decision? DRM has been very much part of the internet since 1995 when RealPlayer was released. DRM has been part of content delivery ever since then. It has not ever seem to have decreased in popularity, quite the opposite. The browsers that 99.9% of people use have already implemented this standard for years anyway. It's not obvious to me that this decision…

One great thing about the personal computer revolution and the World Wide Web is that, thanks to its open specs nature, pretty much anything can be part of the Internet. That doesn't mean everything should be part of the standards: EME requires a piece of software called the Content Decryption Module, which is developed for Hollywood by software companies like Microsoft and Adobe, and can not be open source. So basically what the W3C is saying here is that every standard complaint browsers should include a binary blob from a private company. And that is, by the way, what will change from today to tomorrow.

This goes completely against the nature of the Internet, and it's also useless (as it will not stop "piracy"). I can't believe the W3C is doing this, it's extremely sad and marks a dangerous precedent.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#897

Post by lucaspottersky »

near wrote: post #710
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…

The web has been engineered to a complexity level so grossly obscene that it is all but impossible for independent developers to produce fully independent web browsers anymore. You would need hundreds of millions of dollars in capital and strong leadership to produce a browser that would be successful in today's world. I could dedicate the rest of my life working 100 hours a week on a browser, and I would die before…

as the standard gets bloatted, new players could leverage this weakness and build something entirely new. yes, reinvent the wheel. =)

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#898

Post by antoinevg »

feelin_googley wrote: post #687
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…

"... web developers are going to go by the behavior of [what] the browsers do." I have pointed this out before. It is an important point that I think perhaps is overlooked when users ponder how to change the web. Want to change how the web is presented, fix annoyances, scratch an itch? Try to achieve through web development? Good luck. Try to achieve through browser development? Far more interesting. Alternative, ope…

The original vision for hypertext absolutely had multiple "browsers/clients" and feature parity between them was not even remotely an issue.

The idea was that you tell the server what capabilities you have, it then tells you what it wants to offer you and a negotiation ensues.

I have no idea where this concept of a "standardized hypertext client" came from! ;-)

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#899

Post by wjoe »

lioeters wrote: post #424
kibwen wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is, AFAIK, the only browser vendor that decouples the EME module from the browser, allowing the browser to be downloaded without any DRM support at all. See the various "EME-free" directories here: http://download.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/55.0/

That design decision makes sense, to decouple the EME module, and great that Mozilla offers a prebuilt binary without it, as an opt-out. I wonder if Chromium (or a fork) can also be built without this feature?

Not sure how it works on other OSs, but in my experience on Linux, Chromium is installed without Widevine DRM, Flash, or any proprietary stuff, and if you want that you have to install it separately.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#900

Post by scriptkiddy »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…

> The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to try to exclude DRM is Mozilla, and unfortunately, if they do that, the users will switch to the browser that makes watching Netflix easiest.

This is the world we live in. People are willing to sacrifice privacy and security in favor of convenience. Sounds a hell of a lot like a book I read in high school.

People are so willing to make these sacrifices because they don't even understand what they're sacrificing. They don't understand what they're sacrificing because they couldn't be bothered. Apathy is the disease that will bring down the world. I'm calling it now.

Post reply on HN