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

W3C recommends WebAssembly

w3.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 350 posts

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#321

Post by shadowgovt »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #315
shadowgovt wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[citation needed]. Traffic, usage, diversity of usage, investment, all of these are higher than they've ever been and still trending upwards. What definitions are we using by which we can look at these numbers and claim the internet is being "killed?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059

If that's the definition by which people think the internet is dying, I find the definition suspect. And I find the solution suspect, because the notion of building protocols instead of platforms doesn't address the question of how to route those protocols over a network that has evolved to address the problems associated with laissez-faire protocol management in the past.

There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80. Does the idea of protocols instead of platforms address that reason? Because most people don't want to make themselves vulnerable to attacks along threat vectors they aren't even aware exist.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#322

Post by mtrower »

shadowgovt wrote: post #290
BlueTemplar wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What prevents access to the Internet from a non-website ? Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text - it's not like other, more appropriate protocols are not available, or cannot be designed ! (Or that URLs are limited to HTTP...)

At this point, HTTP has enough tooling around it to do enough significant application-layer things that the opportunity cost of rolling new protocols is extremely high. It's not just text transfer... HTTP also goes hand-in-glove with HTTPS, which is a technology few people want to build an alternative for (and fewer people should be trusted to do correctly).

What? How is SSL dependent in any way on HTTPS?

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#323

Post by mtrower »

shadowgovt wrote: post #321
BlueTemplar wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841059

If that's the definition by which people think the internet is dying, I find the definition suspect. And I find the solution suspect, because the notion of building protocols instead of platforms doesn't address the question of how to route those protocols over a network that has evolved to address the problems associated with laissez-faire protocol management in the past. There's a very good reason that so many syst…

> There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80.

Elaborate? Rather than using different ports for different protocols and filtering what you don't want/need, you instead tunnel everything through port 80 and effectively don't filter at all?

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#324

Post by Hnrobert42 »

lsalvatore wrote: post #173
danShumway wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could we ever lose the HTML centered model? This is what people should be worried about, not replacing JS. It became a kind of popular hot-take for a while to say that separation of concerns was a mistake, and that's not how apps get built in the real world, and what we really need is a way to encapsulate all of our DOM and CSS in JS. We need to start pushing back against that idea and keep emphasizing that separat…

Frontend Engineer here. That “popular hot-take” is my career, and I happily combine HTML and CSS into my JS every day. React.js has been the most significant JavaScript library in the past decade. Over 50% of JS developers on the web are writing HTML inside JavaScript. In recent years, CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled-components are becoming standard. We’re killing HTML templates and writing JSX. We’re killing CSS cla…

Because I run noscript. Mostly, when a site requires javascript for static content, I just hit back and move on.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#325

Post by shadowgovt »

mtrower wrote: post #322
shadowgovt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, HTTP has enough tooling around it to do enough significant application-layer things that the opportunity cost of rolling new protocols is extremely high. It's not just text transfer... HTTP also goes hand-in-glove with HTTPS, which is a technology few people want to build an alternative for (and fewer people should be trusted to do correctly).

What? How is SSL dependent in any way on HTTPS?

Ftp and sftp are different protocols. So are HTTP and HTTPS. So are IMAP and IMAPS. And that's the issue with new protocols being added: the security question is a protocol-layer question, but one can't just hot-drop a new protocol into SSL and call it a day; security requires abstraction-breaking considerations.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#326

Post by shadowgovt »

mtrower wrote: post #323
shadowgovt wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the definition by which people think the internet is dying, I find the definition suspect. And I find the solution suspect, because the notion of building protocols instead of platforms doesn't address the question of how to route those protocols over a network that has evolved to address the problems associated with laissez-faire protocol management in the past. There's a very good reason that so many syst…

> There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80. Elaborate? Rather than using different ports for different protocols and filtering what you don't want/need, you instead tunnel everything through port 80 and effectively don't filter at all?

Remember when Windows installs didn't have firewalls on by default and it was pretty trivial to attack people's installations via insufficiently-secure protocols running on open ports? It was a bad time.

HTTP has both elaborate tooling for deep packet analysis and a battle-hardened secured protocol, which we don't get with new protocols.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#327

Post by [deleted] »

krapp wrote: post #208
BlueTemplar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find this stance ridiculous ? Yes, one could say that the Web has "jumped the shark" sometimes after 1997 (took some years), remember the mess when Flash and Java applets were everywhere ? (WebAssembly might be more sleek, but the issue is likely to be the same...) I guess that multimedia could be part of the Web, but support for basic features like audio/video search is (still!) sorely lacking... (Though…

It's ridiculous because you're claiming that HTML is "the web", but that somehow the content that HTML marks up is "not the web." I can guarantee that no one was looking at a Java applet or a Flash site in the 1990s and thinking "I don't know what this is, but it definitely isn't part of the World Wide Web." >Yes, one could say that the Web has "jumped the shark" sometimes after 1997 (took some years), remember the m…

[deleted]

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#328

Post by int_19h »

gmueckl wrote: post #283
int_19h wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make content control more complicated, but it can't make it impossible. If the embedded browser uses the host's HTTP implementation, then you can filter and edit content there. If it implements HTTP itself on top of raw sockets, then you can intercept traffic on socket level (although you'd need to MITM any SSL connection).

If the inner browser has its own client certificate or simply checks for a set of known server certificates, MITM won't get you anywhere. Done right, this could well be game over.

For it to be truly game over, the wasm implementation it's running on must also protect the wasm payload itself, otherwise it would be trivial to patch that to MITM it.

So, on something like iOS, it could be game over (but I'm also curious what Apple is going to do with wasm there, given that it goes contrary to their strategy of being the gatekeeper for all code running on the platform). But not for the rest.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#329

Post by beaker52 »

bitwize wrote: post #282
beaker52 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything I'd prefer it if styles, logic and dom lived together in the same file. I hate the sheer number of files people create in projects. The worst one I've seen is a ".types.ts" file. Everywhere.

So, .vue files then?

That is one of the thing I like about vue.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#330

Post by BlueTemplar »

shadowgovt wrote: post #326
mtrower wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a very good reason that so many systems block everything except port 80. Elaborate? Rather than using different ports for different protocols and filtering what you don't want/need, you instead tunnel everything through port 80 and effectively don't filter at all?

Remember when Windows installs didn't have firewalls on by default and it was pretty trivial to attack people's installations via insufficiently-secure protocols running on open ports? It was a bad time. HTTP has both elaborate tooling for deep packet analysis and a battle-hardened secured protocol, which we don't get with new protocols.

Well, yes, we used to not care about security as much.

These days, don't you think that consumer routers sold without firewalls should be about as illegal as selling cars with only motor braking ?

Post reply on HN