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Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

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Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#81
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I absolutely share the philosophical concern, I do wonder how large of an issue this is in practice. On an IOT device, or a retrocomputing/hobbyist platform, you'd likely want to display a QR code and have the user authenticate with their phone, similar to how you log into Netflix on a smart TV. As an aside, to my knowledge OAuth2 still works in PaleMoon. I just downloaded the source and did a count with CLOC,…

It's an issue because browsers keep getting bigger and more bloated, which encourages buying faster machines, which encourages consumption, the related production, and all the waste and pollution that come with it.

While this happens to be a great concern of mine, but I'd say it's a pretty different issue than the discussion of OAuth.

Although since we're here, discussing numbers of lines code—how much do you think web browsing performance has to do with browser complexity versus the websites themselves? I've always assumed the primary issue was the latter. Does e.g. Hacker News have higher system requirements in Chrome 97 vs Chrome 1.0?

Browser complexity worries me for other reasons—namely, the web isn't really a standard if there's only one implementation that matters, and because browsers are so complex, no one can really hope to create a new one.

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#82

Something I've been thinking about lately is how browsers have essentially become a dependency for any sort of auth on the internet. Pretty much everything uses OAuth2, which requires you to be able to render HTML and CSS, and in many implementations JavaScript. That's ~20M (Firefox) to ~30M (Chromium) lines of code as a dependency for your application, just for auth. This applies even if you have a slick CLI app lik…

Insightful, and good ideas.

That said: cookies may have been a mistake (opinion). I should back that up with more evidence, but until I can put a complete argument with evidence together -- that's all I would like to say on the matter for now.

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, Google has pushed websites to add more structured data into their html for crawling.. Seems it's used for SEO hackinge. For instance on recipes why wouldn't a site give their recipe a super high rating. Those sites are awful SEO spam adservers basically. But business info that can be used to map seems pretty valuable to google. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure...

It's not as easy as faking metadata of 5* user ratings of your own content. If it ever was, that technique is no longer useful and likely to lead to losing rank. Google uses a subset of schema.org, validates it according to its own stricter specification and extends it in other ways. It doesn't naively consume everything you provide. For example [1] > If the Recipe structured data contains a single review, the review…

Makes sense. And I'm sure they don't want to give too much away just helps SEO spammers even more

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#85
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember weboob, and all the amusing names of the various pieces. Unfortunate that the (French) humour was killed by political correctness.

Are you suggesting "political correctness" is the only reason someone might be discouraged from installing a program named after toilet humor and juvenile references to specific parts of the anatomy? I've let my kids watch plenty of children's movies with fart jokes in them, but I still don't want to hear more of that when I'm trying to use a tool to access a banking service. It seems there's even still a banking mod…

I see your point, but "professionalism" brings to mind things like enterprise software, which is not exactly great either. It's sterile, but just as bug-ridden and user-hostile/difficult to use.

Quirky naming and crude humour can be orthogonal to functionality.

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#86

Something I've been thinking about lately is how browsers have essentially become a dependency for any sort of auth on the internet. Pretty much everything uses OAuth2, which requires you to be able to render HTML and CSS, and in many implementations JavaScript. That's ~20M (Firefox) to ~30M (Chromium) lines of code as a dependency for your application, just for auth. This applies even if you have a slick CLI app lik…

What part of OAuth2 requires browsers? You need to be able to handle JSON, but I'm pretty sure you don't need to be able to render anything.

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#87

Believe it or not, around the turn of the century there were many thick client apps. But back then it was a challenge to ship and update these applications. This pain, along with the continued rollout of broadband led many to advocate for creating applications that would run in a web browser while being controlled on centralized servers. In practice, turning the platform that was designed to render markup text into a…

> Now fast forward a decade to the early teens and the ubiquitous use of smart phones.

An interesting thing happened here as well - because of the iOS app store and its auto-update policy, "thick" clients came back in vogue again. It just happened that they're running on phones, not full PCs. I'd argue these count as thick client apps. :-) Consider WhatsApp or WeChat - it has a complete and full ecosystem of messaging, apps, and utility function. It actually (I think) supercedes AOL 2 or 3 in terms of functionality. There's DMs, Chat, Apps...

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#88
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not “political correctness” which killed the humor, in fact the humor was there by accident and at the beginning the creator of the project found that funny, so it stuck for a while > When weboob was started in 2010, 11 years ago, the name was chosen, without a hidden agenda, since as a French speaker, "boob" wasn't part of my vocabulary. > Following its release and the ensuing reactions, during its first years,…

> since as a French speaker, "boob" wasn't part of my vocabulary. I think this sentence has been carefully constructed to be kind of true. The original author certainly knew what "boob" mean at the time. And the name "weboob" was voluntarily chosen as a pun. Now if you ask him maybe he will deny (I have other memories, but who cares) or maybe he will simply say that we do not use "boob" on a day to day basis in frenc…

Perhaps cf. the theorem-proving assistant Coq, in which case the authors almost certainly knew exactly what they were doing, the idea apparently being that it is good and proper for Anglocentrism to make us uncomfortable in light of superior French scholarship. Still, the community has been quietly mulling a name change for a while [1].

[1] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#89

Something I've been thinking about lately is how browsers have essentially become a dependency for any sort of auth on the internet. Pretty much everything uses OAuth2, which requires you to be able to render HTML and CSS, and in many implementations JavaScript. That's ~20M (Firefox) to ~30M (Chromium) lines of code as a dependency for your application, just for auth. This applies even if you have a slick CLI app lik…

>Pretty much everything uses OAuth2, which requires you to be able to render HTML and CSS, and in many implementations JavaScript.

I don't think this is true. My first (and last, yuck) foray into golang was forking and improving on a REST API client for Questrade[0]. I used it to write a bot that would alert me via push notifications on my phone when certain options contracts met favorable criteria, and despite the auth being OAuth2 the whole thing was hand-tooled in golang. No browser anywhere near it.

[0] https://www.questrade.com/api/documentation/getting-started

Re: Woob: Web Outside of Browsers

#90

Reading the linked site and some of the discussion, I highly recommend finding your nearest Chinese friend or person and getting authorized on Wechat. Its a whole parallel other internet! Kinda similar to how a private set of Facebook pages are otherwise inaccessible with an account, except in a parellel reality where people use them for all business and have no other internet presence. Yes, as a user another governm…

As a wechat user(I made my account during a study abroad in China) I think one of the most interesting feature is the mini programs. They're basically javascript applets within wechat with their own API that do whatever an html5 website can do, but specifically integrated with the platform making account registration and payments more frictionless than even "login with facebook"/Apple Pay. For example you may have heard of their bike share(Mobike), uber equivalent(Didi), and grubhub equivalent(ele.me). For Chinese users, these are not simply separate phone apps, but actually accessible within WeChat so they never even have to tab out.
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