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I miss the programmable web (2021)

matt-rickard.com

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Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#171

Post by rektide »

aendruk wrote: post #169
rektide wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many sites are turning on CSP, a web security capability which lets sites block loading content from anywhere they don't allowlist. Userscripts will run, but if they try to load any content from elsewhere, that breaks. So, for example, the Hypothes.is extension wont load. Affected sites keep growing. https://twitter.com turned on CSP many years ago.

This is such a silly problem to have. User agents that want an exception to a policy are free to make one.

The mainstream browsers & spec authors sneer at & detest userscripts, wish they'd never been a thing. https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-csp/issues/444

I agree. This is simple & stupid a problem. It's grossly anti-user. But today, security rules, and security sees all the misdeeds of users, and those who would prey on them, and they have no emapathy left for creativity and fun. There's no moral-value-party left anywhere that defends user freedom, that is pro end-user-hacking.

The Manifest V3 (MV3) catastrophe is still scheduled for 4 months out, even though there is still only 1/3rd the work done thay it would take to allow GreaseMonkeyTamperMonkey/et-cetera to live. The new browsers are actively unwinding power & possibility, forever trying to undo the permissiveness that it had (ex: CORB, and now ORB). The standards authors & browser makers are infected with deep deep fear. Certainty & closedness is winning.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#172

Post by josephcsible »

rektide wrote: post #171
aendruk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a silly problem to have. User agents that want an exception to a policy are free to make one.

The mainstream browsers & spec authors sneer at & detest userscripts, wish they'd never been a thing. https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-csp/issues/444 I agree. This is simple & stupid a problem. It's grossly anti-user. But today, security rules, and security sees all the misdeeds of users, and those who would prey on them, and they have no emapathy left for creativity and fun. There's no moral-value-party left anywher…

Keep in mind that all of the mainstream browsers are funded by companies that make money off of advertising, so you should always look for ulterior motives from them.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#173

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

agentwiggles wrote: post #126
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but there is no value, personally in building projects like that anymore, you can not use them in your portfolio or to progress your career - i was going to build a personal site, but realised it would probably act as more of a hindrance to me, because potential clients/employers would see that it was not using latest new js fad. if it was up to me i would never touch those things, but that's what the market has…

People building for the fun of it with simple tools is what made the old school web that so many HN readers are nostalgic for. These days it feels like everyone is constantly looking for an angle, feeling like nothing is worth doing if it can't be monetized and turned into content. Fuck's sake, people can't even go _fishing_ without strapping up with a GoPro and trying to sell their favorite tackle. Be punk rock. Go…

> Be punk rock. Go do something for the joy of it. Go learn a language that no one will ever pay you to write. You have a day job to get paid. Why worry about it for what you do for fun?

you're right, i'm trying to get into that mindset. Being contrary for no other reason than absurdity.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#174

Post by grishka »

klibertp wrote: post #143
lgas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would WASM driven pages be any different to deal with than non-WASM driven pages?

You can't scrape HTML out of a rendered bitmap. It's not the only mode WASM can be used, but often all the rendering happens in the compiled code and the page only receives a series of images to display on a canvas. It's Flash all over again.

> It's Flash all over again.

Flash was at least easy to decompile. The decompiled code was so good most of the time that you could compile it back into a working swf, with modifications if you want any.

But then both WASM and Flash have to get the data from somewhere. That is usually something resembling an API endpoint that returns the result in XML or JSON. Why not sidestep the whole client app thing and go straight for that API endpoint?

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#175

Post by thegeekpirate »

thunderbong wrote: post #6
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #4

My most used bookmark is this, for speeding up the first audio or video element on the page. I suppose that's if you don't count me typing 'n' and auto-completing my way to hacker news. javascript:(function() { (document.querySelector('video') || document.querySelector('audio')).playbackRate = (+prompt('How many times normal speed?') || 1); })();

For webkit based browsers, you can also use Video Speed Controller extension https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

Here's the fork that added Firefox support (https://github.com/codebicycle/videospeed, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/), and it's saved me so much time it's absolutely ridiculous at this point.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#176

Post by ecef9-8c0f-4374 »

grishka wrote: post #10

Huh? Userscripts are dead according to author, but I apparently never got the notice because I have about a dozen of those things installed right now. Three of them are for YouTube because it's this much annoying as is.

More and more sites use "Content Security Policy" and prevent javascript: from working.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#177

Post by TOGoS »

redox99 wrote: post #132
splintercell wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree shaking doesn’t mean to minify the code but remove the CSS classes from the payload which are not being used anywhere. Proper term is dead code elimination (DCE).

Why is "dead code elimination" more proper than tree shaking? Is CSS even "code"?

Dead Code Elimination is the goal. Tree Shaking is just one technique to achieve that goal.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#178

Post by RobbieGM »

klibertp wrote: post #143
lgas wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would WASM driven pages be any different to deal with than non-WASM driven pages?

You can't scrape HTML out of a rendered bitmap. It's not the only mode WASM can be used, but often all the rendering happens in the compiled code and the page only receives a series of images to display on a canvas. It's Flash all over again.

Almost nobody is doing this, and almost nobody ever will because it breaks accessibility and a whole host of other features. I would save the alarmism for another day.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#179

Post by klibertp »

RobbieGM wrote: post #178
klibertp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't scrape HTML out of a rendered bitmap. It's not the only mode WASM can be used, but often all the rendering happens in the compiled code and the page only receives a series of images to display on a canvas. It's Flash all over again.

Almost nobody is doing this, and almost nobody ever will because it breaks accessibility and a whole host of other features. I would save the alarmism for another day.

You're right about the accessibility and other features breaking. You're wrong in saying that (almost) nobody would do this. What (almost) nobody will do is creating an HTML-based rendering engine for windowing (GTK, Qt, wx, etc.) and graphical (SDL, DirectX, OpenGL, etc.) toolkits. It's technically possible, but maintainers have enough work with supporting just the 3 desktop and 2 mobile platforms. In the absence of a proper HTML rendering frontend, there's really nothing you can do other than compile the whole graphical stack and render into a canvas. That's the default for graphical apps under Emscripten - all games and GUI apps currently work that way. The only apps that have a HTML rendering frontend are CLI tools and REPLs, where it's trivial enough to rewrite the rendering in JS. There are frameworks currently being developed that allow rendering of widget trees in HTML or SVG, but they're still immature and not widely used. Well, WASM itself is not widely used, so it's normal.

BTW: were you around in the days of Flash? Because it broke accessibility and a whole host of other features the same way, yet it was still used and hugely popular (there was also ActiveX, which worsened things even more). It began with online games and graphics-rich pages, but it evolved frameworks for generic apps (ie. Flex) and then even CMS engines. Soon enough Flash was used for even blogs and e-commerce. The situation today is different due to the Web having evolved into a more capable and standardized platform, but there's no shortage of devs who would welcome the ability to run their app in the browser, but who dislike HTML/JS so much they would do basically anything just to not have to touch it - accessibility and a lot of other things be damned.

Don't underestimate how irrational people and even whole communities can be.

As a bonus, here's an example of the "almost" part: http://35.158.218.205/experiments/webDOOM/

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#180

Post by naasking »

naillo wrote: post #98
anonyfox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we could *force* all the walled gardens to have an open API again, like some of them had back in the day, that would solve soooo many issues. Make all the data free to use for everyone, while ML techniques get even more accessible, and let people build products with that - where they also have to provide APIs for their enriched data.

I suspect part of why they closed open APIs down is because it was abused (for spam or similar). Not sure how to convince them to open it back up in light of that.

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