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Splitting the Web

ploum.net

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Re: Splitting the Web

#151

Post by mike_hearn »

mschuster91 wrote: post #103
tannhaeuser wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can thank W3C's ActivityPub charter for that, who, in their infinite wisdom, have decided it woukd make sense to use JSON for sending hypertext around, rather than, you know, HTML.

How else would you deliver the metadata accompanying the content? HTTP headers are too flat, they don't support nested elements. In contrast, JSON parsers are a dime a dozen, and HTTP+JSON has been the standard in APIs for well over a decade now. Be happy Mastodon isn't based on XML-SOAP, that would have been a right fucking mess and depending how rigid the clients would parse it, you'd end up with immediate ossifica…

Why would you get ossification? The point of XML based RPC protocols was that XML had lots of extension features like namespaces and parsers were dime a dozen.

The forgotten 2000-era web had solutions for all of this in the form of XML and XSLT. The server serves XML, which is "semantic" (data structures). The XML has a header pointing to an XSLT file, which defines a functional transform of the XML to HTML. You could use namespaces to embed semantic info inside other schemas like XHTML if you wanted, also.

It never took off, partly because XSLT was a pretty unpleasant programming language (I actually built a product with it back in the day), partly due to latency reasons and partly because the XML vision wasn't sufficiently backwards compatible with regular HTML.

These days browsers don't support such tech anymore, so you need to treat HTML+JS as an app platform, HTTP as an RPC protocol and JSON as the serialization format but because that arrangement was never really designed per se there are lots of little missing pieces, like being able to discover the RPC protocol a web app uses without actually executing that app.

Re: Splitting the Web

#152

Post by eterevsky »

I think the author exaggerates a bit. Where on their scale between commercial and non-commercial web would you fit say Substack? It's obviously a commercial service, but it has it bells and whistles mostly tuned down, presenting to the users more or less pure texts of the articles.

Re: Splitting the Web

#153

Post by rakoo »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #17
chomp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, her analogy is more for protected areas where you can hide from lifeless, aggresively public areas and where you can consume (presumably) more authentic content. It doesn't work well in this case for e.g. "cozy web" because places like Snapchat are definitely harvesting your interactions. Whatsapp is literally Facebook. The author of this article is more ranting about the "commercial web" in this case. They don…

That’s why I feel like the author is trying to force a square peg into a round hole. WhatsApp is literally Facebook, but all my messages are end-to-end encrypted; I don’t feel like they’re tracking me the same way I do on Instagram. Meanwhile, plenty of people’s blogs have all sorts of nasty tracking shit. People love trying to fit things into dichotomies, but reality is always a lot messier.

Whatsapp doesn't know what you're talking about, but facebook stills increases its power and presence if you use it

Re: Splitting the Web

#154

Post by tannhaeuser »

mschuster91 wrote: post #103
tannhaeuser wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can thank W3C's ActivityPub charter for that, who, in their infinite wisdom, have decided it woukd make sense to use JSON for sending hypertext around, rather than, you know, HTML.

How else would you deliver the metadata accompanying the content? HTTP headers are too flat, they don't support nested elements. In contrast, JSON parsers are a dime a dozen, and HTTP+JSON has been the standard in APIs for well over a decade now. Be happy Mastodon isn't based on XML-SOAP, that would have been a right fucking mess and depending how rigid the clients would parse it, you'd end up with immediate ossifica…

Ah the obsession with "metadata". Looks like W3C spent too much time on non-problems of the "meta" kind first with XML and then RDF/JSON-LD, now they're looking for problems to their "solutions".

Re: Splitting the Web

#155

Post by anthk »

c22 wrote: post #117
Dalewyn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of W…

Linux has medical viewers. You can get the Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS DVD, install it. Open Synaptic, which is the "advanced graphical package manager", search for "DICOM" in the dialogs and install a good viewer.

Re: Splitting the Web

#157

Post by flir »

GMoromisato wrote: post #99
flir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything beyond the main page is a 404. I just wanted a technical description of how it works.

Apologies--still working on everything (which is why I didn't post the URL). But here's a technical description: 1. Imagine we build a platform abstraction layer on top of the typical nodes of a datacenter: web servers, database storage, etc. 2. We also create a remoted UI layer on the platform that renders on browser clients as HTML/JavaScript. Think of it like X Windows but higher-level and rendered on a browser. 3…

Actually, I have a question. Why not just any old container on the back-end, and mostly focus on the protocol between the web browser and the backend? Why are you bothering to build an abstraction layer between the cloud service provider and your VM?

Re: Splitting the Web

#158

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Dan_Sylveste wrote: post #92
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, but I do think we owe it to the normies to make our part of the web approachable. I don't want to feel like we've fed them to the machine when maybe they wanted out and didn't know how.

There's nothing unapproachable about a 100% static site with some server-rendered navigation elements, much like livejournal was in the early 2000s. Much like HN is today. Perfectly 'approachable' even on mobile devices. The only thing that makes sites like this and that 'unapproachable' is stunningly high (genuine, not stat-massaged) levels of functional illiteracy.

For people who are accustomed to clicking "new post" there's definitely something unapproachable about mediating the relationship between your DNS registrar and your hosting provider.

I'm just saying that if it's gonna be a techies web and a non-techies web we ought to recognize that some of us tend toward toxic elitism and work to counteract it.

As much as I enjoy being a Linux snob and a person with Stack Overflow reputation and a pedantic nitpicker on Wikipedia, I don't think that those parts of me, left unchecked at scale, make for a nice community. I want other kinds of specialists around and I don't want them to feel like second class citizens because they don't know their way around a private key (or, if that's unavoidable, I want to have at least tried to teach them).

Re: Splitting the Web

#159

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

Dalewyn wrote: post #104
skydhash wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m moving to Firefox as my main browser, and the amount of sites that break because of me blocking JavaScript (with ublock) is staggering. I can understand SPA being JS only, but simple blogs and other content sites, no.

You clearly haven't seen the sites that demand JavaShit just to load JPGs and PNGs that you told the browser to open directly. As in pointing the browser at a JPG or PNG and getting redirected to a page with JavaShit to load that JPG or PNG. Why? Fuck if I know, I don't live in the same universe as whoever wrote and published that literal garbage.

Oh, you mean reddit? https://old.reddit.com/r/help/comments/13ereaq/opening_image...>

Re: Splitting the Web

#160

Post by sophacles »

palata wrote: post #147
sophacles wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the person you asked, but framing it as "us vs them" and talking about having to choose a side... it's an extremist framing.

> it's an extremist framing. I see it as expressing a feeling. "It feels like it's us vs them". I don't know, I understand "extremist" as a pretty serious criticism ("I don't want to listen to that guy, he is an extremist"). But the author doesn't call for invading the Capitol, he is merely saying that he doesn't like how the commercial Web evolved. Maybe it's more of a "purist" framing?

Purism is an extreme position. Its extremism by setting it up as all or nothing, us vs them, or any other position that excludes the middle and only leaves the extreme positions.

I literally have no idea why invading capitols is topical for javascript in web pages, nor how such a comparison is relevant, so I can't comment on that.

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