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My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

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Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#71
post #32

I can only think of one thing. The computational overhead of this parsing insanity. With the size of modern web pages and the scale. This must amount to a very significant cost.

The problem there is that there's a lot of sanity checking happening in browsers; I hope there will be a new technology where things like html, css and JS are all precompiled / pre-verified so the page is executed as-is with minimal sanity checking. There was a post yesterday about Python's random() vs randint; the former just spits out a random number, the latter does a list of sanity checks on the arguments passed,…

Hi,

I work on CSS parser performance, and error handling isn't really a big pain point; if you removed all error handling overhead, you would not be likely to notice any real performance increase in your web page loading. Most of the time, you just hit the happy path anyway, and the error checks from that is an easily-predicted branch.

A precompiled format (i.e., binary) _may_ help (I don't think anyone has really considered it), but “pre-verified” means it would come down to who you trust to do that verification, so it's a hard sell.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#72
post #33

>I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. Considering all the misery inflicted by computer crime that's enabled by the forgiving attitude, I 100% agree. And given the choice between "you can still visit the Space Jam website[0]" or "never worry about drive-by ransomware again", I'm pretty sure I'd be with the majority in choo…

I don't see how making browsers less forgiving would reduce drive-by ransomware. I don't think most browser vulnerabilities are related to the web being forgiving.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#73

I love how forgiving the web is. These days you can get strictness with typescript and the like, which is great for businesses and work. But the forgiving nature of html and css and even javascript has contributed to so much adoption. Plus grew one of the most important things in an platform the ecosystem itself. Seeing rust slow down with piles of crates and fall into the same issues, js and npm has, perhaps its not…

> I love how forgiving the web is I have completely opposite opinion. This "forgiveness" comes at a cost: - unexpected behavior instead of an early crash - hard to treat the platform seriously for mission critical tasks - makes it common to have many ways to solve the same problem

Exactly, no bank or payment system would ever offer services on the internet. How can a store operate in this environment! Never gonna happen. Impossible for mission critical tasks.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#75
post #72
post #33

>I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. Considering all the misery inflicted by computer crime that's enabled by the forgiving attitude, I 100% agree. And given the choice between "you can still visit the Space Jam website[0]" or "never worry about drive-by ransomware again", I'm pretty sure I'd be with the majority in choo…

I don't see how making browsers less forgiving would reduce drive-by ransomware. I don't think most browser vulnerabilities are related to the web being forgiving.

Have you seen how big the HTML spec is?

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

A huge part of this complexity exists because of the forgiving attitude. With a strict attitude the spec could be much simpler, and that means web browsers could be much smaller. The most secure code is no code.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#76
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love how forgiving the web is I have completely opposite opinion. This "forgiveness" comes at a cost: - unexpected behavior instead of an early crash - hard to treat the platform seriously for mission critical tasks - makes it common to have many ways to solve the same problem

Exactly, no bank or payment system would ever offer services on the internet. How can a store operate in this environment! Never gonna happen. Impossible for mission critical tasks.

The person you’re replying to said “hard to consider”, they didn’t say it was “impossible for”. There is an infinity of difference.

Presumably banks and payments systems aren’t using web technologies (one would hope) to do the actual payments and transfers. They use them as an interface to other systems in other languages. And most of them tend to push you hard to use their apps, bank websites are often subpar.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#77
post #72
post #33

>I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. Considering all the misery inflicted by computer crime that's enabled by the forgiving attitude, I 100% agree. And given the choice between "you can still visit the Space Jam website[0]" or "never worry about drive-by ransomware again", I'm pretty sure I'd be with the majority in choo…

I don't see how making browsers less forgiving would reduce drive-by ransomware. I don't think most browser vulnerabilities are related to the web being forgiving.

Vulnerabilities are related to the web being complex, and just this one quirk involves a parsing algorithm with 6 transformations of a user-provided value.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#78
> I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. I think a perfect web would be a boring web. I certainly wouldn't be here writing were it 'perfect'. It's about making the web work, no matter what we throw at it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's probably less about "perfection" than precluding non-conformance to a standard from the beginning. The tale of imperfect beginnings to standards that haunt the world for decades repeats itself ad nauseam. In short, if one is clever enough to engineer a relatively future-proof standard, then one avoids (possibly substantial) wasted developer hours.

Note: This is NOT easy and things are sometimes obvious and unforgiving in hindsight.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#79
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love how forgiving the web is I have completely opposite opinion. This "forgiveness" comes at a cost: - unexpected behavior instead of an early crash - hard to treat the platform seriously for mission critical tasks - makes it common to have many ways to solve the same problem

Exactly, no bank or payment system would ever offer services on the internet. How can a store operate in this environment! Never gonna happen. Impossible for mission critical tasks.

Pigs can fly, given enough thrust.

Re: My favourite colour is Chuck Norris red

#80
This article appears to be recycling content from a 13 year old top stack overflow question:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-th...

Truly any interesting thing ever created on the internet will be exploited for marketing until the end of time. Unfortunate that old redditors and other forum contributors were not able to capture the millions of dollars of value created from their work.

EDIT: I did see it’s at least referenced at the end.

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