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WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

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Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#101

Post by mercer »

thegeomaster wrote: post #33
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? " No, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

The curious won't be perplexed by such a simple barrier. They'd find this Web IDE, had it been an add-on, and happily continue exploring. Is that little convenience enough to justify bloating an executable millions of people use daily with a lot of code that only 5% of them (a very generous estimate) will ever use? We should be splitting software into smaller components, and let the user choose what they need. There'…

That's a solid point, assuming that it actually does create bloat (which I don't know much about, I admit).

Could another advantage of coupling browsers with development tools be that it makes it logistically easier to maintain 'parity' between the browser and its development tools? Or is that not how these things are done?

Edit: I see my question has been addressed elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933515)

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#102

Post by projct »

phkahler wrote: post #29
thegeomaster wrote: post #15

This should be a separate tool. An add-on, or whatever, but it shouldn't be bundled with the browser. If you think about it, it doesn't make much sense. Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? No, because you wanted to play your Black Sabbath .mp3, or read a .pdf scientific paper. If you wanted to re…

"Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? " No, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

I have idle on Mavericks in /usr/bin/idle. There is also emacs and ruby.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#103

Post by erikano »

simonsarris wrote: post #54

This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist,…

I know what you mean. I have multiple examples of experiencing this realization about different professions.

For example, the day I discovered that they sell surveilance cameras in regular electronics stores, I was very surprised. Up until then, I had thought that only special kinds of highly trained professionals even knew how to get them and that the whole thing was a giant unified system that cost close to infinite amounts of money.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#104

Post by asadotzler »

thegeomaster wrote: post #94
asadotzler wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What I'm saying is that you do and will for a long time need a degree of technical expertise to develop webpages." This is simply wrong. I was writing web pages with very little technical ability starting way back in 1996 because view source was built in and not an add-on and that made it easy to learn without any technical expertise. Today the web platform is richer and so it makes good sense for the view source of…

> I was writing web pages with very little technical ability Yes, a little . Similarly, I sad a degree of technical expertise. Not a lot, just a little, but enough to differentiate the creator from the consumer. Today, even if browsers don't have "View Source", you can search Google for "how to make web sites", and a zillion results would pop up. It's not a roadblock.

Not everyone learns by reading a book or article. Lots of people learn by tinkering.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#105

Post by Crisco »

cloakandswagger wrote: post #85
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? " No, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

>Do you not want the curious to have ready access to dig in and understand the stuff they use every day? Yeah, pretty much. Combine offshoring with the baffling obsession some programmers have with teaching EVERYONE their trade and you can expect compensation levels to plummet in the coming years.

There will still be a need for dedicated computer programmers, but I think that if everyone had basic scripting knowledge or at least was not afraid of gaining that knowledge, the world would be a better place for it. And if more people understood what it took to program, there might be less under or overestimating of the value of a good programmer.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#106

Post by tedmielczarek »

blueveek wrote: post #93
spacefight wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, the vbox/hbox is XUL. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XUL/vbox

Sure, but that's only in index.xul, which is a very small part of the project. Everything else is plain old js+html (xhtml necessary for localization). Apologies, I didn't notice that when I said "there's no XUL in there". As a meta-discussion, is just a fancy way of saying: div { display: -moz-box; -moz-box-orient: vertical; } ...which is the old flexbox implementation. But I digress :) edit: link to the MDN article…

We could probably rewrite the entire Firefox UI in HTML nowadays, but that'd mostly be busywork (and would break a bunch of extensions). I would bet that Servo's UI will just be HTML.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#107

Post by findjashua »

fidotron wrote: post #30
phkahler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you see audio mixing/mastering or video editing software being bundled with media players? Or do you see word processors/TeX IDEs bundled with PDF viewers? " No, and that's a problem. Do you see programming languages shipped with every computer? No, but that's how it used to be. Most shipped with BASIC while Unix shipped with C. I guess Macs come with Python, but just CLI no IDE - not even idle. Is there some rea…

They won't though. All you see in web dev tools is the UI as all the actual clever stuff is still hidden away from you on servers.

Well, with most single-page apps, bulk of the logic is running on the client, with the backend just exposing a REST API.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#108

Post by ryanmcbride »

akx wrote: post #98
simonsarris wrote: post #54

This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist,…

> Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step. I... um, it's a first step we took 17 years ago, didn't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer

A first step on a sinking ship doesn't count.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#109

Post by rodgerd »

jpalomaki wrote: post #86
simonsarris wrote: post #54

This is fantastic and I'm really glad it's being bundled with Firefox and not as a separate download. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of kids still assume that programming is essentially "magic" done by professionals and they implicitly assume there is no way to getting started at their education level (This is especially true if their parents are non-technical, as mine were). All the resources in the world may exist,…

This is a little bit like the early home computers. You could start writing code (basic) immediately after switching on the computer. Copy a few lines of code from magazine and see what it does.

Yep. When I was a kid I had to type my games in from an Usbourne book. It was, in the long run, a hell of a lot better than a console and cartridges would have been.

Re: WebIDE lands in Firefox Nightly

#110

Post by canuckistani »

paulirish wrote: post #53
Sephr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla didn't have to reverse engineer anything. Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all aim to support http://remotedebug.org/

Not accurate right now. Firefox and Chrome spoke about this at EdgeConf this year, along with the remotedebug founder, and basically said "Please go forth and develop a shim layer common protocol in the community. However, all browser vendors standardizing to a common protocol would slow us down too much." Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQG6PljqmLc#t=1013 (around this timecode)

Hear, hear. None of this needs to be a standard to show a web page so I'm personally happy to let developers hack on what lets them be more productive, and let browsers continue to innovate. It's way too early to get a committee process involved, and innovation will happen faster this way.
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