131–140 of 157 posts
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Missing closing tags in html no.
I could imagine a page where cutting HTML would cause it be a yes (not exact JS). setTimeout(10000, () => { safeEval( ); }); window.safeEval = code => eval(code); const notTooSafe = window.safeEval; window.safeEval = code => { if (code.any(c => !c.isDigit())) throw "unsafe"; return notTooSafe(code); };
It's a bad idea. HTML isn't a great format for transmission and parsing. Some binary (non-human-readable) format should be used instead.
> No scripting
That's a good idea. Web should consist of static documents (or ducuments generated on server side), not client-side applications with arbitrary code execution.
Dead on arrival.
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I think original web standards were solving a completely different problem: sharing information . Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead. Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will…
The current web supports flat information delivery, and it's there if you want it. Wikipedia can be presented in pure text. If you write a story or an essay you can post it in many places, including your own web site. Perhaps what's needed is for an alternative search engine. Assert that you will only index a site that meets some strict set of limits. If that's what people want they will use that engine. If it's popu…
Few old school sites like Wikipedia aside, modern Internet is serving a very different purpose: being an entertainment platform, being a backbone for building applications and monetizing them.
Yes, technically there are still underlying networks with instant delivery of content to any place on Earth, but maintaining something like Wikipedia on top of modern Internet is like trying to maintain a quiet library inside of a Casino. Monetization means don’t fit. You need a quiet space to read and study, not dingling sounds and bright lights, not free vodka and 50 security guys.
We need a new paradigm of information sharing and new ecosystem if we want to do things differently.
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I think original web standards were solving a completely different problem: sharing information . Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead. Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will…
I agree. Even where blogging and sharing information is still around, it is strongly linked with brand-building, monetization, and engagement-maxxing. Look at all the old Wordpress bloggers who switch to Substack in order to have some eyeballs on their posts, and then inevitably begin conforming to its ethos willingly or unwillingly. For me, the information-sharing part of the internet now is the shadow libraries. I…
I’ve recently counted movies available on my HBO account and it is in low hundreds. There is absolutely no way to find a specific movie across existing services - information discovery is broken, and their subscription models force me to pay in weird ways (subscribe, watch, unsubscribe.. rental is scarce) for a relatively simple outcome.
Another weird example are books that are widely available on the web in pdf and other formats with absolutely no way to legally purchase them in electronic form. There is a vast untapped shadow network of people doing [often volunteer] work of publishers: scanning, uploading and categorizing content in a searchable way. At the same time most publishers who actually own rights to this content are prioritizing entertainment and attention focused platforms, where 20% of invested work already gives them 80% of business results.
One can argue that this is (a) the only economically viable model we could come up with and (b) most people that are looking for entertainment don’t really have this problem.
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The current web supports flat information delivery, and it's there if you want it. Wikipedia can be presented in pure text. If you write a story or an essay you can post it in many places, including your own web site. Perhaps what's needed is for an alternative search engine. Assert that you will only index a site that meets some strict set of limits. If that's what people want they will use that engine. If it's popu…
You are proposing to fix something that is not broken by adding things to it. My point is, the Internet has already evolved in this specific way for a reason. Few old school sites like Wikipedia aside, modern Internet is serving a very different purpose: being an entertainment platform, being a backbone for building applications and monetizing them. Yes, technically there are still underlying networks with instant de…
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I think at least part of the reason for this is acknowledging that the web isn't much of a web any longer. You've got three or four vendors that serve the vast majority of all internet traffic. And it's not happenstance that those same vendors now control something which was originally meant to be democratic. Most of this document reads to me like that's the problem they're trying to solve, not just chrome's huge mar…
how is the web not democratic? in real democracies the populists (facebook, tiktok, chrome) always win. because that's what the masses want
Some will say that the solution to network effects on the Web is decentralization but decentralization doesn't scale. Because of spam, bots and the fact that not everyone will follow the protocol there is always a need for moderators which is just another word for government and Google's main business model.
Even Capitalism is largely decentralized but it can't function without government. I believe true decentralization (anarchism) is only possible on a small scale where everyone knows each other, very small communities. It's not possible on the global level like in Capitalism or even the Web.
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I could imagine a page where cutting HTML would cause it be a yes (not exact JS). setTimeout(10000, () => { safeEval( ); }); window.safeEval = code => eval(code); const notTooSafe = window.safeEval; window.safeEval = code => { if (code.any(c => !c.isDigit())) throw "unsafe"; return notTooSafe(code); };
Parent poster was talking about the latter half of a page being missing, rather than a chunk out of the middle, I believe.
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> Browsers absolutely decode as much as they can, and if the file is corrupted halfway through you generally get garbling, not the entire image being replaced by "fuck off". The only case where that is so is if the browser can't parse anything at all, or can't retrieve the file. What I meant is that you don't expect PNG or JPEG images to be created in a way that the parser needs to run a complex process to reconstruc…
On the contrary, image decoders all run complex processes that try and guess what to do in erroneous cases. I used to maintain Chrome's image decoders, and every single image format has "what the spec says" and then "what people actually do in practice"; you must handle the latter, and it is often very difficult to figure out how to do so. For BMPs, for example, determining whether the author intended 24-bit RGB or 3…
This causes a situation in which a page that renders the image in Chrome doesn't work in Firefox or other browsers that don't implement the same non-standard correcting algorithm. Worse, the user doesn't have a way to know from Chrome that the image is broken and it will likely continue to be broken forever.
Generalizing this approach, you end up having to test your site in every major browser to see if you didn't made a mistake that is only revealed in the browser which lacks that recovery mechanism.
> I also used to work on a production C compiler. Compilers can and do "guess what you meant" in various cases, notably for producing actual human-readable errors or proceeding past various warnings, but if I recall correctly even in more obscure non-error cases.
I don't think this is addressing my point. When you write a C program, you expect the compiler to either recognize the program from the C grammar, or reject it because it is not correct (hence the concept of "error"). Then run whatever guessing algorithm to report to you what may be wrong.
The programmer expectation is that the program must strictly conform to the C grammar, and errors are corrected. It is not silently producing a half-reconstructed program assuming what you meant to say.
> The specification must contain a non-ambiguous formal grammar that can be parsed easily. A page can then be tested against the standard and reject or accept as compliant. Pages that don't conform with the specification won't be rendered. It is explicitly forbidden for clients to accept any page that doesn't conform with the specification. This is what XHTML was, and it was a complete disaster. There's a reason almo…
XHTML failed in an era when writers (even normies) were writing some HTML of their own and they could't be trusted to close their tags properly. XHTML also assumed writers would be personally invested in semantic markup like distinguishing e.g. the italics of book titles from the italics of emphasis. Today, when writers are using visual editors (or Markdown), few are writing their own HTML any more. A web standard re…