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I'm betting on HTML

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Re: I'm betting on HTML

#181

Post by didntcheck »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #117
klardotsh wrote: post #9

I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements, and that's such a shame, because they could seriously help put the "we need JavaScript for every gosh darn thing" ecosystem to an end (or at least return JS to what it was originally meant to be: a way to add some flair, some interactivity, some whatever, but not necessarily a replacement for all of your markup and a full-DOM manager). I'm starting to think my dream…

> I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements I'm not disagreeing with the gist of your post, but come on, these elements have been around for ages. It's definitely on you to become acquainted with the basics before your HTML critic can be taken seriously ;) The post links to MDN (arguably the most useful short reference) but there is of course also WHATWG's HTML spec or, if that's too voluminous, SGML DTD form…

has always been interesting to me. I've been aware of it for as long as I can remember, since it's been in all the tutorials I remember reading as a teen, and other docs as I got older. Unlike some other forgotten elements, it's one that's clearly very useful, and yet I can count on one hand the amount of times I've seen it used in the real world (yet plenty of times where someone has reinvented it with JS)

Likewise, image maps. Remember messing about with those when I was young, but Wikipedia is the only place I've seen them used. To be fair, the UX isn't great, and I've often ended up navigating to an article when I was expecting to view the image page instead

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#182

Post by chromoblob »

delusional wrote: post #112
wruza wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT (and its future offspring) can navigate regular websites the same way humans do It seems to be at least a not-yet-true claim, but let’s ignore that for now. It’s interesting if LLMs actually could do this. As I understand it, LLMs are trained on texts and source code among other things. But lacking… let’s name it a reasoning apparatus, can they really look at a DOM tree and tell what it is/does? It’s not a te…

> “LLMs will look at any .exe and be able to integrate with it immediately”. The LLM will look at any .exe and determine if it halts.

.exe's (for the usual architectures) run on finite-state machines, not Turing machines. So, indeed, that is possible.

If the .exe connects to a service that runs on something more powerful than finite-state machine, though, I don't know.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#183

Post by pravus »

jll29 wrote: post #152

HTML was designed as an SGML application for networked hypertext. As an alternative to what the original post posits, we could leave it for that purpose, and design another (now XML) application for user interfaces: windows, buttons, scroll bars (if desired), text controls (no I'm not talking about textarea for CGI), the kind of controls that Windows or X11+MOTIF provide, expressed as tags in a UIML (User Interface M…

> XML XHTML + UIML

I agree with this idea. We need a toolkit standard for the web and to stop shoving application code into a document model. What's strange to me is that so many people have been trying so hard to either resist or deny this.

The proposed solution is a non-starter, though. Anything involving XML is probably DOA for the web. I know I don't want to touch it. But something needs to fill this space because UI on the web is so god-awfully atrocious.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#184

Post by circuit10 »

abwizz wrote: post #155
p-e-w wrote: post #26

HTML is the solution to walled-garden lock-in? What? Those walled gardens already use HTML, including some of the semantic elements mentioned (plus ARIA semantic attributes, which are much more sophisticated). > ChatGPT-like interfaces are likely the future of human data access. And the whole point of artificial intelligence systems is that they don't require specialized "machine-readable" annotations in order to pro…

> They know when a sequence of paragraphs constitutes a "list", without it having to be explicitly marked as such, etc. that's the thing; they don't know - they guess

Humans do the same, it’s usually obvious from the context

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#185

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Kiro wrote: post #170
SPBS wrote: post #165

ugh I was so excited to see pure HTML modals were a thing with only to find out there's no way of triggering them without JavaScript. Using pure HTML you can only dismiss them, not trigger them. https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3567 > dialog elements are a great addition and I'm glad they're getting implemented, but a key part of their functionality relies on JavaScript: to open a you need to use JavaScript to s…

I don't see the higher purpose of "HTML only" if that means we need to extend HTML with scripting capabilities. In that case I rather just use JavaScript.

Users might prefer, say, that 99% of the time a data selection widget behaves the same whenever accessed by their browser. When devs choose a JS UI library then that's usually what users get. Wouldn't it be good to have all tables have the same features (sort, collapse, column-select, data export), rather than only having rich features if the dev implemented them, duplicating the effort of millions of other devs.

There's a sliding scale here, with html at one end and each page ships a parser and libraries at the other - why have an img tag, just let the page developer implement a JS based interpreter?

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#186

Post by kaba0 »

chromoblob wrote: post #182
delusional wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “LLMs will look at any .exe and be able to integrate with it immediately”. The LLM will look at any .exe and determine if it halts.

.exe's (for the usual architectures) run on finite-state machines, not Turing machines. So, indeed, that is possible. If the .exe connects to a service that runs on something more powerful than finite-state machine, though, I don't know.

That’s still a stupid pedantry, and is even false.

A Turing machine only makes use of at most n cells of its tape after n steps - so running it for a finite number of steps is possible even in finite memory. Especially that modern computers can do arbitrary side effects, having access to the whole universe as tape, which is still finite, but so is time.

There is no way to differentiate between a magical Turing machine with infinite tape and a “fake” one that has n-sized memory under any program that takes n steps, so for all practical purposes they are identical.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#187

Post by mythhabit »

kaba0 wrote: post #130
KronisLV wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The LLM will look at any .exe and determine if it halts. At that point you'd need an AGI that can figure out something we can't. Edit: but yeah, sarcasm. Nowadays I can't even tell sometimes.

I am 100% sure that parent poster was being sarcastic at the hype around LLMs and how many think they can solve everything, even if said thing is impossible to do, e.g. the halting problem. Do note that the halting problem is fundamentally true, no AGI will realize some new way around, unless are mathematics are flawed to the core.

There is some nuances here. While the general halting problem for a general Turing machine is undecidable, and with a fairly easy to understand proof as well, the computers we run today are not a general Turing machine. They are of a weaker class called Linear Bounded Automatons and for the programs they can run, the halting problem is fact decidable, on a theoretical level due to their finite nature.

So we will probably never practically solve the halting for LBAs, but the quest for this AGI that should be able to solve this, is not just day dreaming, it's rooted in the theory.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#188

Post by iamflimflam1 »

renegade-otter wrote: post #108
klardotsh wrote: post #9

I had heard of almost none of these HTML elements, and that's such a shame, because they could seriously help put the "we need JavaScript for every gosh darn thing" ecosystem to an end (or at least return JS to what it was originally meant to be: a way to add some flair, some interactivity, some whatever, but not necessarily a replacement for all of your markup and a full-DOM manager). I'm starting to think my dream…

I just ran into "datalist" and my first impression was "wow, game changer". The behavior is the same across browsers but the appearance is strictly browser-specific. You can't style it with CSS. Sometimes the list displays the text of the data, sometimes, the text and the "value" attribute. So you are not selecting "Atlanta" - you are selecting "234290780 Atlanta" (the ID and the value). And with the on-click action,…

That's the problem with most of these things, half assed implementations that just tick the box of "compliant with a standard".

There's a reason why we have all these frameworks built on top of HTML - it's because the browser manufacturers have not done their jobs.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#189

Post by birracerveza »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #41

I use a lot for debugging Go html templates. {{if .DevMode}} Data {{.}} {{end}} It's nicely unobtrusive when collapsed, doesn't mess up the page completely. Then expands to the full glory when needed.

I abuse the element when I can. It's so neat, I don't know why it's not used more often.

Re: I'm betting on HTML

#190

Post by chromoblob »

kaba0 wrote: post #186
chromoblob wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.exe's (for the usual architectures) run on finite-state machines, not Turing machines. So, indeed, that is possible. If the .exe connects to a service that runs on something more powerful than finite-state machine, though, I don't know.

That’s still a stupid pedantry, and is even false. A Turing machine only makes use of at most n cells of its tape after n steps - so running it for a finite number of steps is possible even in finite memory. Especially that modern computers can do arbitrary side effects, having access to the whole universe as tape, which is still finite, but so is time. There is no way to differentiate between a magical Turing machin…

Why are they identical? A program may use more steps than memory.
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