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A clean start for the web (2020)

macwright.com

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#191

Post by account42 »

zzo38computer wrote: post #173
EddieDante wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we really want to continue having "a web"? Speaking only for myself, I'm not at all invested in having a website . Yes, I want a publicly accessible site of my own on the internet with which to share documents, and I currently do so over HTTP, but I would equally happy to share them over Gopher or even anonymous FTP. However, I'd rather pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting than run my own VPS or self-host on a m…

I dislike FTP and think that it is not a very good protocol. (There is one advantage of FTP over HTTP, which is that it has directory listings, although you could also do with HTTP possibly by a new file format (e.g. application/httpdirlist) for directory listings.) You can serve other file formats (including text/gemini) over HTTP. Although I could manage to make the web browser I have to support text/gemini files o…

> the protocol does not support file format polyfills

It does hover support file format negotiation so you can fall back to a different format where it makes sense.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#192

Post by gmueckl »

MrJohz wrote: post #169
DeathArrow wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. JS is unfit for the task. It is a dynamic scripting language introduced by Netscape for the only purpose of adding a bit of interactivity to web pages, not to create large apps. .NET and Java are much better for the task. The VMs support better languages with better libraries and more sane ecosystems. And the performance would be much better than that of JS.…

I think what your describing is mainly your preference - which isn't in itself a bad thing, the lack of real diversity in browser scripting is a problem that is slowly being solved as WASM becomes a more viable target. That said, some of your statements seem to be simply false. Javascript engines are at this point about as heavily optimised as Java and .NET runtimes, and a quick scan through a few benchmark sights se…

JavaScript VMs are inherently hampered by language design choices in JS. The dynamic typing and prototype based objects limit JIT based optimization for the full JS massively. Java and .NET have fully static typing which allows their JITs to be completely certain when they are translating code. JS JITs constantly have to add overhead in the form of escape hatches to deoptimized code if e.g. expectations about variable types are being broken at runtime.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#193

Post by account42 »

shmde wrote: post #82

Aaand internal leaked restricted bug show firefox is testing its frontend to use blink[1] ( developed by google ). I thought abc.xyz which is owned by google was an obnoxious thing to do which meant the internet began (abc) and ended ( xyz ) with google. But now its clear that it really is just them playing god. Really wondering how long till ftc breaks up google. Every fucking engine is now chromium derivative or go…

> Aaand internal leaked restricted bug show firefox is testing its frontend to use blink

At this point, Mozilla clearly saying they are stopping Gecko or Gecko-based Firefox development might best thing that can happen to FF -- that is if it will be enough to get others to band together and finally replace Mozilla with an organization that actually cares about the needs and wants of its users.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#194

Post by EddieDante »

bruce511 wrote: post #68
EddieDante wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do we really want to continue having "a web"? Speaking only for myself, I'm not at all invested in having a website . Yes, I want a publicly accessible site of my own on the internet with which to share documents, and I currently do so over HTTP, but I would equally happy to share them over Gopher or even anonymous FTP. However, I'd rather pay NearlyFreeSpeech.net for hosting than run my own VPS or self-host on a m…

You want a publically accessible place for your public persona. You have got that. Why do you care about the protocol it uses? Why would you prefer a protocol that no one else uses? That no one has a client for?

The fact that I want to is reason enough for me. Why does that bother you? Am I somehow harming you?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#195

Post by Karrot_Kream »

zzo38computer wrote: post #171
_Algernon_ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its not. I just want to read text based content without downloading google analytics + 20 other trackers, 5 java script libraries, 7 frameworks of some kind and 20 ads. It's inefficient. It drives obsolescence of hardware long before it is unusable (second only to gaming, but at least gaming has a user driven motivation, not abuse by tech megacorps). Assigning a gatekeeping motivation to it is a nice strawman, but…

> I just want to read text based content without downloading google analytics + 20 other trackers, 5 java script libraries, 7 frameworks of some kind and 20 ads. It's inefficient. I agree. I have JavaScripts disabled, but it may still try to download CSS, pictures, and other stuff, and might try to hide the document, etc.

Then don't? If you want to recreate Gemini on the web, just use curl to download assets and consume them that way. This doesn't seem to be about you or the GP specifically consuming the Web this way, this seems like people who want to create a _network_ of other people who consume the Web this way, which is essentially the same as gatekeeping.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#196

Post by zzo38computer »

account42 wrote: post #191
zzo38computer wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike FTP and think that it is not a very good protocol. (There is one advantage of FTP over HTTP, which is that it has directory listings, although you could also do with HTTP possibly by a new file format (e.g. application/httpdirlist) for directory listings.) You can serve other file formats (including text/gemini) over HTTP. Although I could manage to make the web browser I have to support text/gemini files o…

> the protocol does not support file format polyfills It does hover support file format negotiation so you can fall back to a different format where it makes sense.

Yes, you can use the Accept header; however, there are some problems with this:

- The default values are often not very useful; they might not list all supported file formats, and may have wildcards for formats that are not supported, too.

- The Accept header (and other headers) are often misused, which also makes it inaccurate. And sometimes if it is a picture, video, etc, the Accept header might make it difficult to load directly.

- The Accept header cannot distinguish if JavaScripts are enabled or disabled.

- If the end user wishes to save to disk (whether using the browser's save function, or using an external program such as curl or wget) or view source of the original file, this will not work. (Of course there is also possibility that you might want to view/download the alternate file instead, so that still will need to be handled, too. But if you want to view the resulting HTML tree then you can use the web developer tools, but that doesn't do all of the things.)

- See https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Why_not_conneg for some more comments. I do not agree with everything mentioned there, but there are many good points too (some of which are similar to the ones that I had mentioned above). (Another note about video codecs: there are differences other than the codec too that a end user may want, such as the picture size.)

My idea is adding a Interpreter header; I wrote a document with my ideas of how I would intend it to work. (This can be used both for server-side and client-side interpretation, and also allows interpreter caching (and possibly also caching the internal representations) if the optional hash has been included in this header value.)

Also note that the HTML command is also available in HTTP, and can be used with a response of any file format. (I have seen it used in one case for applying stylesheets to plain text files; I do not know what other uses work in what web browsers.) (I also have my own ideas about additional links, such as rel="data" to link to underlying data of a web app in case the end user will use their own software (e.g. SQLite) to query it. These can be used even without changing the web browser, but the Interpreter header requires the web browser to support it)

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#197

Post by bullen »

zzo38computer wrote: post #176
bullen wrote: post #114

I would say .html, .css and .js and the browser are becoming over-engineered. HTTP and SMTP are fine however. I have stopped coding .html and only use HTTP now from a native OpenGL client written in C.

I would agree, although HTTP and SMTP are not the only protocols; in many cases other protocols should do better (such as IRC, SSH, etc). > I have stopped coding .html and only use HTTP now from a native OpenGL client written in C. How is that working? Do you have any further details?

SSH is not a frontend protocol, but I use that for the backend.

IRC is replacable with HTTP.

It's a 3D MMO: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#198

Post by knighthack »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

HTMX has been one of the best libraries I've used to date. Love it to bits.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#199

Post by kixiQu »

iamcurious wrote: post #46
grishka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear…

Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone? That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

https://www.wickeditor.com/#/ <-- I give these folks some money on Patreon because I feel like they're trying for the right thing

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#200

Post by recursivedoubts »

knighthack wrote: post #198
recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

HTMX has been one of the best libraries I've used to date. Love it to bits.

:) glad to hear you are finding it useful
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