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Google is killing the open web, part 2

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Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#191

Post by [deleted] »

pmontra wrote: post #154
amarant wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just ill-informed ideological thinking. People see Google doing anything and automatically assume it's a bad thing and that it's only happening because Google are evil. HN has historically been relatively free of such dogma, but it seems times are changing, even here

Maybe free of the "evil Google" dogma but not free from dogma. The few who dared to express one tenth of the disapproval what we usually express about Apple nowadays were downvoted to transparent ink in a matter of minutes. Microsoft had its honeymoon period with HN after their pro open source campaign, WSL, VSCode etc. People who prudently remembered the Microsoft of the 90s and the 2000s did get their fair share of…

[deleted]

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#192

Post by nerdponx »

bigyabai wrote: post #167
Forgeties79 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari yes Mozilla…are they actually competing? Like really and truly.

Mozilla has proven they can exist in a free market; really and truly, they do compete. Safari is what I'm concerned about. Without Apple's monopoly control, Safari is guaranteed to be a dead engine. WebKit isn't well-enough supported on Linux and Windows to compete against Blink and Gecko, which suggests that Safari is the most expendable engine of the three.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45955979 this sibling comment says it best

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#194

Post by glenstein »

charcircuit wrote: post #155
glenstein wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, those changes which I believe were done at the time to create space for Google Plus (which I think in an alternative reality with some different choices and different execution could very well have been a relevant entrant into the social media space). It involved driving a steak through the heart of Google reader. Perhaps the most widely used RSS reader on the planet, and ripple effects that led to the de-em…

The writing was already on the wall by the time Google Reader shutdown. >usage of Google Reader has declined https://googlereader.blogspot.com/2013/03/powering-down-goog...

I would respectfully disagree in the following sense: I think the choice to shut down Google Reader and deprioritize RSS across the Google ecosystem (including the browser) did more to impact the trajectory of RSS than whatever was already in motion prior to the Reader shutdown.

And the same is true in the other direction, I want RSS to be a success but that would hinge on affirmative choices by major actors in the space choosing to sustain it.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#195

Post by rendall »

> ...just in case the questionable “no politics” policies —which consistently prove to be weasel words for “we're right-wingers but too chicken to come out as such”— weren't enough to stay away from it.

I am sympathetic to the stance of the article, but this line really turned me off and made me wonder if I was giving the writer too much credit. This kind of "if you're not with me, then you suck" outlook is childish and off-putting.

I know it's hard for some terminally political people to understand, but some of us really, really think it's a strength to work with teammates who hold different opinions than our own.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#196

Post by matthews3 »

kuschku wrote: post #176
matthews3 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you run XSLT as part of your build process, and serve the generated HTML?

I have arduinos with sensors providing their measurements as XML, with an external XSLT stylesheet to make them user-friendly. The arduinos have 2KB RAM and 16 MIPS. Which build process are you talking about? Which XSLT library would you recommend for running on microcontrollers?

> Which build process are you talking about?

The one in the comment I replied to.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#197

Post by glenstein »

dpark wrote: post #151
glenstein wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project. It's also 32 million lines of code which is borderline prohibitive to maintain if you're planning any importantly different browser architecture, without a business plan or significant funding. There's lots of things perfectly forkable and maintainable in the…

> Chromium commits are controlled by a pool of Google developers, so it's not open in the sense that anyone can contribute or steer the direction of the project. By these criteria no software is open source.

I would disagree, corporate open source involves corporate dominance over governance that fits internal priorities. It meets the legal definition rather than the cultural model which is community driven and often multi-stakeholder. I would put Debian, VLC, LibreOffice in the latter camp.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#198

Post by O4epegb »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #184
pitaj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is backwards compatible. You can use an older standard supported by everything if you wish.

Really? Because I have an old iPad (4th gen?) that no longer works on many sites. If it was backwards compatible they'd still function.

You are confusing backwards and forwards compatibility. Those sites may have added features that your iPad does not support, which is why it broke, if they have not added those, it might still work.

However JS is not 100% backwards compatible either, it is in many cases, largely backwards compatible, but there are rare cases of bug fixes, or deprecated APIs that might be removed and break old code, but this is not even JS itself, it's more like web/engine standards.

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#199

Post by kuschku »

matthews3 wrote: post #196
kuschku wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have arduinos with sensors providing their measurements as XML, with an external XSLT stylesheet to make them user-friendly. The arduinos have 2KB RAM and 16 MIPS. Which build process are you talking about? Which XSLT library would you recommend for running on microcontrollers?

> Which build process are you talking about? The one in the comment I replied to.

Fair, but that shows the issue at hand, doesn't it? XSLT is a general solution, while most alternatives are relatively specific solutions.

(Though I've written repeatedly about my preferred alternative to XSLT)

Re: Google is killing the open web, part 2

#200

Post by antod »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #97
ndriscoll wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was such a non-programmer as a child, yes. At the time that XSLT was new, if you read a book on HTML and making web pages from the library, it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. Things that blew my mind were that you could install Apache on your own computer and your desktop could be a website , or (as I learned many years later) that you could make a server application…

> it would tell you about things like separating content from styles and layout, yes. That's what CSS does.

XSLT is really separating (XML) data from markup in the case of the web. More generally it's transforming between different XML formats.

But in the case of docs (eg XML-FO for docbook, DITA etc) XSLT does actually separate content from styling.

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