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W3C recommends WebAssembly

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Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XMPP is an excellent example of why existing flexible protocols push out novel protocols. When Google and Facebook wanted to improve the user experience of their XMPP clients, they encountered roadblocks in the fundamental design of the protocol itself. They finally reached a point where exiting the protocol was easier than improving it.

"Exiting" doesn't seem to be the right word? How do we stop Google, who is currently "exiting" HTML ?

Should we? I thought you were making the argument that HTML was a bad fit for non-hyperTEXT content. From up-thread:

"Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text..."

If Google agrees with you, would we want to stop them?

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Exiting" doesn't seem to be the right word? How do we stop Google, who is currently "exiting" HTML ?

Should we? I thought you were making the argument that HTML was a bad fit for non-hyperTEXT content. From up-thread: "Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text..." If Google agrees with you, would we want to stop them?

By "exiting", I mean Embracing-Extending-Extinguishing.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the other poster said "pointlessly excluding", I understood it to refer to examples such as the deep sea one, where there is an easy and straightforward way to design the page and allows it to fail gracefully. This design doesn't require more engineering effort. In fact, I'd say it's quite the contrary. It's not a coincidence that this design also increases accessibility -- it encodes the most meaning.

You understood it in a biased way that not coincidentally supports your agenda. Clearly the topic is more general then the specific example.

Clearly, and I'm not claiming it's not. I just understood that the OP was using the phrase like that.

Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understood it in a biased way that not coincidentally supports your agenda. Clearly the topic is more general then the specific example.

Clearly, and I'm not claiming it's not. I just understood that the OP was using the phrase like that. Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours.

>Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours.

Ok first of all. There is no universal law that says everyone has to be biased and have an agenda. There's no logic to it. This false notion comes from the fact that most people (not all) people are biased and that when people are biased they are unaware of it. However this does not mean that people can't be unbiased or have no agenda.

Second: Examine the sentence in reference to that phrase. It is literally word for word referring to "engineering" and Not a specific set of engineering projects.

Literally what you are doing is inserting your own opinion onto what that "engineering" is referring to and I am taking it at face value. So I am not wrong when I say that your observations are biased. There is no accusation here, just observation of events.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly, and I'm not claiming it's not. I just understood that the OP was using the phrase like that. Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours.

>Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours. Ok first of all. There is no universal law that says everyone has to be biased and have an agenda. There's no logic to…

Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread.

Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have you taken into account everyone's wishes, desires, needs, analyzed every possible scenario in existence according to some yet-unspecified objective reasoning system? Then you are biased. You are missing something, you are concluding something erroneously. (using the generic you as a stand-in for anyone)

Your agenda is to incorporate a pixel-level API into the web. And that's okay. Mine is to prevent the web into devolving into an opaque black box. That's okay too.

As to the topic at hand, I won't try dissecting comments word for word, because I think this is a loss of time and devolves into a lot of who-said-what, when we can sidestep it by concentrating on the most charitable explanation.

Reading through the thread again, I think the other poster's point was that there are many situations (not all) where designing things in the simplest and most direct way, using HTML as the semantic underpinning, leads to both less engineering effort and to a more accessible design.

Specifically, I do not think he was arguing doubling or tripling a movie budget in order to make another similar movie for blind people. But then again, we weren't talking about movies. We were talking about web sites, in which the loss of HTML would lead to a net loss compared to what we have now.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Render targets are usually more fundamental with libraries built on top for more specific use cases. It would be better if the web browser world had pixel level render targets with HTML built on top as a library. This is how most graphical APIs work. Rather then what is now, HTML as the render target, and canvas as a child object of HTML. But the web is not a graphical API and that is precisely the point. The web i…

>The web is a semantic API and its components represent meaning. Make the semantic API a library. Or how about seperating semantics from component. Semantics are listed in a single file which can be crawled and only possesses meta data that links to other semantic files. The pixel level API and web crawlers have libraries that can interpret these files. This is a much better design then the adhoc way the web formed.…

> Make the semantic API a library. Or how about seperating semantics from component. Semantics are listed in a single file which can be crawled and only possesses meta data that links to other semantic files. The pixel level API and web crawlers have libraries that can interpret these files. This is a much better design then the adhoc way the web formed.

I'm not convinced it's a better design. It just makes semantics a separate, additional concern, rather than a frontal concern which you have to think about. It allows you to be lazy by not supplying the semantical layer at all, in any shape or form. Granted, you can have document websites with some pretty opaque form even today, but I would argue that enforcing the basic structure of HTML still keeps us in a much better place than we would otherwise end up.

I also don't think the way the web formed was ad hoc when you consider it from a semantical perspective. The most ad hoc bit about it is JavaScript, which was of course necessary due to the expansion of the web into being an application platform.

Pixel-level control sounds wrong to me as a default choice. You don't need pixel-level control in most cases, whereas meaning is crucial, both for humans and for ease of interoperability and extension.

> It's using low level components as a composition of high level components. The design is backwards ...

This is only so due the arbitrary meanings of "low" and "high" you picked here. You're imagining pixels as fundamental, meaningless atoms out of which meaning is built. Why not have meaning at the forecenter, though?

I would argue that having a semantic layer exposed as the front is the right design, not backwards. By default, you have a set of meaningful components composed in a meaningful way. One of those components can be "an array of arbitrary pixels", a canvas to draw on. That doesn't sound wrong nor difficult to me.

Does this argument boil down to the design being "wrong" due to some kind of first principles, or does it genuinely make things substantially harder in a large number of cases? Bear in mind that changing the web like this would also be an exceedingly hard effort.

> vendor locks people into html.

Which vendor would that be?

> There are other ways to display semantic UI. Html is an arbitrary choice.

I agree, but HTML is what we have and it's not half-bad compared to some other things we could have ended up with.

> Your saying ad blockers should be the center point of design? You realize that right now in html and css ad blockers aren't the center point of design. An adblock centered design implies something along the lines of replacing the html tag with one that has the word adblock in it. Literally adblockers are designed for the platform not the other way around.

Let's not get too literal. I was clearly pushing back to your suggestion that we shouldn't take requirement of ad blockers as a design consideration at all.

What I meant to say was that, given the knowledge we have today, any design should take the possibility of ad blockers as one of its central points. Ad blockers need to remain easy and they will remain easy as long as the platform forces you to encode basic meaning in a transparent way.

> You should of put your declaration of lack of understanding and comprehension in the beginning. That way readers can dismiss your entire argument without first reading it because things need to be understood first before you can make a counter argument to it. Reread my argument until you understand or take some classes at reading comprehension then you'll have what it takes to make an argument.

That's uncalled for. I read your argument multiple times and the best I've found is "I don't like being forced to write HTML." Even though you'd need only a small amount of boilerplate HTML in order to get a canvas which then gets you the pixel API you wanted.

I only realized I don't really understand your argument midway through writing that since I consider your request to have a pixel interface reasonable. I just don't consider it reasonable to request to uppend the web fundamentally -- to the detriment of the document platform facet and the use case of writing freely interoperable, transparent documents -- in order to cut away a small bit of boilerplate.

I decided to leave my comment as it was to reflect the time evolution of my thought. You may not like the style of my comment, but it's a bad reason for rudeness and instructing me to take reading comprehension classes.

> Honestly let's get a little more meta at what's going on here. Someone has composed a response that is rather rude. The responder dismisses my argument by implying that my arguments are so baseless that he doesn't "understand." Highly offensive. When you play games like this nobody wants to participate in an informed discussion. I'll play his game and say that his lack of understanding makes his whole counter argument ludicrous but literally this argument was over before it even began when the responder decided to be a rude and offensive. If I were the rude responder, I'd just walk away because nobody cares for his opinion anymore.

I'm not sure, but are you talking about me? I'm truly sorry if I was rude and offensive, it was not my intention to be. That said, I got the same feeling about your responses to other people and the topics of lock-down, opacity and vendor lock-in are dear to me, so I may have got a bit worked up.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please stop accusing everyone of being biased and having an agenda. Not that there is anything wrong with that, since everyone is biased and has an agenda (including you), but the way you're saying it makes it sound like you think it's an important component of other people's comments but not yours. Ok first of all. There is no universal law that says everyone has to be biased and have an agenda. There's no logic to…

Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread. Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have…

>Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread. Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have you taken into account everyone's wishes, desires, needs, analyzed every possible scenario in existence according to some yet-unspecified objective reasoning system? Then you are biased. You are missing something, you are concluding something erroneously. (using the generic you as a stand-in for anyone)

No. statements of observation do not have agendas. "The sky is blue" is a statement without an agenda. Statements can be made separate from agendas, which makes the statement unbiased.

>Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have you taken into account everyone's wishes, desires, needs, analyzed every possible scenario in existence according to some yet-unspecified objective reasoning system? Then you are biased. You are missing something, you are concluding something erroneously. (using the generic you as a stand-in for anyone)

This is completely false. Biased, means a leaning of ones mind towards a particular viewpoint. People usually use this word in the context of a leaning of ones mind despite being aware of evidence to the contrary or lack of supporting evidence. If the mind does not lean then it is unbiased.

Your judgement of the statement has leaning towards your agenda despite you being aware of lack of evidence supporting it. My statement does not have leaning.

>Your agenda is to incorporate a pixel-level API into the web. And that's okay. Mine is to prevent the web into devolving into an opaque black box. That's okay too.

This "agenda" had nothing to do with my observations, but for yours it colored your interpretation of words. Your observations were biased, mine were not. This is not something that is Okay. Biased observations are usually false.

Given at face value the sentence is referring to a world of engineering with the context of the web as a specific example out of a more general point. You need to make a biased modification to the sentence in order for it to fit your world view.

>As to the topic at hand, I won't try dissecting comments word for word, because I think this is a loss of time and devolves into a lot of who-said-what, when we can sidestep it by concentrating on the most charitable explanation.

The most charitable explanation is here:

Given the original sentence we are referring to:

"You're not advocating for a bold, artistic world when you talk about engineering things to pointlessly exclude people."

The terms:

   "Bold artistic world" "engineering things"
under your biased agenda becomes:

   "Bold artistic web" "engineering web pages"
Which makes the original sentence become:

"You're not advocating for a bold, artistic web when you talk about engineering web pages to pointlessly exclude people."

You applied context to the statement relevant to your agenda. I did not. There is no doubt when I say that your perspective is in alignment with your agenda given lack of supporting evidence within the sentence itself. When you are biased you are unaware of it.

Definitively from the logic your statement is biased, mine is not.

>Specifically, I do not think he was arguing doubling or tripling a movie budget in order to make another similar movie for blind people. But then again, we weren't talking about movies. We were talking about web sites, in which the loss of HTML would lead to a net loss compared to what we have now.

Earlier you were rude to me. Therefore I don't care to debate this topic with you. Keep your opinion. I care little for it. If you had chosen more wisely earlier I would have gladly engaged with you on this very topic but since you chose not to, there is now zero possibility of further discussion on this topic.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread. Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Have…

>Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread. Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Hav…

Okaaay. This is getting a bit too crazy for me. Enjoy your unleaning mind.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Having an agenda simply means wanting something. If you do not want anything, then you do not have an agenda. If you do, you have one. By your own admission, you want something, and if you did not, you would not be discussing in this thread. Being biased is pretty much a part of the human condition since we are limited, finite beings. Do you have all the information? Are you certain you have all the information? Hav…

Okaaay. This is getting a bit too crazy for me. Enjoy your unleaning mind.

The humble thing to do is to apologize for you previous rudeness. Passive aggression does nothing to serve your agenda.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the inner browser has its own client certificate or simply checks for a set of known server certificates, MITM won't get you anywhere. Done right, this could well be game over.

For it to be truly game over, the wasm implementation it's running on must also protect the wasm payload itself, otherwise it would be trivial to patch that to MITM it. So, on something like iOS, it could be game over (but I'm also curious what Apple is going to do with wasm there, given that it goes contrary to their strategy of being the gatekeeper for all code running on the platform). But not for the rest.

Adding a ton of obfuscation will do the trick. Patching wasm requires reverse engineering and that is very cumbersome. For Blu-Ray it took months to reverse engineer the copy protection VM and that was with a mechanism that took a lot of attention. If it's your average website, it's far easier to stay ahead of the game.
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