On Mon, 07 Sep 2009 03:26:05 -0700, frederic <fduboi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:51:46 +0200, Uriel <lost.gob...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Pinocchio<cchino...@gmail.com> wrote:
A few months ago lobobrowser.org caught my eye. Its a browser written in
java (hold on... don't kick me off the list... :) ) but the thing I
liked
about it was its support for alternative document formats. It supports
JavaFX out of the box and that's definitely a more suckless version of
document rendering / scripting than HTML + Javascript.
You better kick yourself out of this universe. WTF are you smoking?
So, the only way is to get rid of the whole "Web" stack and to rewrite a
"sane" one. This would mean:
* defining a protocol that would play the role of HTTP,
I don't think that would be necessary. HTTP is okay. HTML + Javascript is the
non-suckless part.
* defining a format for interactive documents and applications. The tricky
thing here is that this format should be convenient for both usages and
for "middle" cases.
That's the whole idea. I believe that it is possible to get something usable without a
lot of code bloat. The basics should be good so that "web" sites can get more
complicated things done with their own code.
Of course it has to be totally incompatible with the current "web stack",
browser included. It can be quite a problem for wide acceptance; the
majority of "web users" today are, I think, not computer literates.
It doesn't need wide acceptance. Dwm doesn't need wide acceptance as long as it works
with most of the useful X11 applications. Dwm would do fine with a bunch of folks who
care about a suckless window manager. This "new webstack" would be something
similar. There are no hidden plans to conquer the world here :).
But maybe one may walkaround that by providing browser plugins to handle
that document format together with the actual platform.
Yeah, that's definitely an option. However, I think I would favor a method
where this document format could be changed on the server side to HTML +
Javascript for the regular browsers. I am saying this because even after a lot
of marketing muscle and commercial force, it has been hard for Adobe, Sun and
Microsoft to push their rendering stacks over HTML + Javascript. Flash is the
only thing which gained major adoption... and the picture might change once
HTML 5 comes out.
If you read my previous post again, I also mentioned why a new web document format is not
an insane idea. Web frontend programmers don't directly program in HTML + Javascript.
They use some middle-ware (GWT for eg.) which takes care of quirks between different
browsers. If you think about browsers as a "machine" to run your applications,
HTML + Javascript is literally the assembly of that machine.
What I am suggesting is the following:
- Come up with a "suckless" document rendering / scripting format (a
new RISC like assembly if you will... from the machine analogy above)
- Write a browser for that format
- Add a plugin to display HTML + Javascript (use an existing rendering
framework like webkit)
- Write server side converters for the format to HTML + Javascript
- Regular browsers default to the HTML + Javascript format of
the content
- Suckless browsers query for the "suckless" version of the
content and use that.
Benefits of going the suckless format:
- Concise, hacker friendly, open source implementation.
- Rapid evolution of the format to new usage scenarios.
- Platform support, acceleration
- Warm fuzzy feeling of using less RAM + CPU cycles for rendering web
content.
--
Pinocchio
