On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:37:58 -0700, frederic <fduboi...@gmail.com> wrote:
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 :).
I think wide acceptance is mandatory, because the platform we talk about
would be useless if nobody writes interesting contents.
Well, I am looking at it as a GWT which has a direct rendering support in a
browser. GWT doesn't need wide acceptance to exist or be useful.
Yeah, [writing a browser plugin is] 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.
It seems a lot of work to me. Furthermore, HTML/JS compatibility issues
may poison insidiously the whole thing.
That is true... some kinks may need work around. May be we will need to use
some obscure tricks in HTML + Javascript to accomplish part of it instead of
poisoning the webstack with HTML + Javascript compatibility. I guess we won't
know unless we begin to work on it.
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.
The Flash strategy is definitely what I have in mind.
I guess the problem would be convincing the 100s of millions of people to
install our plugin. Much worse than converting web app developers to our stack.
[I have a feeling I didn't quite get your point here...]
[...]
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.
Maybe it is not that hard to do. I think it is possible to build a
prototype using Lua with some GUI toolkit bindings for instance: the
server would send the Lua source to the client, and the client interprets
it.
Yup something like that. I guess you chose Lua because Lua is small in size and
pretty expressive as a language. There is also io (iolanguage.com) which I
found to be small and expressive. It would be nice if there was a neat way of
making it frontend independent. I was thinking about it more from a secure code
execution + graphics runtime perspective.
--
Pinocchio
