Sent from my iPod
On Sep 9, 2009, at 4:53 AM, Pinocchio <cchino...@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
There is also "neko". The problem is that I don't see the need of
clientside scripting. A clean design should split presentation and
data. And having a templating language for merging them into a canvas.
So not having the possibility to create infinite loops, eat the CPU,
etc.. The web should be safe and simple. If you want to run something
more complex you should use a sandbox or something able to do static
code analysis in a way that ensures me that the running code is no
dangerous.
--
Pinocchio
