Re: [dev] Talk about sane web browsers

On Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:37:58 -0700, frederic <fdubois76_AT_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