Re: [dev] Suckless operating system

On 6/14/10, Ethan Grammatikidis <eekee57_AT_fastmail.fm> wrote:
>
> On 14 Jun 2010, at 22:35, Ilya Ilembitov wrote:
>>
>> So, here is my question. If we take only modern and active projects,
>> how standard are they? Suppose, we have a browser engine that
>> implements only the current standards (OK, may be some legacy
>> standards, but no IE or other tweaks), will we still be able to use
>> 95% of the web?
>
> Probably, but why? There's nothing suckless at all about the standards
> coming out of the w3c. I don't know much about rendering html but I
> recently made a web server, and while I started out with the noble
> intent of supporting standards, before I was done I just had to
> declare http 1.1 schizophrenic and delusional!
>
> Consider this: Out of web browser and web server, which one has to
> examine the data in order to render it, and which one is just reading
> it from the disk and dumping it down a pipe? Which one's resources are
> at a premium, and which is mostly idling between fetching web pages?
> With those two questions in mind, can someone please tell me what the
> w3c were collectively smoking when they made content-type mandatory in
> http 1.1? If that isn't enough argument, it's actually impossible to
> set content-type correctly from file extension. No-one really tries
> and I very much doubt they ever did, but that didn't stop the w3c from
> making it mandatory. Idiots.
setfattr(1). File extensions are just a historical misunderstanding (where
people confused presentation with semantics). IMO they should mostly
be used to give unique names to binaries, sources and configuration
files with a similiar base name.
> "Schizophrenic" actually refers to a less serious problem, but still a
> bizarre one. Dates are provided in headers to guide caching, very
> useful in itself but the date format is about as long-winded as it can
> get and it's US-localised too. With that in mind, why are chunk length
> values for chunked encoding given in hex? That's not even consistent
> with the length value of content-length, which is decimal. And what
> titan amongst geniuses decided it was appropriate to apply chunked
> encoding to the http headers?
Granted, decimal vs hex inconsistency is plain weird. But nobody is
forcing you (as a httpd implementor) to actually use (chunked) trailing
headers, though it´s a different story for clients.

-- 
kv,
  - Bjartur