Greetings.
Connor Lane Smith wrote:
> On 22/10/2011, Patrick Haller <201009-suckless_AT_haller.ws> wrote:
>> Hickey kicks unix because although pipes = composability, output and
>> input = free-form text. We combined data exchange with user interface,
>> and user interface usually won that fight.
>>
>> Say data exchange won; would it help us to rewrite our programs to
>> output JSON and our shells to pretty-print* JSON?
>
> You pretty much just described TermKit [1]. I think there is something
> wrong with the shell paradigm, but I'm not convinced JSON-structured
> IO is the right approach. My suggestion in the earlier mailing list
> discussion was to allow programs to draw directly to the terminal, in
> little Xembedded frames, but of course that change only improves the
> interface: to avoid "let's all write parsers" you'd also have to come
> up with some kind of typing system like TermKit's MIME headers. Also,
> the representation of data would be a concern of each program, not of
> the terminal, which would probably result in ugly.
There were escape codes that allowed drawing basic things in
a terminal. Another example how to do it is w3m[0], but this
requires too much legacy code. It's still less than having
more than one parser and a whole VM for the description lang-
uage, like the web would require.
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
[0]
http://w3m.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/w3m/w3m/w3mimg/
Received on Sat Oct 22 2011 - 14:45:43 CEST