Re: [dev] rebooting the web (it was: surf rewrite for WebKit2GTK)

From: Christoph Lohmann <20h_AT_r-36.net>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:31:44 +0100

Greetings.

On Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:31:44 +0100 Ralph Eastwood <tcmreastwood_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hopefully my discussion/argument makes sense - a friend of mine told
> me that the idea sounded like imposing a Communist regime on the
> masses :)

This is what this discussion boils down too. The web is too big to be
changed with new established cultures.

In the sense of the communist movement and the suckless interpretation
don’t go the hard way, which is not possible. China has shown to let
free development happen and use it as needed. The next step is to have
guerilla and revolutioners in key positions. Convince them and allow
simple access to the information of the web, where Javascript is the
current enemy.

The first priority for changing the web is to make it more usable for
*us*, the people trying to use the commandline to use the web and script
the data returned. Here web developers won’t change and aren’t consid‐
ered qualified in their mass to be convincable. Next is the web
browsers, which are software and on *our* level of concern. The browsers
are a VM for a common interface now standardized and know as »the Web«.
In this VM the DOM is the interesting part and how it’s represented.

What's needed for the next steps:
* Someone who knows any of the popular web rendering engines very well
  and can modify them without ending up in psychiatry.
        * The rendering engine needs to be modified to be reused for the
          points below.
* An abstraction of the DOM to be reused more easily on the commandline.
  (Maybe some daemon mode to run a browser and control it.)
* Appropriate tools to handle the different exchange formats (images,
  audio, XML, JSON etc.)
* Be able to easily switch to »normal mode« to have the a backward-compa-
  tibility.

Anyone steps up?


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann
Received on Fri Oct 31 2014 - 15:31:44 CET