3 ms·
I'd say it again: break compatibility and make an open, preparsed/compiled/binary HTML format. You'll get several order of magnitude speed increase and reduced
by jokoon 10y ago
I'd say it again: break compatibility and make an open, preparsed/compiled/binary HTML format. You'll get several order of magnitude speed increase and reduced memory consumption in browsers (parsing text is expensive). Something a little similar to microsoft .CHM file format.
So instead of having a competition in browsers, you'll have competition is the HTML parsers that developers will use.
No more messy W3C messy standard which is VERY hard and ambiguous to parse for any browser.
I've repeated that rant so often, I might start making a simple example of what I'm talking about. We just MUST abandon the text only approach. It allowed the internet to thrive without microsoft's attempt to make money with it. But today browsers are so ubiquitous, all that there is to do is enable browsers to just render binary HTML, which would just be a tree of rectangles and styles, so really simple. I think.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoAren't the big bottlenecks things like waiting for large resources (images) to download and javascript processing? The parsing of HTML, as far as I'm aware, has a tiny relative impact.
- spriggan3 10y ago> javascript processing? Actually Javascript engines are extremely fast, the UI in a web app isn't because web engines have to deal with a complex repaint model. Resources can be loaded asynchronously, so it's not really a bottleneck. On the other hand repaints can absolutely be a serious bottleneck in webpage. Native UI use a much much more simple model, which makes repaints less expensive and allow a better FPS rate. That's why webpages shouldn't try to look like native apps on mobile.
- wvenable 10y agoIf we had started with a binary HTML format to start with, many of the progressive enhancements that made the web possible could not have happened.
- jokoon 10y agoMaybe. But maybe those progressive enhancements are not good ideas either. HTML just enabled to penetrate the microsoft platform. HTML was designed for static documents, not web apps.
- wvenable 10y agoSo argument isn't so much that we should have binary HTML but we should actually just run Java* apps in a sandbox. I'd say there is merit to that argument and we'll probably get there the long way around. Perhaps webassembly will succeed where Java applets failed. * Or your virtual platform of choice.
- jokoon 10y agoSandboxed apps are not really a good thing IMO. I agree that webassembly is a good thing too. BUT, my critic is about the DOM and the text-only approach, and also HTML not being strict enough so that all browsers can use it. It is the same compromise between having a compiled or an interpreted language. A compiled language will always be faster and smaller. If you put the burden on a HTML compiler instead of how the browser displays a binary document, you won't have those issues.
- wvenable 10y ago> Sandboxed apps are not really a good thing IMO. Interesting because isn't that sort of what you advocating for. Ultimately what's the difference between strict compiled binary executable "HTML" and something like a Java applet? > BUT, my critic is about the DOM and the text-only approach, and also HTML not being strict enough so that all browsers can use it. But really the problem isn't the syntax of HTML/CSS/JS but the semantics. Everybody can parse this stuff pretty much equivalently now but they still do different things with it. I don't see how compiling to binary would change that.
- jokoon 10y ago