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It's our fault for turning the web into the monstrosity it has become. Web browsers are for displaying hypertext documents. DOCUMENTS. Why on earth are we execu
by gnu8 9y ago
It's our fault for turning the web into the monstrosity it has become. Web browsers are for displaying hypertext documents. DOCUMENTS. Why on earth are we executing code at all?
- oblio 9y agoFor the same reason all major document formats execute code. PDFs execute code, DOC(X)s execute code. Users want features: interactivity, automation of various bits, etc. Features = users = money. Money > anything (security, privacy, etc.).
- mrob 9y agoPDF code execution is an implementation detail. It's there for data compression purposes, not interactivity. DOCX macros are disabled by default. Code execution by default in HTML documents is unusual.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y agoJavascript was tacked onto PDF a few years back for interactive display.
- jacquesm 9y agoPlenty of that could have been achieved by slower but more consistent and secure development of extensions to HTML. That wouldn't give you Google maps, docs or gmail, but the vast majorit of SAAS products could have probably been created in one way or another with the restriction that no code could execute client side. More and more pages that could have worked just fine now render as totally blank because client side frameworks are now being pushed from every angle. As an end user there is no clear advantage to this.
- umanwizard 9y ago> That wouldn't give you Google maps, docs or gmail So, it wouldn't have given you three of the most important and useful applications in the modern world, used every day by millions of people.
- jacquesm 9y agoNo, it would not have given you those on the web. You could have simply made applications that do the same thing. Gmail could have been made to work (on the web) by the way, just not with such a spiffy interface, and maps probably as well.
- oblio 9y ago> just not with such a spiffy interface What makes you think that's not the main selling point of those applications? "Except for that one thing that normal people care about, my sticks-and-stones are just as good!" :)
- jacquesm 9y agoWorks in a secure and predictable way without eye candy to me trumps works in an insecure way but has eye candy. Software was plenty usable before we had the CPU power to burn on 'pretty'. In fact, in many ways it was more usable. To some extent hardware has outpaced our ability to do useful things with the cycles and transistor budgets available. So we've become super wasteful and our software is now mostly immature. If instead clock cycles had doubled every decade or two and ditto with the transistor count we probably would have had a much more mature software eco system as a result, rather than a bunch of pretty junk with plenty of that pretty junk as a service rather than as an application that you control and all the security headaches that come with that.
- always_good 9y agoThe web has shown us that people don't want to download an app for everything.
- 9y ago
- umanwizard 9y agoEven fonts execute code (truetype/opentype, at least)
- Santosh83 9y agoThe web became a place to do business. You can't do business just sharing documents.
- pdkl95 9y agoBusinesses existed before the creation of Javascript. Conducting most business does not require a Turing complete language and executing arbitrary code on every document. The HTML <form> is all that is needed to conduct business. The web was created as documents+forms in the IBM 3270 model, which businesses and other other organizations were using since the 1970s.