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I've been wondering whether there's possibility of a "browser" being something other than an "application". In general I like my software decomposed into actio

I've been wondering whether there's possibility of a "browser" being something other than an "application". In general I like my software decomposed into actions that I can recompose as I wish in the shell. For something as generic as "web browser" I'm not (yet?) sure what that looks like - actually experimenting seems like a lot of work.

ianbicking 8y ago
Something along those lines was also on my (more vague) list of goals: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-tools.html http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-... At least in my mind that would involve a kind of holding space separate from files (but serving some of those purposes). It's going to involve a lot of large, structured data, remote resources, and potentially "live" entities (like an open tab). All of which are still manipulable entities, but they need representations and a place to exist.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dllthomas 8y ago
  Very much in line with what I'm thinking - we should grab (logical?) beers sometime :) In the space of "live" entities, I played a bit with something I called "genies" (out of a notion that they were "a kind of daemon" or "something that's not quite a daemon", depending on where you drew lines) where a long-running process would register itself with your shell before backgrounding, and then you could make requests of it at leisure and possibly poll in your PROMPT_COMMAND. There's a lot of potential ecosystem I haven't really fleshed out, but I did put together a libpurple client that worked that way (with a UX very much inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System)
derefr 8y ago
Are you maybe picturing something like Plan9's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor), but with the panes being webviews instead of text buffers?
- dllthomas 8y ago
  Maybe? Not from a visual perspective, but there may well be overlap in other dimensions - I understand Acme exposes a programmatic interface? The UX I'm picturing is a suite of individual commands that can run from the shell against the current "state of the page", some of which would produce a display in either the shell or a separate window. One of those might be of the form of "render the whole page" but it could be less privileged a view than it is in existing browsers.

ianbicking 8y ago

Something along those lines was also on my (more vague) list of goals: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-tools.html http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2018/02/web-small-composable-... At least in my mind that would involve a kind of holding space separate from files (but serving some of those purposes). It's going to involve a lot of large, structured data, remote resources, and potentially "live" entities (like an open tab). All of which are still manipulable entities, but they need representations and a place to exist.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dllthomas 8y ago
Very much in line with what I'm thinking - we should grab (logical?) beers sometime :) In the space of "live" entities, I played a bit with something I called "genies" (out of a notion that they were "a kind of daemon" or "something that's not quite a daemon", depending on where you drew lines) where a long-running process would register itself with your shell before backgrounding, and then you could make requests of it at leisure and possibly poll in your PROMPT_COMMAND. There's a lot of potential ecosystem I haven't really fleshed out, but I did put together a libpurple client that worked that way (with a UX very much inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MH_Message_Handling_System)

derefr 8y ago

Are you maybe picturing something like Plan9's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_(text_editor), but with the panes being webviews instead of text buffers?

dllthomas 8y ago
Maybe? Not from a visual perspective, but there may well be overlap in other dimensions - I understand Acme exposes a programmatic interface? The UX I'm picturing is a suite of individual commands that can run from the shell against the current "state of the page", some of which would produce a display in either the shell or a separate window. One of those might be of the form of "render the whole page" but it could be less privileged a view than it is in existing browsers.