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I feel ya. I'm refactoring my CSS parser the third time now, because I needed to support nested media queries (and therefore the logical condition "spec"). It'

I feel ya. I'm refactoring my CSS parser the third time now, because I needed to support nested media queries (and therefore the logical condition "spec"). It's amazing how complex even CSS has gotten. And implementing HTML without the ISO SGML spec and the SGML handbook is close to impossible. So many edge cases, so much layouting overhead, and so much damned flow root types. Honestly in the beginning I thought "how hard can it be, it's just like XML"... I was so wrong about this.

sanxiyn 6y ago
Eh, SGML spec is entirely unnecessary. Use HTML5 parsing spec. ("The HTML syntax" chapter.)
dslkfjg 6y ago
This is exactly it. I looked at doing something like this, ok, I looked at doing this and decided early to forgo CSS because it's so very very complicated. Truthfully, if my skillset had better matched the task I might have been lured into giving it a go. On another project I considered using CSS as a styling technology and got down to really understand it in detail. I then realized how good my 1,000 yard vision really is. I can't speak to the forces which inevitably lead to decay but essentially, for some reason every technology tries to eat the world. CSS is trying to eat the world and HTML5 is trying to eat the world and of course Javascript is famously trying to eat the world. All these technologies (and here's the part where I see my post begin to fade to gray) are on their way to experiencing technology's version of societal collapse. I use that analogy because it's so so apropo. They are overwrought, overly complex systems yielding only marginally better results and being maintained at huge cost in terms of attention, brain power and collateral damage by everyone. The benefits accrue to a smaller and smaller number of people (FANG et. al) who do not have society's best interest at heart at all and are very far from the founding principals which inspired the original vision. A simple scriptless HTML 1.0 browser minus the blink tag would deliver at least to me nearly 100% of the benefit I get from the web which can be characterized as "seeing what is happening, seeing what other people think, learning new stuff and downloading stuff". I would love to start a (reactionary) movement away from the current web composed of a privacy-preserving HTML 1.0 browser capable of HTTPS and people dedicated to creating pages and resources for it. I don't know of any such "movement" . If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.
- DougMerritt 6y ago
  Agreed. Except (half kidding but only half kidding here) augmented for things like cat videos; previous generations watched tv for entertainment, and for many people that has been partially or entirely replaced by the internet.
- cookiengineer 6y ago
  > If anyone is aware of anything like this do share. Well, I actually tried to start a movement for that [1]. The idea is to offload as much as possible to trusted peers, and to refine the web with a trust model where the user has to trust a website specifically to deliver expected things from the user's side (e.g. a news website should have no right to shove videos down your throat). I also think that a lot of web browsers tackle the privacy problem wrong. "User Privacy" is not sending a user-agent to a server, or downloading a resource from it in a statistically easily detectable manner. Real privacy is not having to download anything from the web server at all, by offloading requests to its peers. In my Browser [2] I'm trying to have every metadata, configuration or observation (and extraction) federated. I believe that the real strength of peer-to-peer is not decentralization; it is federation and liberation. [1] https://tholian.network https://tholian.network [2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

sanxiyn 6y ago

Eh, SGML spec is entirely unnecessary. Use HTML5 parsing spec. ("The HTML syntax" chapter.)

dslkfjg 6y ago

This is exactly it. I looked at doing something like this, ok, I looked at doing this and decided early to forgo CSS because it's so very very complicated. Truthfully, if my skillset had better matched the task I might have been lured into giving it a go. On another project I considered using CSS as a styling technology and got down to really understand it in detail. I then realized how good my 1,000 yard vision really is. I can't speak to the forces which inevitably lead to decay but essentially, for some reason every technology tries to eat the world. CSS is trying to eat the world and HTML5 is trying to eat the world and of course Javascript is famously trying to eat the world. All these technologies (and here's the part where I see my post begin to fade to gray) are on their way to experiencing technology's version of societal collapse. I use that analogy because it's so so apropo. They are overwrought, overly complex systems yielding only marginally better results and being maintained at huge cost in terms of attention, brain power and collateral damage by everyone. The benefits accrue to a smaller and smaller number of people (FANG et. al) who do not have society's best interest at heart at all and are very far from the founding principals which inspired the original vision. A simple scriptless HTML 1.0 browser minus the blink tag would deliver at least to me nearly 100% of the benefit I get from the web which can be characterized as "seeing what is happening, seeing what other people think, learning new stuff and downloading stuff". I would love to start a (reactionary) movement away from the current web composed of a privacy-preserving HTML 1.0 browser capable of HTTPS and people dedicated to creating pages and resources for it. I don't know of any such "movement" . If anyone is aware of anything like this do share.

DougMerritt 6y ago
Agreed. Except (half kidding but only half kidding here) augmented for things like cat videos; previous generations watched tv for entertainment, and for many people that has been partially or entirely replaced by the internet.
cookiengineer 6y ago
> If anyone is aware of anything like this do share. Well, I actually tried to start a movement for that [1]. The idea is to offload as much as possible to trusted peers, and to refine the web with a trust model where the user has to trust a website specifically to deliver expected things from the user's side (e.g. a news website should have no right to shove videos down your throat). I also think that a lot of web browsers tackle the privacy problem wrong. "User Privacy" is not sending a user-agent to a server, or downloading a resource from it in a statistically easily detectable manner. Real privacy is not having to download anything from the web server at all, by offloading requests to its peers. In my Browser [2] I'm trying to have every metadata, configuration or observation (and extraction) federated. I believe that the real strength of peer-to-peer is not decentralization; it is federation and liberation. [1] https://tholian.network https://tholian.network [2] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth