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For an honest assessment, difficulty of implementation—and, accordingly, lack of diversity in implementations—should be be listed in the "Disadvantages" section
by cxr 5y ago
For an honest assessment, difficulty of implementation—and, accordingly, lack of diversity in implementations—should be be listed in the "Disadvantages" section.
(It's interesting that applications against censorship are brought up. Difficulty of implementation has consequences here, too. In order to effectively use SQLite as an archive format, the receiving end will need the SQLite software. By comparison, it's pretty trivial to craft a polyglot file that is both plain text and HTML and is self-extracting and assumes no software on the other end except to rely on the ubiquity of commodity web browsers. Always bet on text.)
- bastawhiz 5y agoSorry, how exactly do you create a "self extracting" archive file with only text and HTML?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- a1369209993 5y agoSomething like: <script>document.write("<textarea>...</textarea>");</script> presumably? (I'd assume they meant self-extracting when run as a shell script or something, but they did say "to rely on the ubiquity of commodity web browsers".)
- cxr 5y agoSounds like a trick question, but Netscape's latest beta from September includes scripting support. Rumor has it that they're going to rename it to JavaScript later this year since Sun is pushing for strategic alignment with their Java platform. (You can use it to script e.g. applets). But you can embed the decompression code directly in the file, writing it in the scripting language itself—no compiled bytecode (or even a Java plugin) is necessary.