4 ms·

The web should have been based on Display PostScript instead of HTML. Interactivity and graphics built in right from the start, no need to bolt on JavaScript an

by pavlov 4y ago

The web should have been based on Display PostScript instead of HTML. Interactivity and graphics built in right from the start, no need to bolt on JavaScript and CSS later. JS ended up being a compiler target anyway. Stack-based PostScript would have been fine for that and given the web a 15-year head start towards real applications and designs. Of course Berners-Lee was familiar with DPS, since it was the display layer on NeXTSTEP and the original WWW was a NeXT app. The problem for Display PostScript was always Adobe's expensive and restrictive licensing policy. Worse but free beats sophisticated but proprietary. (See also Sun NeWS, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS which suffered the same licensing fate)

mhd 4y ago
I'd rather see DPS than the current hodgepodge of technologies, but that's part of having given up on the whole original concept and accepting that we're deep into the mire of the web as an application delivery system. For such a thing, sure, DPS would've been great, and we'd have gotten applications and Flash from the very beginning. Marrying that to a hypertext-document-system is another deal entirely. We're moving away from that, too, but at least there's enough of the corpose visible to contain the raging beast of SPAs and animations. But, well, "based" leaves some room, and maybe something between HyperCard and DPS would've been the best of both worlds.
- arethuza 4y ago
  "HyperCard and DPS" There was HyperNeWS - which was a HyperCard like environment written in Sun's NeWS PostScript based graphics environment. I worked with HyperNeWS in the early 1990s and it was brilliant - I don't think NeWS had much of a security model (could well be wrong about this). Edit: Because of the alleged difficulties of writing PostScript the HyperNeWS team created a C to PostScript compiler in PostScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668668
  - mhd 4y ago
    Thanks, I knew there was something like that already, but it's hard to keep all the Don Hopkins posts memorized ;) (Speaking of whom: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html )
    - arethuza 4y ago
      HyperDraw was great: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperDraw.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperDraw.gif One thing that was particularly neat was that you draw a shape (any shape) and paste it as the shape of a window.
- jshprentz 4y ago
  HN considered "What Was Wrong with Display PostScript and NeWS?" in 2015 [1]. TLDR: Poor performance on mid-1980s hardware. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10076724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10076724
coliveira 4y ago
Barns-Lee had nothing to do with Javascript. HTML was created as a display technology for static documents and for that purpose it is just fine. Javascript was an afterthought, and that's exactly why the web is the hodgepodge of technologies we see today.
aloe_falsa 4y ago
> The web should have been based on Display PostScript instead of HTML. For all that I dislike HTML tag soup, the language does a lot of things right. It's reflowable, it can be rendered at any resolution (even a text terminal, see Lynx), it's flexible enough to support any document structure, and it can be picked up quickly by any 12-year-old with a text editor and no previous programming experience (and that's how we got ourselves the quirky and fun 90s Internet). You'd be hard pressed to find another document markup language that can do the same. TeX, maybe? Certainly not a graphics language like PostScript.
- runnerup 4y ago
  I wish the modern web was usably renderable by Lynx. Obviously there are still great sites which are, like HN and many tech blogs. But AFAIK none of the major platforms are particularly usable on Lynx. I have fond memories of using Lynx and third party CLI messaging apps for AIM, IRC, etc when installing Gentoo on my iMac in 2004 for my first foray into linux. X needed modifications to the Gentoo bootloader to run on my hardware so it took a month or so of assistance from people[0] on #gentoo IRC before I had GUI running. But my digital life was entirely accessible with the CLI apps and 'screen' for multitasking. Living and breathing CLI for that long really went a long way to helping me learn Linux (as well as suffering Gentoo's propensity to require make configure for everything and its excellent guides to choosing between innumerable compile-time customizations of each package). Nowadays that's very hard to do as iChat's XMPP has been replaced by iMessage's very closed system, IRC certainly isn't dead but Discord has taken front-and-center for many communities of high-interest, and websites are essentially impossible to navigate in CLI. It's not necessarily a problem with HTML, but it is a "problem" with so much being moved to React / SPA architecture. A niche problem, to be sure. But it makes me sad that other young netizens can't have the same opportunities that I did. 0: Shoutout to Joseph Jezak ( https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/2006 https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/2006 , https://blogs.gentoo.org/josejx/ https://blogs.gentoo.org/josejx/ ) -- your selfless help that summer sincerely changed my life.
wolfgang42 4y ago
An alternate universe where Berners-Lee built his hypertext viewer in NeWS: Eventually, as more people got hypertext browsers, many desktop applications began to be distributed instead as client-side interactive PostScript documents, eschewing the NeWS network protocol altogether in favor of PSON, a text-based protocol which had the advantage of working correctly through corporate firewalls. Someone developed a server-side runtime engine called Node.ps, and many people jumped on the bandwagon, claiming that it made sharing code between the client and server much easier. As PostScript development became more complex, preprocessor tools began proliferating, including a strongly-typed version of PostScript, known as TypeScript, which had a sophisticated type system that could handle the often-tortured function signatures of library authors. Due to PostScript's lack of a good standard library, a company named "PPM" started a package repository, which was soon filled with tiny libraries for each PostScript procedure. This eventually lead to the “string-length debacle” when an upset developer unpublished a five-line package...
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  > including a strongly-typed version of PostScript, known as TypeScript you have made my day :) I'm very curious about the form and content of the "PSON", which could actually contain a program that would output PostScript. But I like this universe where all the time I spent on PostScript hacking would be useful now.
  - wolfgang42 4y ago
    I’m imagining PSON as the alt-universe equivalent of JSON, where it uses a reduced version of the syntax that can only represent data, not execute instructions. So you’d get /symbols, (strings), << /Key (value) >> dicts, [ (arrays) (of) (items) ], numbers, and booleans, but no { procedures }, % comments, or operators. Just for fun, here's MDN's JSON example turned to PSON: [ << /name (Molecule Man) /age 29 /powers [ (Radiation resistance) (Turning tiny) ] /inAlliance false >> << /name (Madame Uppercut) /age 39 /powers [ (Million tonne punch) (Superhuman reflexes) ] /inAlliance true >> ]
somat 4y ago
The web works quite well as a document system. Unfortunately people wanted an application system and the web is not architected well for this. Most of the sins of the modern web are from this frankenstein effort to graft an application system onto a document system. And for reference a properly architected applicaton system would start with a virtual machine designed for hostile input at the bottom, net requests would be a first class system call and the applications could be written in whatever language you want. if you were particularly insane your entry point could be something as stupid as "#!/dns/org/gnu/gcc4 mass of hideous c code here" but usually would be "#!/dns/com/sun/java/java4" or "#!/dns/org/python/python3" and before anybody shouts webasm... no, webasm is stupid, you are now trying to jam another application system on top of the document system "lets build the virtual machine in javascript and use it on top of all the existing browser madness" is not a good solution.

by pavlov 4y ago

mhd 4y ago

I'd rather see DPS than the current hodgepodge of technologies, but that's part of having given up on the whole original concept and accepting that we're deep into the mire of the web as an application delivery system. For such a thing, sure, DPS would've been great, and we'd have gotten applications and Flash from the very beginning. Marrying that to a hypertext-document-system is another deal entirely. We're moving away from that, too, but at least there's enough of the corpose visible to contain the raging beast of SPAs and animations. But, well, "based" leaves some room, and maybe something between HyperCard and DPS would've been the best of both worlds.

arethuza 4y ago
"HyperCard and DPS" There was HyperNeWS - which was a HyperCard like environment written in Sun's NeWS PostScript based graphics environment. I worked with HyperNeWS in the early 1990s and it was brilliant - I don't think NeWS had much of a security model (could well be wrong about this). Edit: Because of the alleged difficulties of writing PostScript the HyperNeWS team created a C to PostScript compiler in PostScript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12668668
- mhd 4y ago
  Thanks, I knew there was something like that already, but it's hard to keep all the Don Hopkins posts memorized ;) (Speaking of whom: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html )
  - arethuza 4y ago
    HyperDraw was great: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperDraw.gif http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/HyperDraw.gif One thing that was particularly neat was that you draw a shape (any shape) and paste it as the shape of a window.
jshprentz 4y ago
HN considered "What Was Wrong with Display PostScript and NeWS?" in 2015 [1]. TLDR: Poor performance on mid-1980s hardware. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10076724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10076724

coliveira 4y ago

Barns-Lee had nothing to do with Javascript. HTML was created as a display technology for static documents and for that purpose it is just fine. Javascript was an afterthought, and that's exactly why the web is the hodgepodge of technologies we see today.

aloe_falsa 4y ago

> The web should have been based on Display PostScript instead of HTML. For all that I dislike HTML tag soup, the language does a lot of things right. It's reflowable, it can be rendered at any resolution (even a text terminal, see Lynx), it's flexible enough to support any document structure, and it can be picked up quickly by any 12-year-old with a text editor and no previous programming experience (and that's how we got ourselves the quirky and fun 90s Internet). You'd be hard pressed to find another document markup language that can do the same. TeX, maybe? Certainly not a graphics language like PostScript.

runnerup 4y ago
I wish the modern web was usably renderable by Lynx. Obviously there are still great sites which are, like HN and many tech blogs. But AFAIK none of the major platforms are particularly usable on Lynx. I have fond memories of using Lynx and third party CLI messaging apps for AIM, IRC, etc when installing Gentoo on my iMac in 2004 for my first foray into linux. X needed modifications to the Gentoo bootloader to run on my hardware so it took a month or so of assistance from people[0] on #gentoo IRC before I had GUI running. But my digital life was entirely accessible with the CLI apps and 'screen' for multitasking. Living and breathing CLI for that long really went a long way to helping me learn Linux (as well as suffering Gentoo's propensity to require make configure for everything and its excellent guides to choosing between innumerable compile-time customizations of each package). Nowadays that's very hard to do as iChat's XMPP has been replaced by iMessage's very closed system, IRC certainly isn't dead but Discord has taken front-and-center for many communities of high-interest, and websites are essentially impossible to navigate in CLI. It's not necessarily a problem with HTML, but it is a "problem" with so much being moved to React / SPA architecture. A niche problem, to be sure. But it makes me sad that other young netizens can't have the same opportunities that I did. 0: Shoutout to Joseph Jezak ( https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/2006 https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/2006 , https://blogs.gentoo.org/josejx/ https://blogs.gentoo.org/josejx/ ) -- your selfless help that summer sincerely changed my life.

wolfgang42 4y ago

An alternate universe where Berners-Lee built his hypertext viewer in NeWS: Eventually, as more people got hypertext browsers, many desktop applications began to be distributed instead as client-side interactive PostScript documents, eschewing the NeWS network protocol altogether in favor of PSON, a text-based protocol which had the advantage of working correctly through corporate firewalls. Someone developed a server-side runtime engine called Node.ps, and many people jumped on the bandwagon, claiming that it made sharing code between the client and server much easier. As PostScript development became more complex, preprocessor tools began proliferating, including a strongly-typed version of PostScript, known as TypeScript, which had a sophisticated type system that could handle the often-tortured function signatures of library authors. Due to PostScript's lack of a good standard library, a company named "PPM" started a package repository, which was soon filled with tiny libraries for each PostScript procedure. This eventually lead to the “string-length debacle” when an upset developer unpublished a five-line package...

an1sotropy 4y ago
> including a strongly-typed version of PostScript, known as TypeScript you have made my day :) I'm very curious about the form and content of the "PSON", which could actually contain a program that would output PostScript. But I like this universe where all the time I spent on PostScript hacking would be useful now.
- wolfgang42 4y ago
  I’m imagining PSON as the alt-universe equivalent of JSON, where it uses a reduced version of the syntax that can only represent data, not execute instructions. So you’d get /symbols, (strings), << /Key (value) >> dicts, [ (arrays) (of) (items) ], numbers, and booleans, but no { procedures }, % comments, or operators. Just for fun, here's MDN's JSON example turned to PSON: [ << /name (Molecule Man) /age 29 /powers [ (Radiation resistance) (Turning tiny) ] /inAlliance false >> << /name (Madame Uppercut) /age 39 /powers [ (Million tonne punch) (Superhuman reflexes) ] /inAlliance true >> ]

somat 4y ago

The web works quite well as a document system. Unfortunately people wanted an application system and the web is not architected well for this. Most of the sins of the modern web are from this frankenstein effort to graft an application system onto a document system. And for reference a properly architected applicaton system would start with a virtual machine designed for hostile input at the bottom, net requests would be a first class system call and the applications could be written in whatever language you want. if you were particularly insane your entry point could be something as stupid as "#!/dns/org/gnu/gcc4 mass of hideous c code here" but usually would be "#!/dns/com/sun/java/java4" or "#!/dns/org/python/python3" and before anybody shouts webasm... no, webasm is stupid, you are now trying to jam another application system on top of the document system "lets build the virtual machine in javascript and use it on top of all the existing browser madness" is not a good solution.