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We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). Insecure, all the SPA and anything that require JS to see the full c

We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). Insecure, all the SPA and anything that require JS to see the full content.

grishka 4y ago
Back in the day, we had a nice boundary between the document and the "app". Then for some reason we decided that Flash doesn't need to be a thing any more and erased that boundary by building the app functionality into browsers themselves, making the app and the document inseparable. We should have invested that effort into building an open source Flash player instead. One of the nicest things about Flash was that you could set your browser to only load and run Flash content after you click it.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  Java Applets were worse though, every time I got a virus of any sort from merely browsing generic sites, it always happened due to Java in the browser. I finally stopped installing Java for the web and my security problems went away. Flash had some security nightmares all the time too if I remember correctly but I dont think it ever screwed me over like Java did. I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. It would be nice to be able to block web APIs selectively to limit what a JS script can do.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    > I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. IMO, it should be enough if incognito mode presents an identical fingerprint on everyone's browser.
    - grishka 4y ago
      It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. Sure, you could remove all those PWA and pretend-OS APIs and hardly anyone would notice, but what about things like viewport size and font rendering? You can't exactly hide them from a website.
      - nordsieck 4y ago
        > It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. > what about things like viewport size and font rendering? Not much can be done about viewport size, but a browser could easily ship with 2 fonts (one serif and one sans serif) and only allow access to those.
        derefr 4y ago
        “Font rendering” is a different thing than “what fonts you have.” Font rendering is about how fonts are drawn to the screen. The trick is to draw some words to a <canvas> and then pixel-peep the result. Different OSes and browsers use different font renderers and font hinting logic; fonts will even render differently on a different-DPI screen.
        grishka 4y ago
        Not just the <canvas>. The font rendering of the underlying platform also influences the width of strings. So if you create a <span> with some text, its width will differ several pixels depending on the host OS.
        GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        Don't they already use freetype to parse webfonts?
        derefr 4y ago
        Is that a standard — that all browsers are forced to use the Freetype library, or to be bug-for-bug compatible with its glyph+hint parsing semantics? I've never heard of anything like that. But also, even if they did, AFAIK browsers still mostly lean on OS text-drawing APIs for font rendering. Text in Chrome on Windows looks different than text in Chrome on macOS, etc. The same pile of beziers, and the same pile of hints, converts into a different set of hinted pixels (and sub-pixels!) when fed to each OS text-drawing API. Especially when those APIs are configured by user settings around subpixel hinting / "font smoothing", and when those APIs are aware of the device being rendered to and so render subpixels differently for high-DPI vs low-DPI screens, RGB vs BGR displays, etc.
  - grishka 4y ago
    > Flash had some security nightmares all the time too if I remember correctly but I dont think it ever screwed me over like Java did. Those incessant RCEs were only due to the sloppy way the Adobe Flash player was written. There is nothing bad security-wise inherent to the SWF format itself. Ruffle is an open source Flash player in Rust, currently under active development. I'm sure it won't have such problems because 1) it's open-source and 2) it's in Rust, and I was told that anything written in Rust can't possibly have any memory-related vulnerabilities; we'll wait and see if this would still hold true if/when they implement JIT compilation for AS3.
olebedev 4y ago
I think we will end up with something like permissions grants (including granular JS APIs available for the website, as we do for the location, camera APIs etc, at the moment) per website and convenient tools built-in browser that allow you create/re-use patterns so you don't actually interrupted by this strictness too much.
- illiarian 4y ago
  > per website and convenient tools built-in browser Per-website, for dozens (if not hundreds) of APIs and convenient? These are contradictory :)
  - olebedev 4y ago
    Yeah, sounds a bit overwhelming for users, but my point here us that we would need appropriate tooling to be offered to end users so they are not get lost (quickly lol).
wraptile 4y ago
Yeah that's never going to happen - javascript is a lost cause. There's no way any sort of conflict and backwards compitability will lose out to "a bit more privacy" especially when people in control benefit immensely from this.
nordsieck 4y ago
> We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). I've wondered for a long time if a sort of posh gopher based on markdown with extensions would be able to make a comeback. Especially if it allowed for CSS.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago
  You're sort of describing Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
  - account42 4y ago
    Except that is too limited even for a document web.
- kps 4y ago
  But not current web CSS, please. It manages to be simultaneously overcomplicated (including enabling fingerprinting) and really bad at laying out text (e.g. still no baseline grid). A ‘markdown web’ style sheet should be more like document processor's character/paragraph styles. It also needs to be easily overridden for accessibility or alternate presentation, particularly around size and colour (a markdown-like format should already be fine for screen readers without styling). Aside: FFS, web people, if you're setting colours at all, respect @prefers-color-scheme and do not use the inverse for code blocks. There's also the million-markdowns problem, and markdown's HTML embedding. This being Tuesday, I'd start with djot (without embedding), but Wednesday I might go for asciidoc.
- coldpie 4y ago
  As with most things, this isn't really a technical challenge, it's a social one. The protocols you're describing already exist, more or less. No one uses them.
- account42 4y ago
  Why not just good old web 1.0 or even HTML5 without javascript. There are alreay plenty of pages that conform to that, you just need the client enforcement (also already available via extensions) and marketing/lobbying so that big organizations switch to it.
Spivak 4y ago
Which class you're in will be in control of the developer and they'll always choose SPA even for the presentation of static text. And to be fair it makes a lot of sense because writing HTML templates feels super jank once you've experienced not doing it. Even for a site with static content I would still prefer to deliver it as a static JS bundle and a data payload. I really like https://docsify.js.org https://docsify.js.org. Gotta be one of the lowest touch libs out there. The whole site from git repo to page one single completely static asset.
derefr 4y ago
The dark web is the document-based web. Sites built for Tor Browser have to assume JavaScript is disabled. So they have to rely on server-side rendering, old-school HTML forms, HTML meta refresh, etc. Surprisingly, one thing that seems to work just fine in this environment is (even modern versions of) phpBB. Lot of phpBB dark web forums. Also surprisingly, this doesn’t preclude polish or some level of app-like stateful interactivity, because CSS still works. You just have to think differently about how you use it.

We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). Insecure, all the SPA and anything that require JS to see the full content.

grishka 4y ago

Back in the day, we had a nice boundary between the document and the "app". Then for some reason we decided that Flash doesn't need to be a thing any more and erased that boundary by building the app functionality into browsers themselves, making the app and the document inseparable. We should have invested that effort into building an open source Flash player instead. One of the nicest things about Flash was that you could set your browser to only load and run Flash content after you click it.

giancarlostoro 4y ago
Java Applets were worse though, every time I got a virus of any sort from merely browsing generic sites, it always happened due to Java in the browser. I finally stopped installing Java for the web and my security problems went away. Flash had some security nightmares all the time too if I remember correctly but I dont think it ever screwed me over like Java did. I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. It would be nice to be able to block web APIs selectively to limit what a JS script can do.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > I think unless we lock down new APIs that aide in fingerprinting to only be accessible to WebAssembly and let people block or enable WASM theres not too much else we can do. IMO, it should be enough if incognito mode presents an identical fingerprint on everyone's browser.
  - grishka 4y ago
    It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. Sure, you could remove all those PWA and pretend-OS APIs and hardly anyone would notice, but what about things like viewport size and font rendering? You can't exactly hide them from a website.
    - nordsieck 4y ago
      > It's not that easy to "present a fingerprint" without compromising the user experience. And that's exactly what I'm talking about. > what about things like viewport size and font rendering? Not much can be done about viewport size, but a browser could easily ship with 2 fonts (one serif and one sans serif) and only allow access to those.
      - derefr 4y ago
        “Font rendering” is a different thing than “what fonts you have.” Font rendering is about how fonts are drawn to the screen. The trick is to draw some words to a <canvas> and then pixel-peep the result. Different OSes and browsers use different font renderers and font hinting logic; fonts will even render differently on a different-DPI screen.
        grishka 4y ago
        Not just the <canvas>. The font rendering of the underlying platform also influences the width of strings. So if you create a <span> with some text, its width will differ several pixels depending on the host OS.
        GoblinSlayer 4y ago
        Don't they already use freetype to parse webfonts?
        derefr 4y ago
        Is that a standard — that all browsers are forced to use the Freetype library, or to be bug-for-bug compatible with its glyph+hint parsing semantics? I've never heard of anything like that. But also, even if they did, AFAIK browsers still mostly lean on OS text-drawing APIs for font rendering. Text in Chrome on Windows looks different than text in Chrome on macOS, etc. The same pile of beziers, and the same pile of hints, converts into a different set of hinted pixels (and sub-pixels!) when fed to each OS text-drawing API. Especially when those APIs are configured by user settings around subpixel hinting / "font smoothing", and when those APIs are aware of the device being rendered to and so render subpixels differently for high-DPI vs low-DPI screens, RGB vs BGR displays, etc.
- grishka 4y ago
  > Flash had some security nightmares all the time too if I remember correctly but I dont think it ever screwed me over like Java did. Those incessant RCEs were only due to the sloppy way the Adobe Flash player was written. There is nothing bad security-wise inherent to the SWF format itself. Ruffle is an open source Flash player in Rust, currently under active development. I'm sure it won't have such problems because 1) it's open-source and 2) it's in Rust, and I was told that anything written in Rust can't possibly have any memory-related vulnerabilities; we'll wait and see if this would still hold true if/when they implement JIT compilation for AS3.

olebedev 4y ago

I think we will end up with something like permissions grants (including granular JS APIs available for the website, as we do for the location, camera APIs etc, at the moment) per website and convenient tools built-in browser that allow you create/re-use patterns so you don't actually interrupted by this strictness too much.

illiarian 4y ago
> per website and convenient tools built-in browser Per-website, for dozens (if not hundreds) of APIs and convenient? These are contradictory :)
- olebedev 4y ago
  Yeah, sounds a bit overwhelming for users, but my point here us that we would need appropriate tooling to be offered to end users so they are not get lost (quickly lol).

wraptile 4y ago

Yeah that's never going to happen - javascript is a lost cause. There's no way any sort of conflict and backwards compitability will lose out to "a bit more privacy" especially when people in control benefit immensely from this.

nordsieck 4y ago

> We need 2 classes of web. One for document based that doesn't require JS to run (secure). I've wondered for a long time if a sort of posh gopher based on markdown with extensions would be able to make a comeback. Especially if it allowed for CSS.

VyseofArcadia 4y ago
You're sort of describing Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- account42 4y ago
  Except that is too limited even for a document web.
kps 4y ago
But not current web CSS, please. It manages to be simultaneously overcomplicated (including enabling fingerprinting) and really bad at laying out text (e.g. still no baseline grid). A ‘markdown web’ style sheet should be more like document processor's character/paragraph styles. It also needs to be easily overridden for accessibility or alternate presentation, particularly around size and colour (a markdown-like format should already be fine for screen readers without styling). Aside: FFS, web people, if you're setting colours at all, respect @prefers-color-scheme and do not use the inverse for code blocks. There's also the million-markdowns problem, and markdown's HTML embedding. This being Tuesday, I'd start with djot (without embedding), but Wednesday I might go for asciidoc.
coldpie 4y ago
As with most things, this isn't really a technical challenge, it's a social one. The protocols you're describing already exist, more or less. No one uses them.
account42 4y ago
Why not just good old web 1.0 or even HTML5 without javascript. There are alreay plenty of pages that conform to that, you just need the client enforcement (also already available via extensions) and marketing/lobbying so that big organizations switch to it.

Spivak 4y ago

Which class you're in will be in control of the developer and they'll always choose SPA even for the presentation of static text. And to be fair it makes a lot of sense because writing HTML templates feels super jank once you've experienced not doing it. Even for a site with static content I would still prefer to deliver it as a static JS bundle and a data payload. I really like https://docsify.js.org https://docsify.js.org. Gotta be one of the lowest touch libs out there. The whole site from git repo to page one single completely static asset.

derefr 4y ago

The dark web is the document-based web. Sites built for Tor Browser have to assume JavaScript is disabled. So they have to rely on server-side rendering, old-school HTML forms, HTML meta refresh, etc. Surprisingly, one thing that seems to work just fine in this environment is (even modern versions of) phpBB. Lot of phpBB dark web forums. Also surprisingly, this doesn’t preclude polish or some level of app-like stateful interactivity, because CSS still works. You just have to think differently about how you use it.