4 ms·
People are starting to ship even local apps only in the form of some html & js that only works on Chrome because only Chrome has webusb. Whether we like the id
by Brian_K_White 6mo ago
People are starting to ship even local apps only in the form of some html & js that only works on Chrome because only Chrome has webusb.
Whether we like the idea of the browser having access to usb or not, I at least like even less the idea of being forced to install and use Chrome for the same reasons as the bad old days of being forced to use IE.
- colechristensen 6mo agoI still want to reinvent the web with a hypertext document reader that doesn't include the kitchen sink. I suppose with LLMs these days this is actually an achievable prototype.
- angra_mainyu 6mo agonyxt? helium? midori? There are hundreds of browsers these days, you shouldn't have a hard time finding one that fits your needs.
- hollerith 6mo agoNo offense, but you don't get it.
- goodmythical 6mo agow3m, lynks, elinks? falkon? I'm not sure what you mean given that JS and CSS account for at least half of the kitchen sink. Hell, wasn't there someone that implemented an entire OS stack in CSS?
- colechristensen 6mo agoMy point is a new standard, document format, and browser that doesn't have the capabilities which limits publishers to ... not what we have now. The existence of elinks which is marginally useful on the modern web doesn't make the cut nor do tools to un-shitify the existing web.
- spankalee 6mo agoWhat's the difference between that and a subset of what we have now, without, say WebUSB?
- colechristensen 6mo agoI'm talking about no javascript, no additional requests besides the bare document, no sending any information back home. Dynamic behavior only by a simple declarative language.
- Brian_K_White 6mo agoYou are trying to express something that is logically impossible. Not technically difficult or socio-economically difficult to get companies to agree to or get users to care about, simply not a valid string of words. There is no way not to send information back to the host. Merely requesting a document is sending information to a host. I don't mean all the extra metadata in the request header or cookies let alone the all the functionality in javascript or wasm or plugins, I mean nothing more than the name of a document, the bare minimum info required to get something you want it to give you. If you want me to give you an apple, at the very least you have to tell me to give you an apple. It all started with nothing more than that bare function, and we don't even want any less than that. You do need to be able to request a document, and there is no way for a client to prevent a server from replacing a simple static document with a cgi script that performs logic based on the file name. Even without the extra cgi query string, just a document name itself. But about query strings... there is no way to make a typical query string illegal anyway. It's all just strings of characters. Anything can be encoded within anything else. If you try to make a system that makes say the & and ? characters illegal, that accomplishes exactly nothing. You just pick any sequence of legal charaters and interpret those in place of the old ? and &, and = and % and anything else you want that doesn't look like part of a legal file or document name. The special encoded charaters can even be different for each document, even different for each request. It's not possible to make a rule that prevents it. Let's go totally off the deep end and say that you aren't even allowed to make up your own file names any more. All documents on earth have known names in a whitelist. You can't encode anything because every valid document has a known name and known content. Then you can still encode information in the pattern of access. Requesting file A followed by file F means something extra to you and the server. But don't take my naysayer defeatist lack of imagination word for it. Go ahead and try to actually explain how the system should work.
- sagarm 6mo agoThere are plenty of crippled web browsers out there. Heck, on iOS, it's the default.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo agoConversely, a web app platform that includes all the primitives that are needed to build a decent web app (as opposed to bring your own everything/building castles from grains of sand model) would be nice. It doesn't necessarily have to be a browser, though.
- colechristensen 6mo agoWe had those (Flash, Shockwave, Java Applets, etc.), the browser won. Nobody is going to win over browsers with an opinionated batteries included application framework.
- cosmic_cheese 6mo agoThose all had major issues. All of them were constrained to a browser environment, the first two were proprietary and full of security holes, and all of them had a reputation for causing browser or even full OS crashes. I wouldn't say that any of them were particularly "batteries included", either. Flash was probably closest but still left a lot of legwork to the developer.
- vbezhenar 6mo agoDo you like the idea of installing Windows and installing some chinese drivers and some weird tool instead? Because that's the alternative to WebUSB.
- Brian_K_White 6mo agoIt doesn't matter whether we like or dislike things that don't exist. The world where app makers don't ship this way doesn't exist.
- elxr 6mo agoExactly, how is an open, browser-based standard any worse than having to download an executable (often limited to mac/windows only) with opaque permissions? The fact they have to be installed/uninstalled too is another inefficiency.