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"Today, in 2013, a trivial software bug is all it takes to allow the author of a web page to upload and run code in your browser process. That is a consequence

"Today, in 2013, a trivial software bug is all it takes to allow the author of a web page to upload and run code in your browser process. That is a consequence of the architecture we run on." Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days. "Are we at any point in the near future going to have fully transparent hardware? No we are not." Open hardware isn't cost effective, and economically and politically probably is repressed. There's darn few viable projects that I can find on the internet and a few underground systems that are borderline crackpot. There might be a better market for these systems today than there was a year ago. There seems to be a growing mistrust in commercial software, but there is no substitute for commercial hardware. "We're going to have to get over the NSA stuff, at least for the most part." I have to go to the office tomorrow and pretend that I work on secure systems for sensitive data. :)

bad_user 13y ago
> Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days. I've seen many people express their dislike for the status quo, however I haven't seen any real arguments for how things could be better. In terms of UI at least I've worked with Delphi, I've worked with Visual Basic, I've worked with Java's Swing and with WxWidgets and with Android - all of the available UI toolkits, except HTML, make it easy to build stuff with standard widgets. However, if you diverge from that path, pain ensues and I haven't encountered something more dynamic or malleable to experimentation than working with HTML/CSS. There's also nothing stopping you from implementing frameworks of standard widgets on top of the browser's DOM and Javascript. And btw, even Android or iOS developers that are quite happy with their native platform, are sometimes embedding WebViews in their app for cases in which they've got something complicated to do. In terms of Javascript, there are already compilers and frameworks that use Javascript as a target, with things like Google's GWT giving you everything a Java developer dreams about (code reuse, some static type safety, etc...), yet Javascript is still more popular by an order of magnitude than all alternatives combined. And if you haven't seen the Unreal Engine demonstrating asm.js in Firefox, you should. In terms of security, the biggest attack vectors on the web right now are old browser versions and various browser plugins that are still around, like Java (most PCs have a version of the Java plugin installed with known vulnerabilities) or Adobe Reader or other crappy plugins with a broken update cycle. With Chrome and Firefox auto-updated regularly, Javascript is actually quite secure and there's nothing in it that prevents you from sandboxing its execution. Many people complain about the state of the web, however given the constraints that the web faces (open standards, multi-platform in every sense, multiple independent implementations from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc...) I have a hard time believing on how things could be better. In fact, given the history of the web, especially given Microsoft that has held the web back for a couple of years simply because they could, the web turned out to be awesome.
- tga 13y ago
  Delphi, WinForms, Swing wxWidgets are the old guard, if you want to see what web apps could be in terms of UI development look at XAML (WPF), MXML (Flex), QML (QT) -- sane layouts, components, built-in data binding, etc. and still XML/JSON based. Adding something like MXML rendering to web browsers, without changing anything else (I'm not going to go into the JavaScript discussion), would already be a huge improvement in developing proper web _application_ UIs.

bad_user 13y ago

> Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days. I've seen many people express their dislike for the status quo, however I haven't seen any real arguments for how things could be better. In terms of UI at least I've worked with Delphi, I've worked with Visual Basic, I've worked with Java's Swing and with WxWidgets and with Android - all of the available UI toolkits, except HTML, make it easy to build stuff with standard widgets. However, if you diverge from that path, pain ensues and I haven't encountered something more dynamic or malleable to experimentation than working with HTML/CSS. There's also nothing stopping you from implementing frameworks of standard widgets on top of the browser's DOM and Javascript. And btw, even Android or iOS developers that are quite happy with their native platform, are sometimes embedding WebViews in their app for cases in which they've got something complicated to do. In terms of Javascript, there are already compilers and frameworks that use Javascript as a target, with things like Google's GWT giving you everything a Java developer dreams about (code reuse, some static type safety, etc...), yet Javascript is still more popular by an order of magnitude than all alternatives combined. And if you haven't seen the Unreal Engine demonstrating asm.js in Firefox, you should. In terms of security, the biggest attack vectors on the web right now are old browser versions and various browser plugins that are still around, like Java (most PCs have a version of the Java plugin installed with known vulnerabilities) or Adobe Reader or other crappy plugins with a broken update cycle. With Chrome and Firefox auto-updated regularly, Javascript is actually quite secure and there's nothing in it that prevents you from sandboxing its execution. Many people complain about the state of the web, however given the constraints that the web faces (open standards, multi-platform in every sense, multiple independent implementations from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc...) I have a hard time believing on how things could be better. In fact, given the history of the web, especially given Microsoft that has held the web back for a couple of years simply because they could, the web turned out to be awesome.

tga 13y ago
Delphi, WinForms, Swing wxWidgets are the old guard, if you want to see what web apps could be in terms of UI development look at XAML (WPF), MXML (Flex), QML (QT) -- sane layouts, components, built-in data binding, etc. and still XML/JSON based. Adding something like MXML rendering to web browsers, without changing anything else (I'm not going to go into the JavaScript discussion), would already be a huge improvement in developing proper web _application_ UIs.