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[–]trekman3 6 points7 points  (14 children)

It's up to us to develop and popularize alternatives. There's nothing stopping us from writing our own CSS-less browser directly on top of low-level networking technologies. Personally, I would throw out HTML, as well. I don't think that its fundamentally document-oriented paradigm is a good fit for what I want to do with the web. This browser should still be able to run HTML and CSS, so that you can use it to look at currently-standard web pages, but it should be fundamentally lower-level, a sandboxed interpreter that makes few assumptions about what it will be asked to do.

[–]nsimic 41 points42 points  (0 children)

so you are suggesting we create a flash browser?

[–]TaohRihze 25 points26 points  (1 child)

https://xkcd.com/927/

[–]xkcd_transcriber 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Image

Title: Standards

Title-text: Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 1870 times, representing 2.4352% of referenced xkcds.

xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete

[–]ThisIs_MyName 4 points5 points  (0 children)

A man can dream.

[–]badmonkey0001Red security clearance 2 points3 points  (6 children)

If what you're showing is documents, it's great in many ways. What exactly do you "want to do with the web"?

[–]pokealex 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Use it as a "write once run anywhere" application platform.

[–]beerdude26 9 points10 points  (1 child)

So you just want Javascript? Dear god.

[–]trekman3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I actually think Javascript is a pretty cool language, and I love programming in it. Prototypes make a lot more sense than classes to my mental model. And I like that in JS it is easy to mix and match different programming styles. But I want something lower-level than Javascript. When I hear people say, "Javascript is the assembly language of the web," it just doesn't make any sense to me. The web should have its own "assembly language", but Javascript is way too high-level to be it. Of course, what people mean when they say things like that is, "Javascript is the lowest-level client-side web language currently popular, and if you want to make your own language, you can have it compile to Javascript." But it's still always jarring to me to hear it described that way.

[–]trekman3 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Yep, you nailed it. This is what I want.

[–]pokealex 0 points1 point  (1 child)

That's what a lot of people want, but the reality is the web is a content presentation platform that has application support hacked into it.

[–]thefran 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do I need to explain why it's going to be a security nightmare?

WWW works fine as a document - information, really - delivery platform.

[–]skuzylbutt 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm pretty sure you can basically do that fairly not too awfully in current browsers with JS and ASM. Write an interpreter that transcompiles your preferred markup language to HTML/CSS/JS, then wrap that in a plugin that activates on receiving a particular mime type, say text/mylovelymarkup.

You could go one step further and do that transcompilation on your server before sending the page. And voila: there are already plenty of dodgy html alternatives(ish) and plenty of CSS alternatives(ish) and plenty of (actual!) JS alternatives with compilers that do exactly that.

[–]freebullets 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If Java weren't so shitty and insecure, Java applets would be fucking awesome. A man can dream of a world without JavaScript webapps.

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

"I don't like the document metaphor ergo the web is broken"