A theme I saw yesterday & unwittingly contributed to: Old protocols are perfectly satisfactory. The issue is that as technology is brought to the masses it gets filtered through the lens of capitalism!
Personally I quite like:
HTTP
HTML (caveats)
CSS (caveats)
RSS
XMPP
eMail
I tend to be quite cynical about what gets sold as innovations, but I won't say there ever was a golden era of computing we've fallen from grace from.
@alcinnz@spearmintwarlock Modern CSS is horrendously complex. and perfectly suited for the job it does! I'm a webdev and I'm often impressed by how much they've thought it through. CSS flexbox and grid are wonderful pieces of technology, but not for the faint of heart.
@DrFriendless@alcinnz It may be incredibly well put together, but it's complexity is precisely what causes the alienation I've spoken about. Web development is for the tech savvy only. There was once a time when your average netizen could learn some HTML and be part of the web. That capacity has long since been hijacked by the technorati. Everyone else just uses big social to interact instead, where they might have once made a page themselves for fun. Things always change, of course 😊 I just remember that brief 90s period when lots of people could actively participate. That window closed years ago.
You know. I think the issue isn't so much CSS's current complexity (boy do I have thoughts there!), but the fact we're expected to know it for pages to look halfway decent.
Browser defaults were designed for that late 90's time, & display technology evolved beyond it. If we had decent fallback style for unstyled pages...
@spearmintwarlock@alcinnz Sure, but it evolved like that because people wanted nice stuff. Every UI framework (PostScript, LaTeX, HTML/CSS) eventually evolves to do the equivalent of typesetting which is complicated. And yes, only nerds like me can do it well. But this is not because we've captured the technology, it's because the public pays more for stuff that looks nice and that flows into commerce which flows into technology.
You can still use Wix or something to make a decent web page, but it won't be glorious. And it seems to be very easy.
Bridging the gap for people who want nice stuff but can't do it themselves is my job. I would love for them to be content with less, but they always demand more.
Today I'm writing code to generate PDFs, which is a bit painful, but people demand it because PDF "looks more official".
@alcinnz I still use FTP on my internal network every week to offload photos/videos to my file server from the cell phones in order to clear up space. I love that FTP is still so common on all devices!
O.K., I admit as a protocol suite email is atrocious security wise. It is an ancient protocol that did not age well.
But I love the experience, & I wish replacements would stop trying to "fix" the part of email which is not broken. I don't want something more live and/or short-form!
@alcinnz I see. We don't HAVE to use webmail though. Have you used https://autocrypt.org/? I think the initial first message content is still unencrypted, but forcing TLS transport encryption helps with that.
@alcinnz
Veteran of spam wars here. Yes SMTP had its problems but I don't think the protocol itself was the biggest problem. The biggest problem was the "trusting" nature of the time and the assumption that everyone will "store and forward" for you. Also the whole "return address can be anything."
(Yes I remember a time before spam. For a few short years, it was lovely.)
@alcinnz
Also... compare what we did to Email over the years (and it survived) to everything that has happened to CHAT over the years. We could have had world-wide multi-vendor chat systems many times over by now but it always gets ruined by someone trying to monetize it, and abusers of course.
It makes me think, if we are able to make Mastodon and Fediverse work, especially the distributed moderation/policy enforcement, could we someday do the same for chat? hmm.
@nedfed@nekodojo I'm using Snikket. A nicely configured & branded Docker-packaging of Prosody! Works pretty much out of the box, though it does require some DNS config.
Yes, Docker is a bit heavier than I'd prefer... I have my priorities!
@alcinnz@nekodojo I don't see the point of using Docker on a VPS. like, it's already virtualized. My web chat is just one binary that's about 50 MB (it includes a web server, and SQLite). I install it with scp, haha
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek Why? SMTP is still used for cross domain emails, or in gateways (which skilled folks use to send you spam). But IMAP can fully replace POP3.
@nedfed@alcinnz@rysiek have you ever tried to implement SMTP? The protocol was never designed for the way we use it, it’s completely unstructured. Headers, messages and attachments are delimited by double carriage returns, so you have to encode them in the actual body. Attachments are fricken base64 encoded to avoid accidentally splitting the binary.
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek I tried to implement SCTP. Combined with IPSec, it'd be ideal for what STMP is used now, but try convincing people switching to that. No one you know has enough funding to push it, and there's no money to be made getting people to use a better protocol to send cat pictures. There is only money in serving them ads.
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek I agree because HTML, CSS, JS are a downgrade from WindowsForms. HyperCard was superior to HTML/HTTP, but Apple was too small back then. I've worked with a team of JS devs who managed to produce such funny bugs like shaking app. If it weren't recorded, I wouldn't believe it.
I've talked to JS devs, and the smartest ones said they hated using web apps and preferred native, but they wanted web apps to be popular to get more shekels.
That being said, I don't like Kay's talks anymore, cause he doesn't propose any kinda solution. It's more practical to just ignore what the soydevs are doing as much as possible, and accept the suck.
@nedfed@twipped@rysiek The stance I work from is that there is a beautiful idea behind HTML/CSS. I'm striving to highlight & explore that malleability!
Quality & inclusive typography has a certain amount of inherent complexity, but I strive to minimize all other complexity! Not supporting JS or the standard DOM is a lifesaver.
P.S. I may well end up bringing WindowsForms back...
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek Using HTML/CSS for documents is great. They're great tools designed for that. I would be okay with monospace fonts, and ASCII emojis 😀
Kay was referring to using browsers as VMs/containers that can run JS and parse HTML. While browsers CAN do it, things begin to break down quickly. You see it manifesting as yet another useless framework every 6 months.
WindowsForms are still there, Visual Studio dev experience is superb compared to VS Code JS. Even for a seasoned dev, WYSIWIG is helpful.
On GANOO, we have a choice between Qt and GTK. I wouldn't even bother with those and make a terminal TUI instead with something like Textual. It will run in OS X too, and should look about the same.
@nedfed@twipped@rysiek Yes, I think browsers are terrible VMs. They've gotten significantly more capable, but fundamentally they tackle the problem backwards! They start with a document format, then as they realize devs need lower-level tools they slot it in.
Top-down as opposed to bottom-up.
Then there's the 90's OO hype's influence on the design of the DOM standards...
UI-wise GTK's my choice, but I'm glad the other options exist!
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek There's no reason to use HTML to define UI. Or even HTTP. Browsers should become full blown VMs/containers. Then you can get a web app as an image, and run it in a sandbox. MAC to define what containers/jails/zones can do. Images can use whatever application level protocol they want, or whatever document format. If it were like that, something like websockets would not have taken so long to be added.
The original OO (Smalltalk) was about objects sending messages. Later it became about bundling functions and variables. Nowadays it's done by a DB (to which you send messages over a TCP connection).
I can't stand GNOME anymore, it's such a fat bastard. Takes 3GB of RAM doing nothing. I've switched away to Qt stuff in disgust. If I want fancy icons I'd get a mac 😀
@nedfed@twipped@rysiek Yeah, when I saw a bottom-up system would be more elegant & secure I'm essentially asking for a VM with standard raw I/O protocols.
What I'm griping about regarding OO here is the infamous "You wanted a banana, but you got the monkey holding the banana & the entire jungle" complaint. An over-embrace!
Personally I like elementary. I find it lighter, prettier, & more convenient than GNOME whilst using similar tech!
@alcinnz@twipped@rysiek Java and C++ claim that inheritance allows for code reuse, but in reality it's all about the package manager. go get and cargo do code reuse better without any Simula style OO.
I just want a DE that doesn't need 8GB of RAM and a GeForce to run smoothly. I only need a terminal emulator and a browser.
oh, by the way, thoughts on remote Xorg as an alternative for web apps?
I'd rather apps continue to go through with taking on the computer-graphics smarts themselves, sending a (compressed?) video stream to the window manager!
@alcinnz One can do a lot with just C and sockets, no fonts, no browsers 252kb footprint thin clients showing as gui cloud apps clients also C other end of sockets. Thin language agnostic layer on top of server app using just stdinout other end sitting on everything from ada to sed, doesn't matter. Sometimes ignoring the end-all-do-everything is quicker and easier.
Add comment