replace JavaScript with Scheme, for sure. Separation of presentation and content is kind of pointless since the Web is an application delivery platform now. What would replace styling? What kind of markup?
@lain I am ever so slightly sensitive to the argument that it does so much stuff that it no longer can be independently implemented by any but a few megacorporations
@Moon What should it be? What do you imagine it will be doing?
i don't think separating data and style are wrong, but the purpose was never properly achieved. The idea was to make the web somewhat easily machine / device readable independent of style (consider Reader Mode in FF, or a braille reader.)
This didn't really end up coming to pass because most people building the web either don't care, but also, the web isn't "documents" as much as varying types of applications and "content" in DBs.
@Moon then we have drafts of that in Java, or something like Squeak or image-container management?
The "web" part, from my perspective, is everything between the purpose (presentation) and provision (servers.)
Distributing fat clients: what becomes of the document thing? Is a word processor / old school browser a tool distributed with the document content in your scheme?
The problem we keep hitting is that a neutral platform is built on the lowest common denominators.
@jeremiah you can embed documents in delivered applications but not vice-versa. documents must be pure documents. they can have device-specific styling but it cannot be turing-complete.
@Moon what about recursive embedding? Can I embed containers/presentations in documents? Can I do the reverse without writing a browser or throwing one in?
What does this scheme expect from the host system -- min specs?
@jeremiah@thendrix well like NeXT used Postscript as its render engine so you could use it for the application rendering, I just think it might be too difficult for the average programmer for adoption. I could be completely wrong.
@Moon@thendrix or maybe by making it just a little bit harder than The Web, you eliminate a lot of retards and improve the code ecosystem by raising the bar.
@Moon Just on the scripting side, can we just not lock it down to one language? It sucks, has sucked and will continue to suck. Something like WebASM but first-class (instead of requiring JS interop) is ideal.
@Moon i think it would be interesting to keep the http distribution mechanism. for applications just do away with all the html/css/js legacy. just provide a sandboxed VM with "devices". like already with WASM but without the legacy stuff. then just compile things with this VM as target.
ideally rendering classic pages should be a program for this VM.
one might say that it's too opaque, but the minified JS and crazy generated HTML&CSS of today is also not readable anymore.
guess this idea is a bit like envisioned by inferno or java, only using webshit ;)
@pro@jeremiah I think implicit in the idea is that it should be some kind of higher-level framework that adapts to different display dimensions and keyboard/touchscreen etc.
@Moon@jeremiah In that case you don't need a browser at all. Just make Java good or something, and download apps outright. The OS should provide windows or other UI, security, sandbox. Why even bother with presentation?
@pro@Moon that's probably part of the discussion: where does this system begin or end?
At the point of "download apps outright" we're basically talking about the app stores we already have now packaging containerized apps.
QT is already a cross-platform graphical standard that runs on everything you might realistically use -- so container-image manager, cross-platform standards for interaction/output...
But what about shared data? Intertask comms? All the security fun stuff? Fake UX stuff?
@jeremiah@pro I am really digging the idea of a scheme language and the markup is in sexps but the markup isn't html tags and has a strict formal definition that can be validated
I've had this thought as well, and with a well-designed WASM-browser API I think it would be possible to jettison the majority of the browser bloat, all of html, javascript and css and have the site just render things directly.