* defining a protocol that would play the role of HTTP,
I don't think that would be necessary. HTTP is okay.
Good enough versus Right. An old story.
It is true it isn't that bad, but it needs some cleanup.
Of course it has to be totally incompatible with the current "web
stack",
browser included. It can be quite a problem for wide acceptance; the
majority of "web users" today are, I think, not computer literates.
It doesn't need wide acceptance. Dwm doesn't need wide acceptance as
long as it works with most of the useful X11 applications. Dwm would do
fine with a bunch of folks who care about a suckless window manager.
This "new webstack" would be something similar. There are no hidden
plans to conquer the world here :).
I think wide acceptance is mandatory, because the platform we talk about
would be useless if nobody writes interesting contents.
Yeah, [writing a browser plugin is] definitely an option. However, I
think I would favor a method where this document format could be changed
on the server side to HTML + Javascript for the regular browsers.
It seems a lot of work to me. Furthermore, HTML/JS compatibility issues
may poison insidiously the whole thing.
I am saying this because even after a lot of marketing muscle and
commercial force, it has been hard for Adobe, Sun and Microsoft to push
their rendering stacks over HTML + Javascript. Flash is the only thing
which gained major adoption... and the picture might change once HTML 5
comes out.
The Flash strategy is definitely what I have in mind.
[...]
Benefits of going the suckless format:
- Concise, hacker friendly, open source implementation.
- Rapid evolution of the format to new usage scenarios.
- Platform support, acceleration
- Warm fuzzy feeling of using less RAM + CPU cycles for rendering web
content.
Maybe it is not that hard to do. I think it is possible to build a
prototype using Lua with some GUI toolkit bindings for instance: the
server would send the Lua source to the client, and the client interprets
it.
