On 5/16/2014 3:26 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
No software is feature-complete until it can read email. :-)
Heh :)
Today I skimmed over the PDF spec... and was horrified to discover that
I had been living in a fool's paradise, thinking that it was only a
passive *document* format. Turns out that it is yet another of those
document format turned Turing-complete messes. With its own embedded
flavor of Javascript, even. (And obviously, it's gratuitously
incompatible with "standard" JS). With the ability to attach files.
(Huh, what?! I thought PDF was *the* attachment... nope, not only it can
contain executable JS code, which is just a repetition of that security
nightmare that is Outlook + ActiveX, it can also encapsulate an entire
directory structure within itself. Yep. No bloatware here, move along.)
PDFs can also embed *movies*. (!!!)
The scripted-PDFs is news to me, but I have known for some time that PDF
is absurdly over-engineered. At it's core, it actually *isn't* a
document format really, it's a container format. And definitely is
designed to contain literally anything you fell like cramming into it.
And not exactly the best container format in the world, either.
This is exactly the same thing that happened with HTML/HTTP. HTTP was
originally designed to be stateless because... the whole point was to
serve *static documents*?! It's a totally sucky protocol for interactive
media, to say the least. All the pathology with cookies, Javascript,
AJAX, and the rest of that jazz that got piled on top, basically arose
from trying to shoehorn a stateless protocol into something stateful.
Nobody ever considers to *replace* the darn protocol with something
*designed* for that purpose. Or that three-headed 5-eyed slimy
monstrosity that is HTML, with something a little more... *suitable*?...
for describing UI elements. Y'know, like a GUI toolkit or something! But
no, we have to use HTML because HTML is cool, and therefore that makes a
HTML UI implementation cool. The Emperor has no clothes, and nobody says
a thing lest they be regarded as fools.
+1 million :)
I'm actually kinda disappointed something like Adam's old experimental
windowing toolkit hasn't taken the world by storm.
A future generation -- if there even will be one, at the rate we're
going -- will look back and laugh at the foolishness that is today's
computing world.
I wish I could believe that. But it hinges on the assumption that people
actually *will* wise up. Which is a notion I've become increasingly
skeptical of. :/ But hey, who knows.
