On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 02:52:43PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
But then using it as a GUI engine and software platform is like
abusing Latex or PDF to make software run inside Acrobat
Viewer. All
the effort, bloat and compromises...and for what point?
No software is feature-complete until it can read email. :-)
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*. (!!!)
So basically, you can create an entire interactive website
inside a
single PDF file, complete with scripting, movies, embedded
subfiles
(basically a self-contained directory structure aka URL tree).
It would
utterly suck, of course, given that probably only crappy Adobe
bloatware
would be able to interpret the resulting mess. But you could do
it. And
obviously somebody *has* done it, since otherwise where did all
these
features come from? One of these days, somebody's gonna
reinvent the
browser inside a PDF file...
Heh, this recently came up in a good article about how broken
software security is:
https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1#493c-7acd71bf4c69
