The point I was trying to make was that HTML 5 (or more formally some of the API's for javascript for accessing local storage), among other things, enables offline use of web applications.
This sounds both interesting and dangerous. Maybe it would let you explicitly install a free program written in Javascript, and it could do the same jobs a C program could do. That seems fine, just like installing a C program to do it. On the other hand, it might also enable web pages to attack you in new ways. Javascript programs are not necessarily bad, but if browsers temporarily install them silently without checking whether they are free, that systematically leads users to run nonfree software without knowing it. I would like to find out more about this change, so I will write to you separately. 2) but also to improve compression of the loading of such programs initially. People like Google work *hard* on latency and understand every byte counts (among many other things: go look at the google talks by their engineers on the topic). This is a kind of compilation, and in principle it's no more of an obstacle to free software than other kinds of compilation. You just need to make the source code available in another file. We are working on the issue of nonfree Javascript code -- see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html. There are people working on extensions to NoScript to detect nontrivial nonfree Javascript programs in pages, but progress seems to be slow. If you know people who would like to help with this, please put them in touch with me. _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list