Comment by zzo38computer
8 months ago
I agree with some of this (WWW is too complicated and messy, and has other problems with its design), but I do not agree with everything, and anyways in many cases it cannot be corrected this easily.
However, I should also think that documents should not need to execute JS or WebAssembly code; although there are uses for such things, it should perhaps be separately.
Also, some of the semantic HTML commands can be helpful, such as <ARTICLE>, <TIME>, etc. (However, the user agent should decide how to display them, according to the options selected by the user; this should not be decided by the author of the document.)
A completely new protocol and file format (or more than one) is another way. A few people have tried some things relating to this, including myself. One thing I had done is that, documents cannot contain scripts to be executed nor can they link to scripts to be executed as a part of the document; executable code can only be linked to from the conversion file (which does other things too, and is not only for executing programs; e.g. to specify how to transform a URL to download a file in a different format), and the user must explicitly tell it to execute; furthermore, it uses uxn and not JavaScript nor WebAssembly (since uxn is much simpler to implement); and, if the conversion file is implemented at all (for simplicity, it is not required), it is mandatory that the end user must be allowed to override it and specify their own conversion file instead (therefore, the end user decides what the client software does). Furthermore, I had also decided to use binary formats, to make them less complicated to parse special cases (to avoid needing so many escaping and stuff like that, which is necessary with HTML). And then, TLS is allowed but is optional; it does not have mandatory TLS (although it is recommended that servers and clients will accept both TLS and non-TLS connections; but a client or server that does not support TLS will still work even if the other does support TLS, if both TLS and non-TLS are implemented). There are many other things can be done too, to make improvement.
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