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Usenix: to wash it all away

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Here's a great article from the March 2014 edition of the Usenix
magazine, written by James Mickens.  It's a bit hyperbolic at times but
otherwise it's a hilarious read about HTML and CSS and why Javascript
sucks and the WWW is getting worse, not better.  Such an article
desperately needs to be circulating on Usenet, not in PDF form on the
WWW, but that's another issue, I suppose.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf

A couple of clips: 

Describing why the Web is horrible is like describing why it’s 
horrible to drown in an ocean composed of pufferfish that are 
pregnant with tiny Freddy Kruegers—each detail is horrendous 
in isolation, but the aggregate sum is delightfully arranged 
into a hate flower that blooms all year.

****

When you’re a Web developer, CSS is just one of your worries. 
The aggregate stack of Web technologies is so fragile that 
developers just accept a world in which various parts of a Web 
page will fail at random times. Apparently this is okay because 
e-commerce isn’t a serious thing, and if you really wanted a 
secure banking experience, you’d visit the bank in person like 
someone from the 1800s instead of accessing a banking Web 
site that is constantly (but silently) vomiting execution errors 
to the console log (a console log which the browser does not 
show by default, because if you knew about it, and you read its 
tales of woe, you’d abandon computer science and become a 
maker of fine wooden shoes)

****

Describing why the Web is horrible is like describing why it’s 
horrible to drown in an ocean composed of pufferfish that are 
pregnant with tiny Freddy Kruegers—each detail is horrendous 
in isolation, but the aggregate sum is delightfully arranged 
into a hate flower that blooms all year.

****

The first log entry says that the browser executed a downloaded 
file as JavaScript, even though the MIME type of the file was 
text/html. Here’s a life tip: when you’re confused about what 
something is, DON’T EXECUTE IT TO DISCOVER MORE 
CLUES. This is like observing that your next-door neighbor 
is a creepy, bedraggled man with weird eyes, and then you start 
falling asleep on his doorstep using a chloroform rag as a pillow, 
just to make sure that he’s not going to tie you to a radiator and 
force you to paint tiny figurines. Here’s how your life story ends: 
YOU ARE A PAINTER OF TINY FIGURINES.

****

Anyways, my point is that browsers 
are too complex to be trusted. Unfortunately, youth is always 
wasted on the young, and the current generation of software 
developers is convinced that browsers need more features, not 
fewer. So, we are encouraged to celebrate the fact that browsers 
turn our computers into little Star Wars cantinas where every - 
one is welcome and you can drink a blue drink if you want to 
drink a blue drink and if something bad happens, then maybe 
a Jedi will save you, and if not, HEY IT’S A STAR WARS 
CANTINA YESSSSS. Space cantinas are fun, but they’re just 
a fantasy; they’re just a series of outlandish details stitched 
together to amuse and entertain. You have to open your eyes 
and see that in the real, non-hyperbolic world that you actually 
inhabit, your browser will frequently stop playing a video and 
then display flashing epilepsy pixels while making the sound 
that TVs make in Japanese horror movies before a pasty sala - 
mander child steps out of the screen and voids your warranty. 
That’s a thing which could actually happen, and we should 
wash it all away.


-- 
RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>

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Usenix: to wash it all away RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-07-10 15:26 +0000
  Re: Usenix: to wash it all away Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2014-07-10 17:01 +0000
  Re: Usenix: to wash it all away Randy Westlund <Vorzakir@invalid.invalid> - 2014-07-10 19:19 +0000
    Re: Usenix: to wash it all away Sylvia Else <sylvia@not.at.this.address> - 2014-07-11 19:53 +1000

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