Re: [9front] Musings on web browsers and office applications

[Pavel Renev <an2qzavok@gmail.com>]

1 апреля 2024 г. 02:13:38 UTC, Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com> пишет:
>Hi,
>
>I've had Plan 9 on the brain for the past few months, and I read a pdffs in the recent conference proceedings, and I was wondering whether the principles in that paper could be applied to create a file server for something that uses the Document Object Model.
>
>You could then use the resulting directory tree in the core of a web browser (HTML) or office application (OpenDocument / Office Open XML).
>
>Just off the top of my head, maybe an example HTML document could be represented like this?
>
>html/
>  !attrs/
>    lang
>      "en"
>  01 head/
>    01 title/
>      01 text
>	"Test Page"
>  02 body/
>    01 p/
>      !attrs/
>	class
>	  "dumb-stuff"
>      01 text
>	"according to all known laws of aviation"
>      02 comment
>	"why are you doing this"
>      03 em/
>	01 text
>	  "there is no way that a bee should be able to fly"
>      04 comment
>	"please stop"
>
>Consider "text in quotes" to be the contents of the files they appear under.
>
>I think the scheme above would work to identify attributes: the directory name would simply be an invalid tag name.
>
>What do you think? I don't know that much about 9P, so maybe there's a better way of expressing the order of elements in a directory tree than literally numbering the files and folders.
>
>	- Willow

I tried something similar in the past and found out that

1. it's slow: traversing file system involves a lot of syscalls and they are relatively expensive.

2. it's not very useful: there are many edge cases that are pain to deal with in both server and client, and in practice attributes are way more important than actual tag hierarchy.

If I were writing a web-browser-as-a-fs today, I'd make a single file per "tab" with a specialized DOM query language console inside, plus similar files for CSS, JS and what else.