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

[Willow Liquorice <willow@howhill.com>]

That's intriguing. What are those edge cases?

On 01/04/2024 10:17, Pavel Renev wrote:
> 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.