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* Re: [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare
@ 2016-09-19 12:44 Marshall Conover
  2016-09-19 17:25 ` Chris McGee
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 22+ messages in thread
From: Marshall Conover @ 2016-09-19 12:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

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Thanks, Chris! That was a lot more detailed than I had thought into it.

> You just mount search engine, route planning tool, or even shopping site
and echo commands into the ctl file.

I hadn't thought of this - was more thinking on the user union mounting,
say, google.com/bin into their bin directory and running a google
operation. The concept of just echoing into a ctl file is really
interesting from a security perspective.

> Multimedia documents with both pictures and text are compiled into self
contained files kind of like PDF without hyperlinks and arbitrary code
expectation... This rich format is for longer and more focused reading
sessions: studying a topic, leisure reading.

I had originally been thinking along these lines, but the more I think
about it, the more I think there would have been a lot of demand for flashy
displays, and so I think something like a library for a flash-like language
that users would execute would've popped up. While I think users could've
gotten used to normal text (and it actually may have been more intuitive,
especially for older, non-technical people who are distracted by flashy
things), I think the people paying for development would've wanted more,
including graphics and animations.

>Also, services are designed to be focused enough and standard enough that
they can be easily interact with other services using pipes, redirects,
etc. so that the user can combine them to suit their needs.

This would've been amazing.

> Single signon is achieved using symmetric encryption. If the service
recognizes your public key and you are able to sign a message using your
private key you can proceed. Not sure how much overlap there is here with
what is in tls and factotum. Something like factotum could be useful to
allow you to specify different keys (identities) for different services.

This would be interesting, as well, when combined with network+union
filesystems, for being able to do something like run a website like reddit
with pointers to files hosted by users themselves. The possible advantage I
was thinking about is that a user could post comments as files stored on
their local accounts with group permissions they can specify, allowing them
to only have their friends see those files; the 'reddit' site would only
host the file pointers, and people would only be able to see those comments
on the reddit reader-app if they had the correct permissions. Usrers could
then delete their comments at will without worrying about the site holding
onto them in old DB backups or the like.

Thanks, also, Hiro!

> There is nothing wrong with the web having a limited scope of features.

Well, since everyone is trying to make the web the OS - see the chrome
boxes, for example - why not cut out the middleman and just have the OS
doing things? It seems like it's going to happen no matter what.

> If they are on par, then why waste time with the web part?

Well, that's the point, isn't it? You can access applications from
anywhere, and you don't need a browser to act as a platform to do it. You
also don't need to install them using some wizard and registry and all the
other BS.

> security and privacy in the web is hopeless. it plainly was never a real
goal.

Would plan9 have made it reasonable to become one?

> popular things tend to drive people. doesn't say anything about the
technical or even educational qualities though.

I think this is a good point. I was also thinking that ease-of-entry would
likely have developed more on the application side if more people had been
using it.

> Plan 9 technically is just one small collection of more consistent
alternative building blocks, but the web has ignored, reinvented or
misunderstood most others, too.

Yeah, this is sort of why I've been thinking about this. I've almost begun
getting frustrated when I see all the redundant design in the browser that,
at least it seems, could've just been done with the OS. Every time a friend
or intern pings me with a web problem, it seems more and more like the web
is just a series of kludges from trying to make the newspaper man be a
song-and-dance man who gives you live television.

Thanks for the thoughts!

mars

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* Re: [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare
@ 2016-10-01 20:17 Marshall Conover
  2016-10-01 20:21 ` Jules Merit
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 22+ messages in thread
From: Marshall Conover @ 2016-10-01 20:17 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

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> I was browsing of my old plan 9 mail and this conversation from 2000 made
me think of your thread here:  https://goo.gl/PO85oD

That conversation was interesting! It seemed Matt was a pretty prescient
guy. The "supports the latest standards...whose?" bit gave me a chuckle.

There wasn't too much in the way of directed conversation about what
different implementations of the web could've been, sadly, though there
were some - more just how feasible it'd be to implement the web as it was
on plan 9. I'm sure whatever Rob's intern was working has been lost to time.

Thanks for finding it!

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 22+ messages in thread
* [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare
@ 2016-09-20 16:48 Marshall Conover
  2016-09-20 19:46 ` hiro
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 22+ messages in thread
From: Marshall Conover @ 2016-09-20 16:48 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

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>  Ken and rob are currently working at google trying to
make sure it stays so - the idea being that if the stupid people that
control the real OS can't be made to learn at least they'll make
themselves an abstract environment that can hide the past and all the
pain, to then work on interesting, more challenging ideas on the
higher level (in the web) without distractions.

So, to make sure I understand correctly, the idea is to leave the actual OS
behind, and have all future development done entirely in the web, with the
browser as an application platform/web services being the OS, and finding a
way to make web services more composable? And this is being actively worked
on by Rob and Ken? I'm tempted to somehow work in the 9front release title
"Why not as a JS library?"

Is there any more information on this? I'd be interested in seeing what a
design like that would be like, and what challenges they're trying to
address. The browser as a platform and the technologies around it seem like
such a kludge after 20-some years of incremental, meandering progress, I'd
think there might be a lot of difficulty trying to base a simple, solid
system on them. Then again, I'm not a web dev, so I could be
misunderstanding what goes on in that domain entirely.

Thanks again!

mars

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 22+ messages in thread
* Re: [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare
@ 2016-09-19 22:00 Marshall Conover
  2016-09-21  3:11 ` Chris McGee
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 22+ messages in thread
From: Marshall Conover @ 2016-09-19 22:00 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

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> Mounting a bin directory from some remote servers is a potential vector
for malicious code and requires all services to provide binaries for all
platforms (arm, x86, riscv,...). Instead, serving the source code and
mkfile allows for audit ability (what did I just run?) and support for
their own platform. Plan 9 compilers were designed not just to produce
optimal code but also for speed of compilation.

Would this be fast enough for what we experienced back then with early
websites, however? What with the stats on how people close or click away
from a tab within N seconds if it hasn't fully loaded yet, I'd think that
having to compile at all could've been prohibitive to people taking this
route vs. web forms. Though, I'm not sure how user behaviors or
expectations of speed were back then for the web.

I was thinking what may have eventually happened would have been an
interpreted language would pop up that would be what web applications were
written in, sort of like java applets, except not embedded in the browser,
and hopefully in a simpler language. Early web applications were also very
simple 'put info in textbox and hit enter' forms, if I remember correctly,
so a small, expandable runtime that would be quickly started up in a
sandbox might have been on equal footing with html, assuming it was indeed
able to start up and run quickly (or maybe just fork a running one into a
new namespace?). Ideally, developers could then write their own libraries
(in C or whatever they like) that the web language would hook into that
could do more powerful things - and those libraries might be the time to
provide source and makefiles, or binaries if they wanted to keep things
close to the chest.

Thinking more on the 'writing to a ctl file' idea, which I'm really getting
into, I was thinking users may have ended up making their own graphical
interfaces for web services; UIs that abstracted away the actual writing to
ctl files and put it in a GUI for less advanced users. It'd've been
interesting to see a competition in UI design among OSS interfaces for web
services, sort of like what we see today with apps for reddit on phones
(except hopefully they wouldn't all be awful). Or, maybe everyone would
just use the service-provider's provided interfaces.

Do you think there would've been fewer large databases if things had gone
this way? Just thinking on my banking example, it seems like it'd be
easiest to just have a /bank.com/users/<username> folder with the relevant
files in it that users could union-mount, since you're not forced to show
things through a web interface. Though, I suppose a bank could just expose
that folder as an interface for what's actually a DB running in the
background.

> This was however because I wanted to call a site "Troff the Crime
Blog."

I chortled.

I was wondering if maybe today a similar thing could be done with docker or
the rocket containers, but I'm not familiar enough with them; it seems like
they're somewhat baked images, not just namespaced folders with the
relevant things union-mounted inside them, so it might not be easy or fast
to just union mount the things you need for the web-app you're loading in a
new docker instance. Also, they have no UI support, thought it seems like
you can dynamically link an X socket into them to draw to an X session on
the parent machine with some extra work.

Let me know if this conversation is not really appropriate for this mailing
list at this point, by the way. I don't want to be a nuisance.

I appreciate the discussion so far - thanks!

mars

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 22+ messages in thread
* [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare
@ 2016-09-17 15:19 Marshall Conover
  2016-09-17 16:23 ` Chris McGee
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 22+ messages in thread
From: Marshall Conover @ 2016-09-17 15:19 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: 9fans

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Hi all,

   For context, I am a plan 9 novice - I've played around just enough to
add jury-rigged background-image support for rio (for better or worse),
implore sl - if I remember correctly - to add the ^B option to 9front's rc
that brings the cursor to the current input place, and, for what it's
worth, create this: http://i.imgur.com/6iiF3zi.png.

   I've been wondering about how the web - specifically, the browser as a
platform for applications - would have been different had plan 9 become a
significant influence in operating systems in the early 90s. I've come to
the point where I thought a discussion here might be enjoyable and
enlightening, hopefully even to the point of dispelling the playful ribbing
that this mailing list may or may not be dead. If this conversation has
already occurred, my apologies.

  The improvement I think plan 9 could have brought to the early web is in
allowing the browser to have remained, as I understand it to have been,  a
medium for mark-up text and images, and have the OS act as the platform for
web applications.

The process I'm thinking of would be, with the example of a banking
application: the user opens the bank's web page in a plan 9 browser; the
user clicks a 'login' link; that link is sent to the plumber, which detects
it as a web application link and directs it to a service which:
- sandboxes it, perhaps by using a 'web' user or just modifying the
namespace to show the process a limited set of information;
- sets the namespace to prefer any libraries that are on the remote bank
machine, allowing the application to always run with the environment the
application developers intended;
- sets the namespace to include any files the application needs from the
remote sandbox, e.g. a directory with the user's banking files.

As a result of this, it seems that much of the hooplah around flash, webGL,
javascript, etc. could have been avoided, and that web applications from
yesteryear could still run today (for better or worse), since they could
control their environment. Web programming would have also have started off
with far greater ability, instead of having being limited by the abilities
of its browser platform and waiting years for even simple things to be
standardized. Web games, video-streaming applications, etc. on par with
local applications could have been launched as soon as the infrastructure
could support them, as the providers could just program the application to
do whatever the OS allowed.

It also seems it would avoid cookies and other privacy issues, since
applications would be sandboxed to only know about the things they have
available to them.

That said, having had discussions with friends in web development, they
have expressed concerns about ease-of-use and their initial interest in the
field - if I understand correctly, they feel that html's ease of
modification and immediate gratification was beneficial to getting them
into programming, which - while my understanding of this community is that
here it's not a highly valued thing - is, I think an important point to
address. They are application developers, and the web had aspects system
languages did not which attracted them.

Again, if these thoughts are obvious, my apologies, and if it's deeply
flawed, my apologies - but I'd be interested in hearing why.

Thanks for your time,

Mars

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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 22+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2016-10-01 20:21 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 22+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2016-09-19 12:44 [9fans] Questions on the browser as a platform if plan 9 had gained marketshare Marshall Conover
2016-09-19 17:25 ` Chris McGee
2016-09-19 20:55 ` Chris McGee
2016-09-20  6:16   ` David Pick
2016-09-20 17:42     ` Chris McGee
2016-09-22 22:49       ` michaelian ennis
2016-09-22 22:53         ` Chris McGee
2016-09-20  7:47   ` hiro
2016-09-20  8:09 ` hiro
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2016-10-01 20:17 Marshall Conover
2016-10-01 20:21 ` Jules Merit
2016-09-20 16:48 Marshall Conover
2016-09-20 19:46 ` hiro
2016-09-19 22:00 Marshall Conover
2016-09-21  3:11 ` Chris McGee
2016-09-17 15:19 Marshall Conover
2016-09-17 16:23 ` Chris McGee
2016-09-17 17:04 ` hiro
2016-09-17 18:51   ` Jules Merit
2016-09-19 17:11     ` michaelian ennis
2016-10-01 15:03 ` James A. Robinson
2016-10-01 15:05   ` James A. Robinson

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