Re: [Edbrowse-dev] Render

[Chris Brannon <chris@the-brannons.com>]

Adam Thompson <arthompson1990@gmail.com> writes:

>> > At the moment if js does stupid things and breaks the js dom that's not nice
>> > if it completely destroys our method for rendering the buffer that's
>> > not only difficult to debug but also means you end up with an empty page.

Can't we make the render function (or edbrowse_render) read-only?  I'm
pretty sure we can.  But maybe this still wouldn't solve all the
problems.

> I'd really like to know how browsers test when scripts have gone into infinite 
> loops, or have generally broken

That's the halting problem, and it isn't computable.  There's no way to
truely detect whether an arbitrary script has failed.  I suspect they
just use a timeout, but I haven't looked at the source.
We should be able to call alarm before JS execution and let SIGALRM
interrupt JS when the timeout is reached.  But I can't guarantee that
Spidermonkey will not call sleep.  Mixing calls to alarm and sleep is a
bad idea.

> No, static html will always exist, and I can point to many sites where the js
> merely serves to run google analytics etc,
> and which won't be changing any time soon.

Yes, I'm pretty sure static html will always be with us, because a lot
of written content is basically static.
Also, lots of people are viewing the web with tablets and phones, and
I've read that JavaScript sucks massively on mobile devices.
Unfortunately, blogs created on Google's Blogger platform with the
default template are unreadable without JavaScript.  You needed JS
enabled to read content that is static.  They weren't readable with
edbrowse, and last time I looked, they weren't even very nice to read in
chrome with chromevox or firefox with a screen reader.  Deedra had one
of these, and she couldn't easily read it in firefox.That was early last year.  Maybe Google has fixed their default template
by now.

-- Chris