New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[Paolo Invernizzi via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 19:28:26 UTC, H. S. Teoh via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> No software is feature-complete until it can read email. :-)
>
> Today I skimmed over the PDF spec... and was horrified to 
> discover that
> I had been living in a fool's paradise, thinking that it was 
> only a
> passive *document* format. Turns out that it is yet another of 
> those
> document format turned Turing-complete messes. With its own 
> embedded
> flavor of Javascript, even. (And obviously, it's gratuitously
> incompatible with "standard" JS). With the ability to attach 
> files.
> (Huh, what?! I thought PDF was *the* attachment... nope, not 
> only it can
> contain executable JS code, which is just a repetition of that 
> security
> nightmare that is Outlook + ActiveX, it can also encapsulate an 
> entire
> directory structure within itself. Yep. No bloatware here, move 
> along.)
> PDFs can also embed *movies*. (!!!)
>
> So basically, you can create an entire interactive website 
> inside a
> single PDF file, complete with scripting, movies, embedded 
> subfiles
> (basically a self-contained directory structure aka URL tree). 
> It would
> utterly suck, of course, given that probably only crappy Adobe 
> bloatware
> would be able to interpret the resulting mess. But you could do 
> it. And
> obviously somebody *has* done it, since otherwise where did all 
> these
> features come from? One of these days, somebody's gonna 
> reinvent the
> browser inside a PDF file...
>
> This seriously tempts me to go back to standardizing on 
> Postscript. I
> just want the *document* part of it, darnit!! What's with this 
> obsession
> of making every single file format Turing-complete so that it 
> can run
> scripts and play movies?! Why reinvent the computer inside a 
> file
> format?! Argh...
>
> This is exactly the same thing that happened with HTML/HTTP. 
> HTTP was
> originally designed to be stateless because... the whole point 
> was to
> serve *static documents*?! It's a totally sucky protocol for 
> interactive
> media, to say the least. All the pathology with cookies, 
> Javascript,
> AJAX, and the rest of that jazz that got piled on top, 
> basically arose
> from trying to shoehorn a stateless protocol into something 
> stateful.
> Nobody ever considers to *replace* the darn protocol with 
> something
> *designed* for that purpose. Or that three-headed 5-eyed slimy
> monstrosity that is HTML, with something a little more... 
> *suitable*?...
> for describing UI elements. Y'know, like a GUI toolkit or 
> something! But
> no, we have to use HTML because HTML is cool, and therefore 
> that makes a
> HTML UI implementation cool. The Emperor has no clothes, and 
> nobody says
> a thing lest they be regarded as fools.
>
> A future generation -- if there even will be one, at the rate 
> we're
> going -- will look back and laugh at the foolishness that is 
> today's
> computing world.
>
>
> T

What a refreshing thread!
That's a hope in the world after all!

;-P

--
Paolo