On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 2:54 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Well, that's not what HTML, nor the underlying HTTP, was designed for. I > don't see it as being an appropriate platform for software at all. (And I Like it or not, the web browser has become a runtime environment, capable of executing both Free and non-Free code. HTML and HTTP were designed to present hypertext documents. And yet here we are, two decades later, and HTML has evolved (with the help of other technologies like CSS and Javascript) so that the browser can also run applications. Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but I suspect it is going to look more and more like this: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plugin.html Warning: contains video and img tags (the latter a perversion of HTML introduced by Marc Andreessen in 1993). (I'm not predicting an alien-infested post-apocalyptic future, btw.) At one extreme (and not something you're suggesting), the browsers available on Fedora could be patched to blacklist non-free web apps, like Gmail. The browser could instead display the GNU gnu holding a stop sign, or wagging its finger. Alternately, these browsers could make web apps second-class citizens, with poor performance. I don't think that's a good idea, either. At the very least, it will create the impression that Free software doesn't perform as efficiently as it's non-Free counterparts. Or Fedora could endeavor to provide a top-notch web app runtime capable of executing both Free and non-Free applications (just as it ships a libc that can run both Free and non-Free applications). That would be my vote. Whatever choice is made, it shouldn't be based on what Sir Tim Berners-Lee intended HTML to be used for in 1990. -David -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
