[Lazarus] Sharing of large files

Kostas Michalopoulos badsectoracula at gmail.com
Thu Apr 18 20:08:03 CEST 2013


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Andrew Brunner <atbrunner at aurawin.com>wrote:

>  Ok,  I can tell you are no fan of HTML5 :-(
>

No actually i am a fan, but not for shoving in the browser stuff that
should have been native applications that take full advantage of my
computer's resources and my operating system's facilities.

For example i am a fan of offline storage for storing things like the last
mailbox i opened in my web-based mail client (which makes total sense since
we're talking about something networked). I'm a fan of JavaScript using
requests to update the page partially so the whole thing doesn't have to be
reloaded every time. I'm a fan for WebGL when it is used for stuff like
showing "in practice" how some 3D math work (a recent series of
OpenGL/WebGL tutorials did that - for every lesson you had interactive demo
alongside the lesson - and it was a very good to learn).

I'm not a fan for trying to mimic desktop UIs (we have the desktop for
that) using a much slower technology that was never designed for such a
use. I'm not a fan of "web apps" which try to do stuff that would have been
trivial to do in the desktop using a dedicated tool for that (such as
Lazarus) and present the "feat" as something positive. I'm not a fan for
trying to create "editors" that - for security reasons obviously - cannot
fully access my file system. I'm not a fan of playing Quake 2 on my browser
when i can simply launch Steam and do it fine.

I'm not a fan of "web apps" which do stuff that proper native programs did
better and faster 20 years ago on the desktop.

I'm not a fan of "web apps" that if they were released as shareware 10
years ago would have been largely ignored by the users because of their
mediocre features and design and the only way they manage to survive today
is that users do not have to pay for them because the developers managed to
convert users to products by selling ads, usage statistics and other stuff.

I'm not a fan of relying on programs developed by people like the above and
by people whose only reason to make the program ("service" they call it
usually - but service to whom?) is so they get big and be bought by
Facebook, Google, Microsoft or whomever for whatever reason on which later
people will depend on them to not shut down like many others in the past.
Of course if you ask these developers they'll swear that they would never
do that and it never crossed their minds.

I'm not a fan of losing control of my computer.

That's simply not going to happen.  There is a rising tide that is pushing
> HTML to new heights.
>

The higher it'll go, the more painful the crash will be when it falls on
our heads.



> Wow.  That has to be the boldest statement I have ever heard.  On who's
> authority did you make that assessment?
>

it is right there in the name of the most important part of the whole "web
platform": Hyper*TEXT* Markup Language.


> First loading, your browser must cache the framework.  Subsequent loads
> are fast.
>

Subsequent loads from the same computer with the same browser and assuming
i haven't configured the browser (or isn't configured by the IT department)
to clean the cache when i close it. Which, btw, even if it wasn't
configured as such, it is still too small (and for a reason: i'm not using
a cache to download the whole Internet).

If every site needs 1MB of framework (or whatever, i didn't really check
the framework size there) then they'll start fighting against each other in
the cache and invalidate it.

I'm not getting a faster connection so people can make bloated pages made
using the latest and greatest fad they learned about, i'm getting a faster
connection so things *will load faster*.


> Ah, so you are a minimalist.
>

When i want to do X i prefer a tool that does X alone, not X and Y and Z
and a bunch of other stuff i do not care about, especially when the latter
tool is MUCH slower than the former.


> Care to elaborate?
>

Do not develop software only to have more things to list as features. Good
software isn't always the software that has the most features.


> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/16/windows-its-over-tech-site-declares
>

You could link to the original article, i found it more interesting :-P.

Yes, i agree that Metro is a failure and shouldn't exist (and probably wont
exist for long), but Microsoft has a TREMENDOUS inertia. It'll need
multiple equally big blunders for them to start being anything close to
irrelevant.


> As HTML5+ becomes adopted you will see a shift in alliances towards
> independence.
>

Sadly most of the time this independence seems to be "independence from
users".


> I like to think that's what we're doing here.
>

Hopefully not. After all browsers aren't written to run in themselves.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lazarus-ide.org/pipermail/lazarus/attachments/20130418/2a9830c0/attachment-0003.html>


More information about the Lazarus mailing list