Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jacquesm 3972 days ago
> If you don't want a browser that has some notion of "local file context" you should just sell your laptop and go live in a cave.

Thank you for your constructive advice.

And I note that so far my stuff written in 'memory unsafe languages' has been in production since '99 or so without a compromise to date over 100's of billions of requests.

Maybe it's not just the language.

And what business does a browser have with a .pdf file anyway, where does that end? excel sheets? word documents? proprietary format 'x'? Web browsers should stick to web browsing or at least have a mode where they will stick to just web browsing.
2 comments
dragonwriter 3972 days ago
> And what business does a browser have with a .pdf file anyway, where does that end? excel sheets? word documents? proprietary format 'x'? Web browsers should stick to web browsing or at least have a mode where they will stick to just web browsing.

Displaying arbitrary media content is web browsing; the web is an interconnected network of servers providing hypermedia content that is self-describing as to content type so that clients (like browsers) can appropriately choose how to handle content based on its type.

Its true that early web browsers only handled HTML, plain text, and a few image formats internally, and relied on external software to handle all other media -- but all of that, including the parts for which they relied on external software -- is part of "web browsing".

link
jacquesm 3972 days ago
Sure, and if I install some plug-in to deal with a proprietary format that's my own doing and risk. But by default a browser should stick to a sensible subset otherwise we might as well author our web-pages in .pdf format instead of HTML.

Anyway, I've already been called grumpy and being told to sell my laptop and go live in a cave so I'll give HN a miss for the next couple of days or so.

link
tripzilch 3971 days ago
:-( but I like your comments!

(also let me take the moment to tell you that your recent "Nothing to hide" blog post is great, thanks for writing that)

link
tripzilch 3971 days ago
You know, they would try to render Word documents and Excel sheets if they could, if the formats weren't quite as Lovecraftian as they are, to display properly.

I bet they'd even try to render .PSD files.

So maybe PDF just hits the bad spot of being just not too arcane to implement, yet still being crazy enough to be a gigantic attack surface.

link