There’s so many nuances around assets, trademarks, copyright, monetisation, cheatware(?), multi-player etc but the article ignores all of it and goes for the straight freedom angle. How do you even have in-game purchases when you can’t control client code? Do we even have a single example of FOSS and mainstream game that made money and was multiplayer?
> Github does not expose a public bug list or any issues page, hiding their problems deep in email chains
Which email chains is this referring to? GitHub/community is fairly active from the community perspective. GitHub rarely looks at it anymore, prioritising their Enterprise roadmap.
> Github often breaks on firefox and safari, browsers with millions of users
[[citation needed]].
I’ve been as annoyed as everyone with the GitHub frontend performance since the React rewrite, but never really faced breakage in Firefox. This claim is repeated a few times in the article, but without any links.
> Mozilla, which still maintains one of the only independent rendering engines (Gecko), is the only viable competitor. Everything else is Blink and Google.
WebKit isn't really independent - while it is technically opensource, it is effectively controlled by Apple. In fact, Apple were the ones who originally forked it from KHTML. They continue to be majority contributors and drive the product roadmap.
On the other hand, there's Ladybird, Servo and Chawan which are indie, and although they're still in alpha - depending on the sites you browse daily (like HN - which works fine), you might be able to use one of these as a daily-driver.
You can spin up a HTML-but-restricted XML grammar (with extra stuff even, like footnotes and stuff) and a CSS file in maybe half an hour, and it'll render in your browser just fine.
(Yeah, it'll be missing all the accessibility provisions, but you know, the base to build on is there, whereas "MarkDown in the browser" rendering has been often suggested and never implemented).
Just choose a subset of Markdown that doesn't allow inline HTML.
This always comes up as an intractible problem in these discussions but I don't get it. If you're making a new protocol you can define a Markdown spec for that protocol. As long as it renders sensibly as plaintext then it's fine. Gemtext is basically already that.
Also let's be honest - almost everyone looking for an alternative to the web is a techie jaded about the modern web stack and its complexity who wants to reinvent things according to their own specific preferences and hyperfixations, mostly because it's fun. Such people tend to like markdown and not like XML or HTML so the chances of anyone making a web alternative that uses either is practically moot, regardless of any actual technical merit or interoperability with the web stack. And for a lot of people not being compatible with the web would be a feature, not a bug.
It's still a lousy "spec", and, again, I often see people wishing for a Markdown web browser, but I don't see anyone implementing such a thing. You'd think it would be an instant success!
Yeah, I am a jaded techie. I wanted to like Markdown and used it extensively for a little while and wound up utterly loathing it for anything other than jotting down a quick, ephemeral note.
But, back to my original response: if you want a usable alternative to HTML, right now, a simple XML grammar + style sheet will deliver that. Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari will render it nicely. Heck, even Docbook would work (which is overkill, but has vast and mature tooling available).
I’m now a firm believer that every package manager needs to support hooks globally.
Composer also supports conflicts which results in this amazing approach of having a meta-package conflict with insecure packages: https://github.com/Roave/SecurityAdvisories.
Can’t happen in Node, sadly because of language differences.
There’s so many nuances around assets, trademarks, copyright, monetisation, cheatware(?), multi-player etc but the article ignores all of it and goes for the straight freedom angle. How do you even have in-game purchases when you can’t control client code? Do we even have a single example of FOSS and mainstream game that made money and was multiplayer?
Terrible slop and I am flagging it.
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