Why Don't Browsers Let Web-Apps Write To The Local File System?

My Quora question :

I mean, I know why. It's a security thing.

But why couldn't a browser have an API for scripts to read / write the file system and a security feature where the web-app has to ask and be given permission by the user before it runs? (Just as Android apps. have to tell you what permissions they need before you install them.) Couldn't the browsers successfully police this?

Surely if the browser manufacturers were to offer this capability, they'd more or less kill native Windows / Macintosh application development overnight and become the default platform for desktop computers. (So maybe Microsoft don't have the incentive, but Google and Firefox do.)

Introducing OWL

I love outlining. I love wiki. What do you get when you create a mutant cross-breed of the two?

A fucking power tool, that's what!

It's just a rough draft, at the moment, a rough mashup of Concord and ideas from SdiDesk. But I think you can see it's compelling ...

Fargo For LinkBlogging

I'm a couple of days into LinkBlogging using Fargo, (at Yelling At Strangers From The Sky) and I have to say, I'm getting into the swing and it's great.

If you keep the outline open in a tab, it's about as fast and convenient to post to Fargo as posting a link to Plus or Twitter. (Which is where traditional blogs like WordPress / Blogger often fall short). In fact, G+ is now getting bloated that it can take 10 seconds just to open the "paste a new message" box. It's a lot faster than that.

It would be nice if it could automatically include a picture or chunk of text from the original page the way FB / G+ do, that's turned out to be a compelling experience for me, but it's a nice not must-have.

A question, is there any kind of API for the outline inside the page which a bookmarklet could engage with? (Is that even possible given the browser security model?)

Elm Lang

I must confess, I'm very intrigued by Elm-Lang.

For me there are four virtues :

1) FRP. All the attempts I've seen to graft FRP onto existing languages have looked clunky to me - ahem ... Trellis? - Requiring the explicit definition of special types of fields. This is the kind of thing that I think needs a new language feature, not a new library.

Elm-lang's "lift" looks a much cleaner way of going about it.

2) It's in the browser. That's where code has to run.

3) I like the way that it reunifies the document / graphics structure back into the same file. The problem is not so much that style and content shouldn't be separated. It's that there are more serious divisions of modularity to respect and forcing HTML and JS into different trees of the filing system has typically pushed highly interdependent data-structure and logic too far apart. I like the ability to bring them back together for small programs.

4) Perhaps it's a way to get familiar with and more into Haskell. Obviously it's not full Haskell. But it seems like a way to get more into that mind-set while doing some practical work.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I'd better go and try something ...  :-)

LightTable

Interesting this new surge of dynamic IDEs. First there was Brett Victor's awesome demo. Now there's LightTable (promoted on KickStarter, discussed on Quora)

Sporadic thoughts.

Is this implemented in the browser? (Bespin? CodeMirror)? Perhaps we're seeing this explosion of innovation as IDE authors move to the cloud.

A Kickstarter project? That's cool. But motivated by early investors getting licenses? Does it also mean that this next wave of software innovation will be abandoning Open Source as a model?

Elements of Jonathan Edwards's Subtext in the tree of updates. Of course, he's paying attention.

Three.js

Bloody hell! Three.js is cool. And CSG.

What can't you do in the browser these days?

CoffeeScript

Just a note. I am really, really liking CoffeeScript now.

It's reminding me both of freedom that Python gave me when I first turned to it after Java. And bit of my experience with Erlang. ( If only it had Erlang's Actor model and pattern matching arguments ... )

The other good effect of this, CoffeeScript is making me more comfortable with investing my time writing serious logic on the browser-side. Which is where it should be, given the requirements of modern applications and that the browser is becoming the default GUI. 

CoffeeScript and Raphael.js

I've been working on a project based on some of my recent artistic works. I thought I'd do it using a Processing sketch embedded in a web-page. It's not that I was particularly happy with Java applets (in 2011!) but I figured I'd make use of the Processing code I already had.

After a whole lot of faffing around trying to get the applet talking to my server, I'm realising that this is really NOT going to fly for a whole bunch of reasons. I wasn't really seeing Java as my long-term future anyway, but I've realised that it isn't even going to be the quick, dirty but workable prototype that I'd hoped. So, if I have to make a break, I might as well do it now and quickly. And look to the future rather than the past. So I've made a decision to rewrite with CoffeeScript and Raphael.js. (I'm generating SVG designs anyway, so Raphael is ideal.)

After a spending a couple of hours today, that's feeling like good decision. There's still the hassle of having to convert a lot of code, and it's a bit of a fiddle going backwards and forwards between the editor, the command-line compiler and the browser. But CoffeeScript feels like a good language. Obviously meaningful whitespace indentation is comfortable for a Pythonista like me, and I'm getting used to the Rubyisms without too much pain.

Not much in the way of debugging information, which hasn't bitten me yet, but might. Still, I'm positive.

ThinkLinkr, another pretty slick web-based outliner.

I think TidyLines is the best browser-based outliner I've seen. At least in terms of how it feels at the keyboard.

The lessons of Mozilla Ubiquity

Dynamic List is a browser-based outliner.

Yes. Atlas is also pretty damned cool.

I'm not, personally, quite so excited by this as I am by Bespin. But it's nice. Particularly how you program the sizers by clicking on which edges are glued and which not. And the connection of the panels in the screen to controllers on a special bar is good.

Bespin

This is it!!!! Editing moves to the browser.

The future has arrived.

...

Update : LOLZ ... the hierarchical code-browser is a steal from Smalltalk. (Of course!)

StackOverflow discussion on good in-browser code-editors. Worth following.

I'm expounding my usual "late-bound" tabs model of IDEs again, over on StackOverflow.

... late binding between the buffer in the editor and actual concrete thing you're working on, gives the editing environment more flexibility and power.

Think this is out of date? One place where the idea is back with a vengeance is in the browser, where you don't have 1-1 correspondence between tabs and web-pages. Instead, inside each tab you can navigate forwards and backwards between multiple pages. No-one would try to make an MDI type interface to the web, where each page had it's own inner window. It would be impossibly fiddly to use. It just wouldn't scale.

Personally, I think IDEs are getting way too complicated these days, and the static binding between documents and buffers is one reason for this. I expect at some point there'll be a breakthrough as they move to the browser-like tabbed-buffer model where :

a) you'll be able to hyperlink between multiple files within the same buffer/tab (and there'll be a back-button etc.)

b) the generic buffers will be able to hold any type of data : source-code, command-line, dynamically generated graphic output, project outline etc.

Take a look at AppJet. An educational take on the IDE in a browser.

Round-up of web-based IDEs.

Ecco via Roberto Saccon

Eclifox, plug Eclipse into Firefox.

Global System Builder (web-based IDE for IronPython)

This looks good. CodeMirror, an in-browser code-editor.