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Comment by tosser0001 | Hacker News Reader

I recall it was almost axiomatic that the more expensive the content management system, the worse the URLs it produced.

I completely believe in the spirit of TBL's statement, and wish the internet had evolved to followed some of the ideals implicit there in. I recall that people took some pride in the formatting of their HTML so that "view source" showed a definite structure as if the creator was crafting something.

Now for the most part, URLs are often opaque and "view source" shows nothing but a bunch of links to impenetrable java script. I actually wonder when "view source" is going to be removed from the standard right-click window as it barely has meaning to the average user any more.

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I expect to eventually browsers be split into users and developer editions, with the tooling only available on developer edition.

Actually I am quite surprised that it hasn't happened yet.

Why?

Because it has been a common trend in computing to split consumer and development devices.

For browsers, the opposite has been true. Developer tools that you once installed as extensions (hello Firebug) are now shipped in the browser.

Firefox's current devtools shipped beginning with Firefox 4. It was only Firefox 3.x that shipped without any kind of tooling for web developers. Prior to Firefox 3, the original DOM Inspector was built-in by default (just like the case with Mozilla Suite and SeaMonkey).

I know, just expect it to turn full circle.

Yeah, seems a bit pointless to split builds for no reason.

You always want to test on the browser users will ultimately use anyways, even if you have guarantees the code works exactly the same for dev and user editions.

Hasn't that already happened? The user browsers are on phones and tablets; the developer browsers are on laptops and desktops.

Not wrong, the mobile market is massive.

But lots of users still use a desktop browsers for working jobs, especially now a days.

Which is why you can still install software you want from any source on laptops (for the time being), but have to go through Apple to get software on your phone.

The end goal is to no longer have any thick device. Engineers will store and manage all of their code in the cloud, then pay a subscription fee to access it.

Rent everything, own nothing.

I bet TBL hates this just as much as the thing the web of documents and open sharing mutated into.

It kind of did with mobile / desktop.

Mozilla making your point for you: Firefox Developer Edition (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/)

Compared to the regular Firefox, there aren't any extra features (other than features that will reach the regular version in a few weeks, since Dev Edition is an alpha/beta of the next release). It's just a branding thing, a few extras by default, and a separate browser profile (might come in handy too).

View source doesn't show anything that cURL doesn't, and browser inspectors are far more useful. Still, I would hate to see view source disappear.

Inspector has more features, but for me view source with CTRL-F is more performant

Except in Microsoft Edge, where it hangs.

Inspector shows what the browser is currently rendering. View source might match that, or it might be something subtly (or not so subtly) different.

The DOM view on the other hand is super useful as it is effectively a de-obfuscated version of what those javascript soup create.

And you can remove things like popups instead of agreeing to them.

Perhaps 'view source' should link to the authors github, highlighting the repo that can be built to produce the page.

If the repo can't reproduce the contents of the page, simply treat that as an error and don't render the page.

Yes because all code is available via GitHub.

(or other code repo)

If you actually want to do this, you could have the browser check for source maps, and refuse to render any pages that did not provide them: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...

(Of course most pages are not willing to make their raw source available, so you would see a lot of errors.)

... and a "go fuck yourself" to anybody who publishes pages that simply don't require source maps to begin with? I admit that would at least be in line with the current trend of prioritizing/encouraging the kinds of authors and publishers who engage in (the mess of) what is considered "good" modern Web development.

I mean, I think the whole idea of only showing websites with unminified source available is silly, but I'm willing to think about the idea ;)

I think a source map is a better approach than a GitHub link, is was all I was saying!

It also probably wouldn't be too hard to make some heuristics to figure out whether scripts are unminified and not require a source map. It wouldn't be 100% accurate, and it wouldn't avoid some form of intentional obfuscation that still uses long names for things, but it would probably work pretty well.

Refer to <https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/> (caveat: very broken and currently under-resourced; see <https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-librejs>).

> a source map is a better approach than a GitHub link

def.

Barely any commercial sites have public repos though.

I'd even say barely any sites in general outside of dev blogs + projects.

And even then they always link to the repo.

I do this with http://chriswarbo.net

Most HTML pages are generated from a corresponding Markdown file, in which case a "View Source" link is placed in the footer which goes to that Markdown file in git.

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