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Comment by ludwik | Hacker News Reader

In my mind, the part that is most likely to fail is "return an HTML document that still contains the following text." Nowadays, more and more "HTML documents" do not contain any content at all, just some JavaScript that is responsible for then fetching and displaying the content.

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If the text was returned using a staged process, whereby the server first returns an instruction (JavaScript), and the web browser then executes that instruction, which is what transfers the text, then that doesn't actually change anything. Those are just technical details of the transfer. You are viewing an HTML document on-screen; it makes no difference to this bet if it was returned to you by a different mechanism than originally conceived, since the bet doesn't specify any transfer mechanism, just that the URL was entered into a browser.

I understand that this isn't entirely clear-cut and that people will interpret it differently, but in my opinion, there is a significant difference between "a webpage that contains text X" and "an HTML document that contains text X." "Webpage" and "HTML document" are not synonyms - "HTML document" has a much narrower meaning.

> or command line tool (like curl)

Even if you interpreted the bet generously to allow for a browser to render the content using JavaScript, if I understand the bet correctly, the condition of working with a command-line tool like curl would fail.

I read the or's as giving alternatives, only one of which needs to work.

I can see how other interpretations are possible, but I don't see anything especially generous about mine. I'm not "allowing" anything: To make a judgement you have to pick a web browser to try it with, and you'd probably pick the most popular one, in the most popular configuration, that seems the most fair. If that web browser happens to execute Javascript when you navigate to an URL, then that's just how it is.

It says that the browser must download "an HTML document that still contains the following text". I can see how either interpretation could work, but I would interpret "contains" as "the text is in the HTML document", not "rendering the HTML document in a JavaScript-capable browser displays the text".

(Though, that said, some approaches to rendering sites via JavaScript would still have that text in the initially downloaded HTML file as JavaScript data.)

As for the "or", I read it as "doing either X or Y must", not "either X must or Y must (not necessarily both)", but yeah, I can see either interpretation being valid.

That's a secondary ("OR") condition, used if the browser condition isn't satisfied.

You two have just spelled out a very specific bet. Care to put a wager on it? :)

I used to be someone, man, I was a dreamer, a programmer, a man!

Now I'm a human slave copying text from web browsers to chat windows to get around JS rendering bullshit.

The preferred term is meat proxy ;)

That depends on which side of the JS rendering bullshit you're sitting. If you're on the serving side, yes.

But I do the same as GP, just on the receiving side. That is, reaching out for help to baby eldritch entity, because that's healthier for my mind than dealing directly with the unspeakable horrors that half the websites are today. The industry has lost its collective mind in pursue of profit and control, and that was long before the thousand-mask wearing shoggoths became our daily consorts.

I like your funny words, magic man.

One of those things is true

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