Second time I run into a developer on itch.io who doesn't know what a #web server is and thinks they need to code a #NodeJS app to serve static files.
This is terrifying. It's the future Google wants to build, with their HTTP 2.0 and Wasm: a future when even the basics are horribly hard and not even developers know how the web works because it's all a black box.
I'm begging you: fight this. Educate people. Don't let openness die.
@notimetoplay So-called "HTTP 2" is /not HTTP/ and I will die on this hill!!
@silverwizard @IceWolf That was no typo. HTTP 2 is binary. It can no longer be used in trivial ways.
@notimetoplay @silverwizard @IceWolf What do you mean by "trivial ways"?
@nasado @notimetoplay @silverwizard You can just open a raw TCP (or TLS) socket and start typing!
You can also write servers/clients in basically anything, you don't need a preexisting library.
@IceWolf @notimetoplay @silverwizard
Not really? First of all, textual HTTP is still very rigid compared to human-to-human communication; no novice without a guide is going to guess the incantation "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: en.wikipedia.org\r\n\r\n". I've worked with HTTP before and I still didn't get it right on my first try; I had the "HTTP/1.1" at the beginning of the line. It'd be even harder for someone who isn't good at English, since all the text in HTTP is based on English vocab.
As for writing new servers and clients... in my experience the exact opposite is true. Creating and examining samples of textual formats may be easy, but when it's time to write the code, binary is just so much simpler to work with, especially without a parsing library at hand. Not to mention that learning to read and modify other people's code is a vital skill for a programmer.
@nasado @notimetoplay @silverwizard Binary? Easier??? Maybe in C. That's about it.
@IceWolf @notimetoplay @silverwizard In some cases they're about the same, in others binary is nicer, but outside of dedicated string-processing languages I've never seen text protocols be easier to parse and generate programmatically.
And that's not the only thing I said, either, so.