Could “View Source” Ever Vanish from the Browser? | Hacker News Reader

Could “View Source” Ever Vanish from the Browser?

8 pointsideonexus9 comments

I've been working on a session to teach kids a little bit of "hacking," and it involves introducing them to the "inspect element" feature of the browser and letting them edit the contents of a web page. The thought is that, by letting them play with the HTML and code of their favorite websites, they can learn a little bit about how it all comes together. But a haunting thought came to me: what if websites started closing off their code and making it proprietary, shutting people out from that layer of understanding. Could this ever happen, or am I being paranoid?

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Yes, it could and there is a good chance it eventually will.

Not because it would be actually possible to hide it but because code has/will become so complex that it wouldnt really make sense anymore. Take, for example, sites like Facebook or Gmail: even the developers tools barely help understanding them, let alone the raw "view source".

This (human understanding) will not get better with an intermediate language like WebAssembly (which should not be considered an obstacle though). And this does not take into account a possibly even more drastic change in technology and the web (or whatever the web would be called then).

How would they do that? By which I mean, "What technologies would they use to accomplish it and what would their rationale for doing so be?"

It's already been possible to 'hide source' for years on the web, either in the form of compiled swfs for Flash files or, these days runtime code or output spat from server side complexity.

Without a fundamental re-write or philosophical change on the internet though, there's little to fear that 'the majority' of sites would go this route in any imaginable near to mid-term future.

Conversely, anyone paranoid or arrogant enough to do so could do, shooting themselves in the foot a little, now.

Your main concern should be, i'd've thought, messy and compacted code that uses a mashup of irrelevant and bloated frameworks, because that way lies bad habits and obfuscated education...

HTML as is though? i'd not concern myself.

"runtime" code still has to be downloaded

It's already gone from the majority of browser market share; mobile browsers.

Well, mobile browsers are generally very restricted in many ways. Nobody would realistically use a mobile device (in their current incarnations at least) for debugging or any sort of development, despite what many people try to convince us of (the decline of regular computing environment and the sole ascend of those touch thingies :) )

That depends.

In the developing world, mobile as the regular computing environment is a fact of life.

For most of the big tech companies (Facebook, Uber, Google's search arm, etc.) mobile is probably where they encounter their users the most.

I am talking about development, not use (which on mobile is still mostly passive). I edited my previous posting to make that clear.

View-source still works on chrome on android.

AFAIK on Android both Chrome and Firefox still have it, it's just not exposed in the UI by default. But "view-source:<url>" as address still works, and there are extensions to add a menu entry.

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