Hacker News Reader

Comment by positivecomment | Hacker News Reader

This is very cool. I hope one day someone creates a basic DOM for this with good CSS support and then we'd have the mini-electron. I hope that a very limited subset of the features of a browser (no downloads, tabs, networking, security contexts and everything else which would be irrelevant for desktop apps) can be implemented with few orders of magnitude less lines of code.

View on HN

In fact I am looking on something like XS7 for my Sciter (https://sciter.com) to provide ability to run <script type=text/javascript>.

Sciter is an implementation of HTML(~5)/CSS(~3) and DOM/layout/rendering. As for now it has its own JS alike script and VM and is contained in single DLL < 5mb all together.

So "yes", mini-electron is feasible and exists already I would say.

Have you considered opening up the source code for Sciter? You can easily get a significant amount of apps just due to the size and still maintain "paid and supported" version.

I am considering that too. The only thing that is worrying me is that it may take quite a lot of time/effort to publish it.

Yet, I am not that good in "legaleze" language, GPL vs BSD vs paid options, etc.

Pls seek help and capitalise on the current situation in desktop apps. We need low memory consuming apps seriously

Sciter is awesome.

I found it too hard to start writing something with TIScript, maybe if there was some step-by-step tutorial it could be easier.

> So "yes", mini-electron is feasible and exists already I would say.

I believe you could became big player in "web to desktop" market if only sciter had JS & DOM support. That would give you access to existing code and make sciter almost drop in replacement for nw.js or electron.

//edit: formatting mistake

Yeah, that would be interesting. Right now the Moddable SDK comes with the Piu application framework, which has cascading styles, inspired by CSS. You can read all about that here: https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable/blob/public/...

I'd hardly consider networking support to be irrelevant to a desktop app.

I meant in the context of the GUI, then all data would be exchanged through the native bindings.

   > security contexts and everything else which would be irrelevant for desktop apps

I hope that was dark sarcasm, or that you do not write software. Security is never irrelevant! Never!

There's a lot of web browser security features which are only relevant when the code is untrusted, when assets are fetched over http/https instead of bundled locally, etc.

GP is likely overestimating how much "bloat" could actually be dropped but your comment is uninformed.

ALL code is untrusted

That's... somewhat hardcore for most applications.

Also it's also not what most people mean by "untrusted". From a low level hardware standpoint though... assuming user-land code isn't trustworthy IS a good guideline.

Purposefully misunderstanding what people write in an effort to be a smartass is a sure-fire way of creating security issues.

No, "ALL" code is not untrusted. There's varying degrees of trust. I'd encourage you to stop trying to win the argument through platitudes and do some research instead, but I'm not sure you're interested.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com