Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

"My disdain for web browsers is well documented1."

Ha, I am not the only one.

I do like links though, somewhere around 2.3pre2, with stunnel or haproxy for up-to-date TLS.

Someone submitted an "improved" version of linenoise the other day, which added UTF-8 and ANSI codes by default.

But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator).

This is an example of enforcing developer preferences on the user where the result is added complexity. Perhaps nowhere is this added complexity more evident (obvious) than in the "modern" web browser and websites.

Links does not try to enforce its authors preferences too much on the user; for example, it has compile time options to disable utf8, ipv6 and getaddrinfo. The user makes the choice, not the developer.

The fundamental problem with "web development" is that its extremely aggressive in enforcing the developers (or web development cargo cult) preferences on the user.

Anyone remember that period where many commercial sites were a hollow shell that loaded a Flash animation. Perhaps a precursor to todays "SWAs". Funny, the Flash idea didnt last long. It died out long before browsers stop supporting Flash. These "trends in web development" are tiring and annoying.

Gemini doesnt allow for that level of "creativity". The focus is shifted to the information, not the presentation. The user comes first. The protocol may refelect the authors preferences but the result is reduced complexity.

Great project.

Could you elaborate (or share a configuration example) on how you use stunnel or haproxy to connect an old browser to encrypted websites? I usually use squid for that purpose, but I've been looking for alternatives.

stunnel configuration is useful for a limited number of sites, since one has to specify every remote ip address in the configuration file. haproxy configuration doesnt have that limitation; it can do dns lookups, use maps, etc.

for example, one can force all http and https to connect to a backend as https with a specific tls version. this is much simpler than eff's "https everywhere", IMHO.

the problem with tls is it keeps changing. as users, we have to bet that every application will stay up-to-date with the changes, and that the software authors wont make mistakes when adding/updating tls support. IME, this has been a losing bet. by just focusing on haproxy and stunnel i only have to worry about a couple of applications staying up-to-date with tls and implementing support correctly.

Thanks for elaborating. I'd be grateful for any resources or configuration examples that explain how to do this with haproxy in more detail. I couldn't really find anything, but then again, I'm not experienced with haproxy.

The example configurations I have seen around the web are not representative of what one can actually do with haproxy. Everything I know is from reading the source code and documentation.

> But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator).

Why? If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?

"Why?"

Why not?

"If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?"

No. The alternative is not garbled text and thats not what I choose.

The alternative for me is a subset of ASCII. I choose what characters I will accept, delete the rest.

For example, something like

   tr -cd '[\12\40-\176]'

This has worked for me for several decades. Nor am I the only one who uses this approach. I once saw an HN commenter say their favourite regex was

   tr -cd '[ -~]'

That’s fair. Is that what links without Unicode support does? (Ignore all byte sequences it doesn’t recognize.) Also, I’d still love to know why you prefer stripping out non-ASCII characters — does this sentence become more readable to you with the em dash omitted?

It just simplfies things for me. If I can read text without Unicode, then I dont need it. Its one less variable I need to worry about. Maybe another way to look at it is cost-benefit analysis. I just dont get much beneft from Unicode in the console (I'm usually just reading text) whereas it almost always causes problems from time to time.

I can see a dash in 7-bit ASCII. I am not going to lose the meaning of a sentence by forgoing a few Unicode chaacters.

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