Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing could be interesting. I've often bemoaned the use of HTML/Javascript as a "poor man's X server" and argued that a browser is not necessarily the best way to remote out a UI. VNC, on the other hand, is designed for pushing user interfaces out remotely, so integrating the two could be a very natural step.

What'll be interesting to see, is if we can get to a point where there's a very natural handoff mechanism between the browser and VNC. Will there be, for example, urls like:

vnc://myhost.com/some_remote_desktop

that will seamlessly start a VNC viewer? If so, that starts to become really cool.

Of course, I freely admit that I don't know well VNC works over public Internet / WAN links. That was always one of the arguments against using X, that the latency of WANs / the public Internet, screwed with it and made it fairly unusable. Not sure if VNC is better in this regard or not.

Why are we still messing around with ancient technology like VNC? Its terrible. It just samples screen output; it does not intelligently understand the underlying GUI so it can't really cache anything or accelerate anything.

If we're going to replace HTML as a "poor man's interface" then we need to do better than VNC. Perhaps NX or RDP.

Still, I'd argue that HTML as a poor man's interface is perfect. I could sit down a write a HTML-based control panel that uses next to no resources. With VNC or whatever, now I need X running on my server, a GUI window manager running, and need to write a desktop app. This isn't progress.

If we're going to replace HTML as a "poor man's interface" then we need to do better than VNC. Perhaps NX or RDP.

Well, I certainly won't argue against that. But at least with VNC it's being used for the purpose it was developed for. Personally I feel like trying to build complex application UIs with HMTL/CSS/Javascript is trying to shoehorn a square peg into a round hole. Browsers are great at, well, browsing hypermedia. I'd like to see that continue and the adoption of something like RDP, NX, or $NOT_INVENTED_YET for remoting interfaces.

But HTML isn't usually "remoting" an interface anymore, it _is_ the interface. This trend will only continue and solutions like VNC, NX will become unnecessary.

Well, you can sort of already have that with a bit of JS and NoVNC.

http://kanaka.github.com/noVNC/

Oh yeah? Cool, I'll check that out. I hadn't heard of NoVNC before...

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