> (I was also working on project(s) that were using DAISY to automatically convert websites into hearable formats to be consumable by blind people.) Somehow from then (around 2000ish) to now, everything went to shit and nobody cares about that aspect anymore.
Yes, it's tragic that you could seamlessly compose streaming audio, video & text from multiple servers using an SMIL _text file_ in early 2000s, but it's all gone now.
Yet we now have large markets of broadband-connected humans with countless hours spent in front of streaming media (including video conferences) that they cannot annotate, inspect or compose. Then people wonder why they are "exhausted" after hours of Zoom meetings via powerless blackbox client apps.
There's still a tiny bit of standards activity on sync of A/V content with web text, part of the upcoming fusion of epub & the web, aligned with Google's "Web Packaging" that will enable a fully-offline internet with signed content (can of AMP worms).
> so that in future my neural net adapters can optimize old HTML code into new, clean, HTML5 code.
This is exciting work. Apple has a powerful ML/AI chip on recent iPhones, likely to be used for image processing and augmented reality annotation of live video. It would be nice to apply this silicon power to the semantic ambiguity in real-world human use of markup languages.
We need an alternate timeline fork of the security aesthetic of CSS "user" vs "publisher" stylesheets, which at least tried to formalize the inherent social/power/finance conflicts between stakeholders in the web content rendering pipeline. Of course, we've since added identity, device fingerprinting, keystroke timing and countless other minutiae to the arms race. But the fundamental need for separation of powers will never go away.
Many users have powerful silicon on their devices, but today it is rarely employed in defense of "user" stylesheet/reality parsers. The proxy architecture you are developing could be combined with fully-private "user" datastores, of the kind harvested today without consent, but instead customized by the user for their own objectives, with data always in their physical control. With local personalization and ML-powered disambiguation, the unfair playing fields could be tilted a little towards local autonomy.
> But the fundamental need for separation of powers will never go away.
... and I think that this was actually the job of web browser engineers, and they failed to do so. I kind of like where Brave is going to be honest, though I do not think that an optional approach will make a change. We've been there, a lot of times, and nothing will be changed if we don't force the industries to.
Honestly currently the only Browser that is doing the right thing when it comes to privacy policies of third party cookies is WebKit/Safari [1] [2] [3] as Apple has the leverage to enforce it via their iOS market share.
Firefox/Mozilla currently is too concerned about breaking things and Chromium is a bad privacy joke outside of Ungoogled Chromium.
> The proxy architecture you are developing could be combined with fully-private "user" datastores, of the kind harvested today without consent, but instead customized by the user for their own objectives.
Exactly ;) Can't talk about this more (for now as my startup idea has to stay under the radar until Q3 this year) but I think you've figured out what I want to do with this concept.
Thanks for the discussion, looking forward to using your work! Brave on iOS is interesting because it combines underlying Safari browser code with Brave's policy UX (e.g. per-site JS controls).
> (I was also working on project(s) that were using DAISY to automatically convert websites into hearable formats to be consumable by blind people.) Somehow from then (around 2000ish) to now, everything went to shit and nobody cares about that aspect anymore.
Yes, it's tragic that you could seamlessly compose streaming audio, video & text from multiple servers using an SMIL _text file_ in early 2000s, but it's all gone now.
Yet we now have large markets of broadband-connected humans with countless hours spent in front of streaming media (including video conferences) that they cannot annotate, inspect or compose. Then people wonder why they are "exhausted" after hours of Zoom meetings via powerless blackbox client apps.
There's still a tiny bit of standards activity on sync of A/V content with web text, part of the upcoming fusion of epub & the web, aligned with Google's "Web Packaging" that will enable a fully-offline internet with signed content (can of AMP worms).
https://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/Activity https://www.w3.org/community/sync-media-pub/
> so that in future my neural net adapters can optimize old HTML code into new, clean, HTML5 code.
This is exciting work. Apple has a powerful ML/AI chip on recent iPhones, likely to be used for image processing and augmented reality annotation of live video. It would be nice to apply this silicon power to the semantic ambiguity in real-world human use of markup languages.
We need an alternate timeline fork of the security aesthetic of CSS "user" vs "publisher" stylesheets, which at least tried to formalize the inherent social/power/finance conflicts between stakeholders in the web content rendering pipeline. Of course, we've since added identity, device fingerprinting, keystroke timing and countless other minutiae to the arms race. But the fundamental need for separation of powers will never go away.
Many users have powerful silicon on their devices, but today it is rarely employed in defense of "user" stylesheet/reality parsers. The proxy architecture you are developing could be combined with fully-private "user" datastores, of the kind harvested today without consent, but instead customized by the user for their own objectives, with data always in their physical control. With local personalization and ML-powered disambiguation, the unfair playing fields could be tilted a little towards local autonomy.