How would:

  hacker@gibson:~$ htmcmp ./myPage.html
  myPage.bhtml generated successfully. 
  hacker@gibson:~$ htmdmp ./myPage.bhtml
  myPage.html dumped successfully.

Hinder an open web? Maybe I am wrong, but my gut tells be this argument comes from developers who are not used to working with compiled languages.

I think it would help new devs, can you imagine how nice it would be to have a handy HTML validator like this compiler would be? And how good for the web it would be to force everyone to use it? I can't imagine learning C without the feed back of a compiler and that was what I hated most about learning javascript and HTML.

If you really hate the idea of having to run this compiler, it could be automatically run by apache, IIS, nginx, etc when serving your page for the first time. This is all hypothetical of course since such a standard does not exist.

I think what jakejake is getting at is that right now, anyone can pull up a page in their browser, click 'View Source' and see exactly how to express that page in a human-readable format. This is also true to a large extent (via various free development tools--some even baked into various browsers) for JavaScript and CSS.

What's interesting is that what you describe: >this compiler, it could be automatically run by apache, IIS, nginx, etc ...essentially already occurs in many cases in the form of compression such as gzip. These files are also automatically extracted by the browser and are essentially as transparent as non-compressed ones.

So I think you both have a point: I agree with jakejake that the web must remain transparent. I agree with you that as long as sufficient tooling is freely available, it doesn't matter how the underlying protocol works. I.e., a binary representation of the page is still fairly transparent if there are plentiful tools that will deserialize it into a page object that can be expanded/perused/manipulated and then re-serialized when e.g., Ctrl+s is hit.

What would be bad is if 'View Source' showed something like: 01010100011010000110100101110011001000000110100101110011001000 00011011110111000001100001011100010111010101100101 etc. ...and you needed to spend umpteen hundreds to get a decompilation tool that only gave you an obfuscated/inexact reproduction of the recipe for the page.

Given IE, Safari, Firebug and Chrome all support ADDITIONAL developer tools, how likely do you think it is that you'll be stuck with raw binary when the browser has to decode this to the same internal representation used for HTML today?

Nothing will change on the front-end, just the servers will get faster and new bugs will be introduced. :)

Meta: Is it too late for you to edit your post to break up your string of digits or put it in a code block (prefix with two spaces, surrounded by blank lines)? It's forcing the whole comment page to have a horizontal scrollbar.

Yes: it's annoying enough for me to decide not to bother with the comments on this story.

Sorry, I'm willing but appear to be unable at this point.

Because the web took off cause non-developers, prot-developers were able to easily create pages, look at html/css/js and become developers. It seems trivial to you but having a compile step complicates things to beyond the reach of many.

Plain text is more open and accessible than binary, full stop.

I remember. There were an awful lot of people who learned from, "How did that work? Let's view source!"

Once pages become big and complex, this learning strategy becomes much harder. But in the early days of the web it was utterly essential.

You will still need and use plain text. File:// isn't powered by HTTP ;-)

You could have embedded the compiler right in the browser. If you would open a html page it could have been automatically compiled and vice versa.

Not that it really matters, but since I'm the one who brought it up and your gut was telling you that I'm not likely familiar with compiled languages - I started programming in Pascal and Assembly in the 80's, moved onto Java and C# and lately I spend a lot of my time writing Objective C code.

It'll be no skin off my nose if the web turns into a compiled protocol. I don't know if it's even necessary to continue with plain text web sites these days. But, it most certainly was a major deal initially for me to just "view source" and see that it wasn't a black box of voodoo. The low barrier to entry is one of the major reasons the web took off.

I'll admit I'm an old timer in this business, probably ready to be taken out back and shot! So I have no idea if you youngsters were similarly inspired by viewing the source code on a web site? Maybe with all of the complex client side code and minimized scripts that it isn't even relevant anymore? It probably just looks like gobbledygook to a non-programmer these days.

> from developers who are not used to working with compiled languages.

I am used to working with compiled languages, 9 million lines of C++ on a embeded costum hardware.

Now I know of course that it would not be that bad but still, I dont want to compile more stuff, I want to compile less stuff. I'll let the VM do the compilling for me.

In the grand sheme of thing these discussions hardly matter, its just a 'cool' topic to fight about. Neither with HTML or HTTP size is a big issue, almost never the bottleneck.