
Could “View Source” Ever Vanish from the Browser? - ideonexus
I&#x27;ve been working on a session to teach kids a little bit of &quot;hacking,&quot; and it involves introducing them to the &quot;inspect element&quot; feature of the browser and letting them edit the contents of a web page. The thought is that, by letting them play with the HTML and code of their favorite websites, they can learn a little bit about how it all comes together. But a haunting thought came to me: what if websites started closing off their code and making it proprietary, shutting people out from that layer of understanding. Could this ever happen, or am I being paranoid?
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datalist
Yes, it could and there is a good chance it eventually will.

Not because it would be actually possible to hide it but because code has/will
become so complex that it wouldnt really make sense anymore. Take, for
example, sites like Facebook or Gmail: even the developers tools barely help
understanding them, let alone the raw "view source".

This (human understanding) will not get better with an intermediate language
like WebAssembly (which should not be considered an obstacle though). And this
does not take into account a possibly even more drastic change in technology
and the web (or whatever the web would be called then).

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detritus
How would they do that? By which I mean, "What technologies would they use to
accomplish it and what would their rationale for doing so be?"

It's already been possible to 'hide source' for years on the web, either in
the form of compiled swfs for Flash files or, these days runtime code or
output spat from server side complexity.

Without a fundamental re-write or philosophical change on the internet though,
there's little to fear that 'the majority' of sites would go this route in any
imaginable near to mid-term future.

Conversely, anyone paranoid or arrogant enough to do so could do, shooting
themselves in the foot a little, now.

Your main concern should be, i'd've thought, messy and compacted code that
uses a mashup of irrelevant and bloated frameworks, because that way lies bad
habits and obfuscated education...

HTML as is though? i'd not concern myself.

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_RPM
"runtime" code still has to be downloaded

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jfoster
It's already gone from the majority of browser market share; mobile browsers.

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datalist
Well, mobile browsers are generally very restricted in many ways. Nobody would
realistically use a mobile device (in their current incarnations at least) for
debugging or any sort of development, despite what many people try to convince
us of (the decline of regular computing environment and the sole ascend of
those touch thingies :) )

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jfoster
That depends.

In the developing world, mobile as the regular computing environment is a fact
of life.

For most of the big tech companies (Facebook, Uber, Google's search arm, etc.)
mobile is probably where they encounter their users the most.

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datalist
I am talking about development, not use (which on mobile is still mostly
passive). I edited my previous posting to make that clear.

