Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Packaging JavaScript games

[Denver Gingerich]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 06:53:27PM +0200, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:
> One of the issue here is finding how to properly package and integrate
> such games in FSDG distributions. A way could be to package the HTML
> page and somehow find a way to properly launch a browser to play the
> game. 
> 
> This needs a bit of research as we'd also need not to interfere with
> users browser usage and games might need special settings to work[3],
> or might need a browser patched to remove privacy protections or with
> different kind of protections.
> 
> [3]For joan-jump, I can run it if I serve the game with a web server
>    but I didn't manage to run it locally yet because iceweasel seems to
>    block external JavaScript, even JavaScript from the filesystem when
>    using local files.
> 
> Another could be to somehow serve the html files and generate a web
> page that points to the all the installed games and expect users to go
> to that web page (http://localhost).

This seems like the only way to do it in my experience.  And quite 
disappointing, as local web development (including for JavaScript programs) has 
become much more difficult due to browsers being hostile to it for the reasons 
you mentioned (i.e. not as an intent of the restrictions on where code is 
loaded from per se, but as a very unfortunate (and unmitigated) side-effect).

As an example, I used to do all my web development on my local filesystem and 
then load it directly from there into my web browser (largely in the 90s).  But 
doing simple tasks that ostensibly don't need any JavaScript at all (such as 
adding a <subtitle/> to a <video/>) don't work on the local filesystem these 
days, for these same external loading restriction reasons, which makes it 
effectively impossible to develop or test websites unless you run a local 
webserver too.

I hope that we can find some resolution to this, perhaps allowing a browser to 
run in a mode where it is only loading trusted code from the filesystem and can 
turn off its external loading restrictions as a result.  But I don't know how 
difficult that would be.

Denver
https://jmp.chat/