I have a smartTV that can play YouTube and a national provided on demand tv media service. Can I get through the TV's internet browser and all the new fangled flashy webpages to actually do what the site is there to do, no.
What this older smart TV needs is a website that, given a URL of the flashy site, returns an abstracted older html page that the TV's browser can freely surf and peruse at it's ram and programming capability.
I understand this opens security issues but there must a trade off of where maximum and moderate security resources are placed versus what is trying to be secured.
The makers of equipment could patch or update software but sometimes it is down to hardware and is not easy to update even if the money and energy is there to do it. The OS could also could be hacked but makers mostly don't want to give out proprietorial workings that make smooth and useful changes.
An abstracted html portal would also be very good for people whom want to just read with minimal disturbances but mainly it would open up use for a whole range of so called obsolete technology that has only burnt a fraction of its life.
In theory, if there a way in <script>....</script> any thing is possible.-- wjt, Apr 23 2020 So, this portal would be a web service sitting between a smart server and a dumb client?
OK, on the one hand, it would not be hard to write some code to take any page of html 5 and return a page of html 1. The hard part would be to return *useful* pages of html 1. A lot of the pages, having been dumbed down, would be dumb.
It might be an interesting AI exercise to make the portal "see what the html 5 site was trying to achieve", and somehow render *that* into html 1. That's "Interesting" in the sense of "quite difficult". You might achieve a useful success rate if you narrowed down your use cases, so you could make more assumptions.-- pertinax, Apr 23 2020 It would best be done by a local Linux server. Server takes page request from client, pulls down page from remote server, absorbs and inwardly digests, spits out a crunched version to the local client.
Sounds a bit like googleweblite, a pernicious and disagreeable innovation.
It's non-trivial. However, far from impractical. Whether the work would justify the result is doubtful but it could be a useful user-supported project.
Why not draft an RFC ?-- 8th of 7, Apr 23 2020 Yahoo Portal was awesome back in the day. You had briefcase too. You could check your stocks. You had weather forecast. You had your emails. Every thing you needed was on one page.-- chronological, Apr 24 2020 Yes, but here you need something where the local host interface is fixed, limted and under your control, so that whenever the remote site changes, and no matter how radcally, your local client is always presented with the same simplified version.-- 8th of 7, Apr 24 2020 I was imagining the frames and html5 gubbins just being converted to links and descriptions, with a bit of scripting to process upgraded logins via service. It would be down to user to understand and traverse the links sensibly. The service might provide some dead end error pages.
The smart TV can play YouTube so I assume that it's just getting the right streaming file clicked from the simple browser.Though I see now it all rests on the simple browser's code interfacing to the TV's file play lower level software and hardware.
The whole idea is rubbished if the simple browser's code can't action the streaming link in the contemporary way. t would be a bit of a step up to have the translating server convert the streaming file on the fly.
Though, there is still the case for simplicity and a less busied document which a lower html might provide. The halfbakery looks good on the TV by the way. Good for reading , bad for even my style of typing.-- wjt, Apr 24 2020 random, halfbakery