>Behave Like A Native App
The keyword is "like".
What Web Can Do Today
41–50 of 136 posts
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#42What does the X axis in the "browser support" graphs mean? It seems to go up to 30, and has fractions along the way, both of which suggest it isn't a simple version number. A percentage of something, perhaps? edit: I guess it's market share? but which measurement?
If you hover over the bars, the "Global Market Share" numbers seem to match up so I guess it's that.
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#43[deleted]
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#44I'm very surprised to see this claim that Safari on OS X[1] can't handle Push Notifications, because it's been able to do that for a few years now. It's just not using Service Workers. It uses a separate solution built around the Apple Push Notification service. Granted, this isn't cross-platform and isn't a W3C standard, but it is a capability that can be used today. But of course the whole section on "Push Notifica…
This website is about implementation of W3C standards, from what I grasped.
So it is not surprised that it doesn't claim Safari can handle push notifications. As it cannot.
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the same issue though. Your RSS client is assuming that all cellular connections are metered and all WiFi connections are unmetered, so it intentionally uses less data when you are on a cellular connection.
Which is usually a correct assumption. But it's more than just metered, it's also assuming that my wifi connection is likely to be faster and therefore downloading a bunch of assets in the background will have less of an impact on my available bandwidth.
'usually' you mean in the US?
While I was in the UK I had unlimited data on my mobile but a 100GB limit/month on my landline connection
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
The truth is that web is getting deeper and deeper into identity crisis. And if any platform is further away from having coherent architecture, it is web.
Exactly the same could have been said 15 years ago, and yet I'd argue it is the platform which has advanced the most in terms of both use and technology, and all this in spite of great standardization difficulties that other platforms didn't have to deal with. I expect the same to happen in the future on both desktop and mobile platforms, despite the FUD.
It certainly has advanced the most, but that's a misleading presentation. It has advanced the most technologically only relative to its own starting position, i.e. it spent all this time catching up from blank state to where everyone else already was (and still is).
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#47I'm very surprised to see this claim that Safari on OS X[1] can't handle Push Notifications, because it's been able to do that for a few years now. It's just not using Service Workers. It uses a separate solution built around the Apple Push Notification service. Granted, this isn't cross-platform and isn't a W3C standard, but it is a capability that can be used today. But of course the whole section on "Push Notifica…
This website is about implementation of W3C standards, from what I grasped. So it is not surprised that it doesn't claim Safari can handle push notifications. As it cannot.
No it's not. It's about HTML5 device APIs.
> Can I rely on the Web Platform features to build my app? An overview of the device integration HTML5 APIs
It's just relying on data from caniuse.com about W3C standards, but the page itself does not say anywhere that I can see that it's ignoring non-W3C browser-specific APIs. Which is rather misleading.
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#48What the web is increasingly unable to do today: provide text content without requiring a code execution environment. This site is another example of that.
All non-application websites should provide all their content in semantic HTML at appropriate HTTP endpoints, with CSS styling (in as few requests as possible) as required per the design, and JavaScript (in as few requests as possible) that takes the semantic HTML and makes it interactive (potentially adding and removing elements from the DOM) as required per the design. The CSS should not depend on mutations resulting from the JavaScript, nor should the JavaScript assume anything of the applied styles (as the user agent should be able to easily apply custom user-styles for your site; e.g. Gmail only providing a limited set of styles that are managed server-side is laughable).
Thus, all content is readable and styled properly without requiring an arbitrary code execution environment. That is what the web was meant to be. Unfortunately, most "web developers" have made the web worse over the past 10 years because simple, functional, minimal technology is not impressive, and hipsters love to show off.
Nor does it help that there are few capitalist incentives for the web being open and malleable -- e.g. so users can easily use a different front-end for Facebook, or users can easily choose to avoid analytics or advertisements, or users might prefer to use the website rather than the app (providing access to personal details, contacts, location, tracking, etc).
The state of the web is emergent and I'm not sure what anyone could do about it (perhaps make a better browser?), but it really irks me when web developers pretend like they're actually doing something good or useful, or that the web is actually in a healthy state. In my experience, it's the people who don't talk about web development who are the best web developers; these are the people who don't wince when they write a HTML document without a single ``.
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the same issue though. Your RSS client is assuming that all cellular connections are metered and all WiFi connections are unmetered, so it intentionally uses less data when you are on a cellular connection.
Which is usually a correct assumption. But it's more than just metered, it's also assuming that my wifi connection is likely to be faster and therefore downloading a bunch of assets in the background will have less of an impact on my available bandwidth.
I know enough people who's mobile data is both faster and cheaper than their home broadband that I cannot agree to your statement that this is usually a correct assumption.
Re: What Web Can Do Today
#50More stuff the web can't do that native apps can do:
* Request stuff from arbitrary URLs without a CORS proxy
* Open TCP and UDP sockets
* Be in the play store/app store AS a web app (home screen installation isn't enough; people still search for your thing in the app store, so even if the other problems aren't issues for your app, you still have to wrap your web app in a dummy native framework and upload it if you want users to discover you)
* Scroll like a native app without Safari's stupid rubber band scrolling the entire app at very erratic times
* Barometric sensors
* Background geolocation, background anything really
* launchActivityForResult so you can work with other native goodies
* Intent resolution for native actions
* Geolocation when the user has inadvertently blanket-blocked Geolocation for all of Safari instead of per-webpage. Thankfully Chrome comes pre-approved on Android and you can't accidentally make this mistake as a user
* Face tracking and other OpenCV-based stuff (it's been done, but JS is still not fast enough on mobile to handle these jobs)
* Display long lists of styled content and scroll without stalling
Still though I think touch gestures is really the killer missing feature. There isn't any canonically-supported way to do things like a simple Android ViewPager or pinch-to-zoom. You end up implementing a bunch of spaghetti code to do these things even in the best frameworks (Meteor, Phonegap + Polymer, Angular et al.). And then you find out the way your spaghetti code reacts is a tad different from the way someone else's spaghetti code reacts to the same gestures. This stuff really needs to be standardized on a OS, browser, or at least JS-framework level.