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What Web Can Do Today

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Re: What Web Can Do Today

#81

Post by bobajeff »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #46
placebo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The web does things those other platforms don't. Like run unsigned applications from any server ephemerally on any machine or system.

It's not playing catch up so much as adding powerful features without sacrificing it's core attributes.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

jacquesm wrote: post #80
bad_user wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about " progressive enhancement ". It's a romantic idea, but it never happened, probably because it's too hard and the cost is not justified given most users run with their browser's default settings. The precursor of the web made by Tim Berners-Lee dates back to 1980, but it was not based on HTML or HTTP. These happened later in 1990 and early 1991. But then CSS happened in 1994. And Javascript happen…

CSS happened in 1996, the first couple of years of the web we had no CSS, all styling was done with inline attributes up to that point. The frustrating bit is that CSS was supposed to separate content/structure and markup, but now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact. This really overshot the mark.

Also note tat the separation of content and structure is mostly nonexistent as it's currently practiced. People like to talk about it as a Golden Rule, a holy virtue, and then proceed to write even worse code than they did with tables. Generally, if you find yourself writing a tangled mess of divs in order to support CSS tricks, you're not really separating content from the structure. HTML5 semantic tags helped a little, but I still rarely see them used live.

(I'm not really convinced that separation of form and content is a feasible goal anyway - some elements of form are also content at the same time - but it's still a good goal to have.)

> now we have pages without content but with markup where the content is loaded after the fact

This is absolutely ridiculous and it, combined with the idea of routing everything through the cloud in IoT / home automation applications, makes me wonder what happened to some good old-fashioned engineering sanity. It's like people are trying to create wasteful and insecure systems on purpose. ("And what would that purpose be," - the cynic in me asks - "maybe monetizing people's data?").

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#84

Post by bzbarsky »

laughinghan wrote: post #59
deathanatos wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that native apps > web apps isn't true, but… > * Request stuff from arbitrary URLs without a CORS proxy CORS isn't a proxy; it's a browser policy/algorithm that allows a site the opportunity to say "yes (or no), other websites may (or may not) make AJAX requests here". The native app (unless you've informed it somehow, or it has done something malicious) doesn't have the user's cookies, whereas the bro…

I think the parent knows exactly what CORS is and you're misunderstanding. There's no fundamental reason browsers can't be configured to not send the user's cookies when making XHR requests, and in fact there's already a mechanism for a webpage to ask certain kinds of CORS requests to be "anonymous": The "anonymous" keyword means that there will be no exchange of user credentials via cookies, client-side SSL certific…

What you characterize as an "arbitrary technical limitation" is there for a good reason, unfortunately: even anonymous requests made by the _browser_ are not equivalent to anonymous requests made by the _server_ the web page came from.

That's because the browser and the server have different routing tables. Or to put is more simply, the browser can see the stuff on your LAN, behind your firewall, while the server can't. The point of CORS even for anonymous requests is to prevent web pages from being able to exfiltrate stuff out from behind firewalls, so you don't have random data leaks just because someone in an organization visited some random website. (Yes, you also need them to not download and run random binaries, not have any unpatched exploits in their browser and OS, etc... security is hard.)

Now obviously native apps _can_ exfiltrate stuff out from behind firewalls. Which means that if you really care about your LAN's security you have to assume or enforce that none of the phones connecting to it have any sketchy apps installed...

Note that there is in fact discussion about having a concept of "installing" a web app that you trust sufficiently, which would relax the browser security sandbox such that you get more of the capabilities you're talking about here.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#85

Post by ryandrake »

majika wrote: post #48

What 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…

What we need is a new protocol: something that lets an author write and publish text documents, marked up with basic styling, with "hyperlinks" to other text documents. The protocol could allow embedding of simple inline figures as well. Users would run a "browser" whose function was limited to requesting and displaying these documents.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#86

Post by qu4z-2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #85
majika wrote: post #48

What 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…

What we need is a new protocol: something that lets an author write and publish text documents, marked up with basic styling, with "hyperlinks" to other text documents. The protocol could allow embedding of simple inline figures as well. Users would run a "browser" whose function was limited to requesting and displaying these documents.

You mean like AMP?

https://www.ampproject.org/

And yes, it's pretty silly that this is a thing.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#87

Post by [deleted] »

bobajeff wrote: post #81
vezzy-fnord wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The web does things those other platforms don't. Like run unsigned applications from any server ephemerally on any machine or system. It's not playing catch up so much as adding powerful features without sacrificing it's core attributes.

[deleted]

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#88

Post by username223 »

majika wrote: post #48

What 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…

> ... web developers pretend like they're actually doing something good or useful...

Many "Web developers" are to "the web" as rapists are to sexual reproduction. They achieve short-term gratification and (perhaps unintentionally) pass their traits on to the next generation, but they couldn't care less about the longer-term consequences of their actions.

The web started as "clickable citations." Now it's mostly hostile surveillance with cat pics.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#89

Post by savanaly »

BurningFrog wrote: post #63
majika wrote: post #48

What 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…

Strong opinions on how things should be, but no arguments for why. That is never going to convince me.

It's because his post is entirely opinion, albeit one that frequently shows up at the top of HN comments sections because it's such a popular opinion in the hacker community that we forget it's not actually the majority's opinion.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#90

Post by hugozap »

mei0Iesh wrote: post #62
majika wrote: post #48

What 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…

It's the Flashification of the web. People who wanted to show off, or code web apps, used to use Macromedia Flash. People complained about it, in part because sometimes if you accessed a site without the Flash plugin you'd see a blank page. But Flash was great in many ways, and it was self-contained in objects, so websites were mostly still websites. JavaScript had been around for a long time, but there was still a c…

> we'll not lose the text-linking place we've grown accustomed to.

It's just a minority of users who are accustomed to the old web.

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