331–340 of 467 posts
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I think you are looking at the past through incredibly rose-tinted glasses. The web has been a mess for a long time, and we used to have to make sure our computer was set to 800x600 and we were using Internet Explorer 6 in order to even use it.
That was 1997, not 2007.
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…
When Lars Bak and Kasper Lund launched Dart [2], I found it sad that they weren't more bold - left CSS and the DOM alone, and created an alternative Content-Type. So you can choose to Accept 'application/magic-bytecode' [3] before text/html, if your client supports so. Sadly, we ended up with Web Assembly, which by the few talks I've seen, appears to only cater to that of graphic/game developers, with no support for dynamic or OO languages.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc [2] https://www.dartlang.org [3] Or in Dart lingo, a VM snapshot.
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I would say that a possible solution is also to better rank websites that mention the checksums of their external resources and make web browsers keep them in cache much longer... if pretty much every website uses jQuery, perhaps we should ship jQuery with the web browser?
I hear this argument a lot, and I very much disagree. Now you have browser vendors having to device which libraries are "popular" and shipping them in the initial download of the browser. It turns out that this technology already exists in a much better form. It's called cache. The problem is that almost everyone hosts their own version of jQuery. If everyone simply linked the "canonical" version of jQuery (the CDN l…
There's no reason to hit the webserver with an If-modified when the libraries already include their version in the path.
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I'm a fan of white-on-black too, but whatever setting/addon you are using to acheive that effect seems to be very broken. It's unfair to blame BMFW for a problem created by, and unique to, your specific configuration.
The setting isn't broken. It's not an add-on. It's BMFW's fault, and it's fair to blame it for this. BMFW sets a foreground color, and does not set a background color. Here are the settings in stock Firefox. http://imgur.com/h4SmKYs
I tried setting this in my Firefox and visited a bunch of sites. None of them showed me white text on black background, because almost every site sets both background and foreground color styles, which override the preference setting. In fact the only site that was affected was the BMFW.
So what is the point of that setting? If you actually prefer white on black, set it to "Always" and you'll always get it--even on the BMFW.
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…
When it comes down to it, for so long many front-end guys only cared about how it looked, and backend guys didn't care at all, because it's just the ui, not the real code.
We're finally at a point where real front end development is starting to matter. I honestly haven't seen this much before about 3-5 years ago... which coincides with node and npm taking over a lot of mindshare. There's still a lot of bad, but as the graph show, there's room to make it better.
I'm skeptical that developers talking to each other about how bad web bloat is will change anything. They will still face the same incentives in terms of ad revenue, costs of optimization, etc. Here's a random idea that might have more potential: create an adblocker browser plugin that also colors URLs based on how slow they are expected to load, e.g., smoothly from blue to red. The scores could be centrally calculat…
It's often suggested that we'll solve poverty by providing education and given the internet provides a unique opportunity to learn then surely we benefit as a species by ensuring there isn't a rich web and a poor web? This risk is compounded by rich people being in a better position to create better learning opportunities.
Much like there's a drive toward being aware of the accessibility of your website (colour blind-check tools, facebooks image analysis for alt text tags, etc, etc) we should be thinking about delivery into slower networks in poorer countries.
The Doom install image was 35x the size of the Apollo guidance computer. Thirty-five times! Apollo software got us to the moon. Doom wasted millions of man-hours on a video game. My point of course is that these comparisons are not actually that illuminating. Are web pages much heavier than they need to be? Yes. This presentation very capably talks about that problem: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm Do…
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I think a more radical departure is needed. It's about time to acknowledge that the web is increasingly being used to access full-blown applications more often than "webpages." Web browsers have more or less become mini operating systems, running elaborate virtual machines. There's way too much complexity for everyone involved — from web devs and browser devs to the users and the people who maintain the standards, th…
I disagree. This is a backward-looking argument which ignores the unique benefits of the web which made it inevitable that it would evolve into an application platform, regardless of how tortured the results may feel. The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment. It is not controlled by a single vendor, and anyone implementing a new computing device must support the web (just stop for a second an…
No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. But it's only an "environment" in the most ecological sense -- it's a collection of ugly hacks, each building upon the other, with the sort of complexity and incomprehensibility and interdependency of organisms you'd expect to find in a dung heap.
"Last but not least, the web's primitive is a simple page, which is far more useful than an app as a primitive"
For whom, exactly? You're just begging the question.
I'll grant you that "installing" an app is more burdensome for users than browsing to a web page, but the amount of developer time spent (badly) shoe-horning UI development problems (that we solved in the 90s) into the "page" metaphor is mind-boggling. In retrospect, the Java applet approach seems like a missed opportunity.
The proper reaction to something like React, for example, should be shame, not pride. We've finally managed to kludge together something vaguely resembling the UI development platform we had in windows 3, but with less consistency, greater resource consumption, and at the expense of everything that made the web good in the first place. And for what reason? It's not as if these "pages" work as webpages anymore.
A proper "application development environment" for the web would be something that discards the page model entirely, and replaces it with a set of open components that resembles what we've had for decades in the world of desktop application development.