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The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

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Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Say if I press Cmd+Space on a Mac and type "Facebook" in Spotlight, it immediately begins downloading the native OS X Facebook app That's exactly what Windows 10 does. http://imgur.com/EqvATwL

Does it auto-download? You still have to install it anyway.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are so right. The web as an application delivery platform sucks. And we are no even capable of producing UIs with the same level of polishment I did in visual basic 2.0 in 1996 or so. Alan Kay has expressed the same filling. PS to downvoters if you have not used a proper interface designer such a QT or Delphi, then you don't know what we mean. Please watch some videos to decide if the state of the art (angular an…

The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.

  > My point was that you can't create a proper application 
  > development environment that is both an open and defacto 
  > standard the way the web is.
Why? Is there a technical limitation? Or are you saying that it's technically possible, but that you have no faith that vendors will cooperate and support such a thing?

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't get the point of those settings. You seem to prefer white-on-black text, but the "Only with High Contrast themes" override means that it will almost never apply. 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 onl…

> I don't get the point of those settings. You seem to prefer white-on-black text, but the "Only with High Contrast themes" override means that it will almost never apply.

The idea of defaults is to be default. I don't mind sites specifying the use of particular colours, and it's useful e.g. for syntax highlighting, for text above background images, for transparent images assuming a particular background colour (e.g. pre-rendered LaTeX images, like those on Wikipedia), etc.

The problem is setting either the foreground or the background, but not both.

> 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.

If only that were true. Many sites set either just the foreground colour, assuming the background will be white; or just the background, assuming the foreground will be black. I've emailed many sites about this over the years, ended up opening countless others in a separate browser with different settings, and just rage-quitted many more.

Last week I emailed ticketmaster.es about the black-on-black text in their registration form (amongst many other issues; their service is terrible, I recommend avoiding them if possible)

This is also the reason I stopped using Yahoo Mail back in 2007 when they switched off access to their old Web UI (with no option to use IMAP or POP without paying) http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_6BhjMzysLTs/Rg1mh0pLjMI/AAAAAAAAAA...

I've even tried fixing pages with custom Javascript http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2015-10-01-web_colours.html with mixed success. I also have a key bound to `xcalib -invert -alter` so I can quickly invert my screen colours.

The MFW concludes with the following:

> What I'm saying is that all the problems we have with websites are ones we create ourselves. Websites aren't broken by default, they are functional, high-performing, and accessible. You break them. You son-of-a-bitch.

In their attempts to be "better", BMFW's authors broke it. Sure, it can be argued that light-on-dark default colours are an edge case; that the authors say they were "going to" add a background colour but didn't; etc. and those are all perfectly reasonable arguments. But those are exactly the arguments MFW and BMFW are disagreeing with, only with "light-on-dark default colours" instead of "disabled Javascript" or "out-of-date Android browser" or "retina display", etc.; or with "background colour" instead of "server-side rendering", "error handler", "CDN", etc.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are so right. The web as an application delivery platform sucks. And we are no even capable of producing UIs with the same level of polishment I did in visual basic 2.0 in 1996 or so. Alan Kay has expressed the same filling. PS to downvoters if you have not used a proper interface designer such a QT or Delphi, then you don't know what we mean. Please watch some videos to decide if the state of the art (angular an…

The downvotes are because he is not engaging with my point. Never did I say the web is a proper application development environment. My point was that you can't create a proper application development environment that is both an open and defacto standard the way the web is.

How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said:

"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment."

...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously).

I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an application development environment, any more than a box of legos is a "housing development environment". People have built houses out of legos, but that doesn't make "lego" a building material. It's a big, messy, nasty hack.

The fact that it's "open" is a non-sequitur response to "it's the wrong tool for the job", which is what the OP (and I, and elviejo) are arguing. It's also not a legitimate response to argue that any re-thinking of the model has to come from a company, or otherwise not be "open".

The reason that web apps happened is because web apps started as a hack. That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model.

(Realistically, the reason I'm getting downvoted probably has more to do with my willingness to call out React as a pile of garbage than with the substance of the greater argument. C'est la vie...it's actually pretty amusing to watch the comment fluctuate between -3 and +3...)

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The author even addresses the fact that they didn't set the background on the site. "I would've even made this site's background a nice #EEEEEE if I wasn't so focused on keeping declarations to a lean 7 fucking lines." Also the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed

> The author even addresses the fact that they didn't set the background on the site.

So? JS template engines allow server-side rendering, to address the fact their pages are slow, and unusable without JS. JS libraries have polyfills, to address browsers implementing older JS versions. Drupal allows Varnish, to address how slow its rendering is. SVG graphics libraries have canvas fallbacks to address IE. Video players have MP4 and Webm versions to address fragmented codec support. And so on.

Does these things make the MFW argument wrong or moot? No, because a) they involve extra work to solve problems that wouldn't exist if people just made a motherfucking website, and b) because many devs don't even bother to implement these fixes even when they exist: case in point, BMFW's authors wrote about setting the background but didn't bother actually doing it, so their site is broken.

> Also the whole site is satire which you seemed to have missed

I get that it's "haha only serious", but it's self-defeating. If the premise were "I built a Web-scale Uber-for-toilets with isomorphic React" and the text were unreadable, that would add to the charm. If the premise were "Stop breaking your sites with junk" (which is the message of MFW) and the text were unreadable, that would be unfortunate and a bit ironic. Yet BMFW's premise is "MFW is right, but there's no excuse to leave out these things", and those things break sites. The site itself is a demonstration of why the only point it makes is wrong. It's funny, but in a "laughing at" rather than a "laughing with" kind of way.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#367
post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." 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 expec…

> No it isn't. Not even close. It's maybe the first cross-platform development "environment" of which millenials are widely aware. Name one then instead of this patronizing BS.

Just off the top of my head: Delphi, Smalltalk, Java, Flash, Mono, and many different cross-library thunks like wxWindows, Qt, GTK+, and so on.

Two seconds of googling will find you dozens.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#369

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…

You don't even need to do a complicated extension mechanism.

Users already respond to page load time. There's extensive evidence to support this.

Re: The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install

#370
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with browsers. This is a horrible idea. Browser vendors would then have too much influence on development libraries.

“We absolutely, most certainly, should NOT ship libraries with operating systems.”

And why do you think web development has become the dominant form of development?
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