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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

#421

Post by jokoon »

detaro wrote: post #184
jokoon wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parsing text can be hardly parallelized. Overall it will increase the price of your phone so it can show that webpage fast enough, which will be a cost of both CPU and battery. I have a shitty bi core smartphone, and it really doesn't like webpages. When you look at the source of a page, there is no justification for all of this, unless you like complexity. I did not want to talk about HTML on smartphones, since it a…

Are you sure that parsing HTML is the step that is the biggest issue for your phone, and not e.g. rendering or JS execution? (It's certainly possible, parsing HTML with bad parsers or pathological content can take surprisingly long, but it's generally the last thing I'd expect as a reason for a browser to be slow)

I linked a computerphile video explaining how HTML ended up as a loose defined language, meaning browsers will often struggle to render something.

I think it's part of the whole thing, HTML is too permissive, and it also will make rendering slower. If HTML was better defined from the ground up, rendering would also be faster. The sites I visited were not really JS intensive. JS is also a problem for webpages.

Anyway I hate HTML/CSS/JS in general for all those reasons. Parsing text is already painful, why do it each time you visit a webpage?

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

#422

Post by sievebrain »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #398
timr wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

If you know C++/Perl/PHP but don't know ES6, websockets, Node, etc, would you not say that your opinion about the web being a bad environment for rich applications might be in some way colored by your personal economic interests? A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things th…

I know C++, used to know Perl, and know JavaScript pretty well. The fact that you actually name WebSockets as a technology sort of sums up the issue we are discussing here. WebSockets is not something that can be compared to C++ or even Node. It's a dumb hack which justifies its existence primarily by allowing web apps to circumvent corporate firewall policies.

The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who have wider experience of different kinds of programmings see some web devs struggling with this concept and conclude, I think quite reasonably, that the only plausible explanation is lack of experience. This is not due to "outdated skills" - I daresay everyone criticising the web as a platform in this thread has, in fact, written web apps. It's the opposite problem. It's to do with developers who haven't got the experience of older technologies having nothing to compare it too, so "web 2.2" gets compared to compared to "web 2.0" and it looks like progress.

And in case you're tempted to dismiss me too, I recently tried to write an app using Polymer. It sucked. The entire experience was godawful from beginning to end. Luckily the app in question didn't have to be a web app, so I started over with a real widget toolkit and got results that were significantly better in half the time.

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

#423

Post by sievebrain »

abiox wrote: post #313
Razengan wrote: post #304

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…

> Android/iOS/OSX/Windows should just work on a better standard mechanism to deliver native apps instead one might imagine that after these competing and incompatible native apps become a headache for crossplatform pursuits, a new platform will emerge that provides a uniform toolset for developing (mostly) native-platform independent applications. perhaps this toolset will utilize a declarative system for specifying…

Android has declarative UI, JIT compiled app logic and a way to link apps together (via intents). It is definitely not the web though.

I think people confuse ideas with implementations. The web is a pretty reasonable implementation of the idea "let's build a hypertext platform". It is not at all a reasonable implementation of the idea "let's build an app platform" which is why in the markets where reasonable distribution platforms exist (mobile) HTML5 got its ass kicked by professionally designed platforms like iOS and Android.

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

#424

Post by sievebrain »

xj9 wrote: post #315
Razengan wrote: post #304

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…

In my opinion, if there is something that the web can't do as well as native it is a bug. Web technologies can already do most of what you are proposing, including notifications. There are some performance issues, but they are well on their way to being fixed.

The problem with the web is not one specific missing feature, or even performance. Man-centuries of effort by browser makers have been able to make performance not-quite-competitive instead of just hopelessly uncompetitive.

The problem with the web is that the developer experience is nightmarish. The fact that native apps don't suffer XSS should be a hint about where to start looking, but it's really just a house of horrors in there.

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

#425

Post by sievebrain »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #314
r1ch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still 84 KB of highly compressed javascript code to parse and execute. Even on a 4.4 GHz CPU core and a cached request, jquery takes upwards of 22ms to parse - that's just parsing - not even executing anything! Now add a bunch of other frameworks and utility scripts and your 100ms budget for feeling "fast" is gone before you even reach the HTML content.

How long does it take you to start Word versus loading Google docs? Has everyone gone insane? The web is absolutely incredible and JavaScript is absolutely killing it as a portable application language. Remember the dark days of flash? Stop complaining.

Um, Word has pretty much always started in a second or two even on computers from the year 2000. You're picking on the wrong app there: Microsoft was notorious for caring about startup time of their Office suite and going to tremendous lengths to improve it.

Meanwhile, how fast Google Docs loads depends entirely on the speed of my internet connection at the time. Good luck even opening it at all if your connection is crappy, flaky, if any of the ISPs between you and Google have congestion issues, or if there's a transient latency problem in one of the dozens of server pools that makes up an app like Docs.

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

#426

Post by TeMPOraL »

bendbro wrote: post #397
TeMPOraL wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're on to something...it could be huge... Heh. Could be. Sad that it isn't. Think how awesome it would be if app developers actually cared about interoperability instead of trying to grab the whole pie for themselves while giving you a hefty dose of ads in return. This is mostly the fault of developers, but the platform itself could help a lot if it was more end-user programmable. You'd have at least a c…

He's being sarcastic. Links are literal web links and the Company he's referring to is Google.

Yes, I know. And I'm trying to subtly point out that it doesn't even work on the web, because it got fucked up by cowboy companies who ignore standards and do whatever they like to get easier $$$.

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

#427

Post by okc »

dasil003 wrote: post #406
timr wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I...have been around long enough to know that will never happen." "That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better..." Whomever wrote the first paragraph of your comment should get in touch with the person who wrote the seco…

The irony is I understand your qualitative opinion of the web, and I generally agree with it. What I believe makes you unable to see my argument is an inability to separate technical excellence from the market dynamics that govern adoption. Declaring the web "not even a development environment" is just absolutist rhetoric that can in no way further the conversation. If you define "development environment" as a tradit…

This is a great discussion. What is it about the English language that makes it so much easier to oppose someone than express nuances in general opinion? I would like to see more discussions like this based at implementation level, surely something valuable and innovative is being grasped at by both sides.

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

#428

Post by Razengan »

dasil003 wrote: post #385
timr wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appl…

> That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. Here's the crux of our disagreement. You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I (despite your presumptuous implication that I'm a millenial), have been around long enough to know that wil…

> It will come from something unexpected that solves a different problem, but in a much simpler and more elegant way, and over time it will be the thin edge of the wedge where it evolves and develops into a web killer.

So.. app stores?

It has already begun. The most popular webapps (Facebook, Twitter etc.) already have native clients in Android and iOS. I believe the majority of people already prefer and use the native FB/Twitter apps more often than accessing the FB/Twitter websites. So it's already obvious that native apps must be more convenient.

Right now however, app stores are a little clumsier to navigate compared to browsers.

For webapps:

• you have to open the browser,

• type in the address OR

• use a web search if you don't know the exact address.

But for apps:

• you have to open the app store,

• search for the app,

• potentially filter through unofficial third-party software,

• download the app, possibly after entering your credentials,

• navigate to the app icon,

• authorize any security permissions on startup (in the case of Android or badly-designed iOS apps.)

We just need the Big Three (Apple/Google/Microsoft) to actively acknowledge that app stores can supplant the-web-as-application-platform, and remove some of those hurdles.

Ideally an app store would be akin to searching for a website on Google.com (or duckduckgo.com) with a maximum of one extra click or tap between you and the app.

Apps should also be incrementally downloadable so they're immediately available for use just like a website, and Apple already has begun taking steps toward that with App Thinning.

Ultimately there's no reason why the OS and native apps shouldn't behave just like a web browser, because if web browsers keep advancing and evolving they WILL eventually become the OS, and the end result will be the same to what I'm suggesting anyway.

Currently though, both the native OS side and the web side exist in a state of neither-here-nor-there, considering how most people actually use their devices.

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

#429

Post by TeMPOraL »

Dr_tldr wrote: post #402
TeMPOraL wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the middle of reading through The Unix-Haters Handbook and I must say that the arguments against web-as-application-platform (and the attempts to defend it) and are eerily similar to what this book reports about arguments against Unix that were circulated in the 80s and early 90s. Sadly, the fact Unix managed to a) win, and b) fuck up the computing world so badly that people don't even realize how much we've l…

Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp communi…

> Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion.

This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you'd probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There's a reason the "year of Linux on Desktop" never happened and is always one year from now.

The point of The Unix-Haters Handbook, which also applies very much to modern web is that the so-called "advancement" didn't really bring anything new. It reinvented old things - things we knew how to do right - but in a broken way, full of half-assed hacks that got fossilized because everything else depends on it.

> And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language.

I don't know where you're getting that from, but it's probably a good opportunity to remind you that JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme twice, both time it didn't happen because Netscape wanted a Java-looking solution right fucking now to compete first with Java, and then with Microsoft, and somehow no-one thought to pause for the moment and maybe do it right.

(Also don't blame Lisp community for the fact that companies reinvented half of Lisp in XML. Rather ask yourself why most programmers think the history of programming is a linear progression of power from Assembler and C, and why they remain ignorant of anything that happened before ~1985.)

JavaScript got a bad rep because a) it was terribly broken (less so now), and b) because of all the stupid stuff people were writing in it those 15 years ago. But the current problems of the Web are not really the fault of JavaScript, but of the community moving forward at the speed of typing, without stopping for a second and thinking if those layers on layers on layers of complexity are actually needed or useful. Simple landing pages are now built on frameworks that are more complex than what we used to call "Enterprise Edition" 10 years ago.

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