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Time to rebuild the web?

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Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#31

Post by dkns »

I'm not buying it. Web development complexity grows but so does desktop software, kernel development, etc.

You used to be able to have a small program written in BASIC or whatever that would give you a simple popup alert on desktop. Now you need to worry about backwards compatibility, different OSes, etc. But guess what? You can still write simple programs, without all the complex stuff, if you want to. The exact same thing applies for web. You can bundle megabytes of javascript, for some fancy stuff, or you can have simple static index.html with just text.

"The web was never supposed to be a few walled gardens of concentrated content owned by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a few other major publishers. It was supposed to be a cacophony of different sites and voices."

It still is. Facebook, YT and Twitter are simply more known than your local pet owners forum but that doesn't mean the pet owner forum doesn't exists. It's similar to supermarket chains and your local grocery store. Both still exist.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#32

Post by goatlover »

harperlee wrote: post #21
goatlover wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. Meh, Office and Adobe products still have widespread use, as do various code editors and related tools, along with specialized applications like SPSS or Matlab. Also, things like Slack are desktop, even though they utilize web technologies. And there remain plenty of PC games which still get made. Some things you don't want to run in a browser.

Isn't it office already a "local webapp", under the hood? You can open any document in-browser through SharePoint server, have (almost?) full functionality, all documents are XML... There are lots of little signs that Microsoft is rewriting everything to be seamlessly used through a browser, and that when you open it locally you just don't notice that you are using an "office browser". Even Visual Studio has also web…

You still download and install Office 365 as applications and run them independent of a web browser and can do so without an internet connection. They also have their own updater. Yes, you can run them on the web from the Office 365 portal, but that's the html version.

The installed version is still fundamentally a desktop platform. I'm pretty sure it's written C# or C++ and runs on dotnet.

An SPA is a web page run in the browser over http(s). Anything else is desktop, server, or mobile app, regardless of what tech it's made from.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#33

Post by fimdomeio »

I've been toying with the idea of creating a web 0.5 that consists mostly of a meta tag and a piece of css (body:after{...}) that hides the contents while directing users to use a textmode only browser. Rules would be page is valid if it doesn't contain css or js. I think this could be an incredible fun experiment somewhat in the same style as the tilde club. If it became popular enough who knows... maybe the community could even create some sort of web rings :O

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#34

Post by nailer »

jacquesm wrote: post #28
nailer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point I was making was that web pages in terms of HTML aren't more complex than they were in the past. An HTML page now often has a smaller amount of elements and element attributes than the equivalent page created using older tech because every element doesn't have styling hacks and behavior added to them. HTML (stuff like GAE or BEM aside) is purer than ever.

Unfortunately removing the 'styling hacks and behavior' has split the pages up into many different components that all interact in quite complex ways. The HTML being 'purer' has not made things simpler at all. Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified. And that can obscure intent quite quickly. As opposed to this is bold text which any fool (this one included) coul…

> Now there are many places rather than just a few where style and functionality can be modified.

Styling is done in style sheets, functionality is done in JavaScript (with the exceptions already mentioned). Trying to create, say Hotmail in 2018 would result in a much better to understand and debug app than the 1998 version was.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#35

Post by naranha »

adrianN wrote: post #26
naranha wrote: post #5

SPAs have made almost all desktop applications obsolete. DevTools have deprecated view source. Through progress and innovation the web can do a lot more than 20 years ago. Sure the web is being abused for tracking by Google and Facebook but that was also possible 20 years ago with a single img-tag.

I can't think of a single desktop application that has been made obsolete by a SPA.

IDEs -> vscode

thunderbird ->Gmail

Ms office > gdocs

Msn messenger -> Hangouts

Etc.

At least for most (non professional) users

Edit: and often you are better off using webapps because they are sandboxed.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#36

Post by majewsky »

fimdomeio wrote: post #33

I've been toying with the idea of creating a web 0.5 that consists mostly of a meta tag and a piece of css (body:after{...}) that hides the contents while directing users to use a textmode only browser. Rules would be page is valid if it doesn't contain css or js. I think this could be an incredible fun experiment somewhat in the same style as the tilde club. If it became popular enough who knows... maybe the communi…

> Rules would be page is valid if it doesn't contain no css and no js.

I believe the double negation is wrong there. You probably mean either "if it doesn't contain any css or js" or "if it contains no css and no js".

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#37

Post by lioeters »

fimdomeio wrote: post #33

I've been toying with the idea of creating a web 0.5 that consists mostly of a meta tag and a piece of css (body:after{...}) that hides the contents while directing users to use a textmode only browser. Rules would be page is valid if it doesn't contain css or js. I think this could be an incredible fun experiment somewhat in the same style as the tilde club. If it became popular enough who knows... maybe the communi…

I like the idea of a text-only browser, back to the basics. Oh and I miss web rings!

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#38

Post by quantumwoke »

bhaak wrote: post #24
quantumwoke wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jsonfeed is a much simpler and more hackable protocol than RSS. It's much easier to build scalable and sustainable aggregators that filter fake news in jsonfeed without the cognitive overhead of RSS. Without hackable tools we end up with the walled gardens of Facebook and Google Reader.

You sound like a buzzword machine. A simple RSS feed can easily be hand written. But of course, you don't do that because there are so many mature tools to create or manipulate an XML feed already. Whereas with jsonfeed there is not much yet because it is so new. If you can hack JSON, you can hack XML as well. Even programmer novices can do this. Edit: Reworded the last sentence that could be interpreted as a persona…

Please be civil :). Avoiding ad hominem attacks is more conducive to discussion.

I have already justified my preference for jsonfeed. XML has proved many times to decrease developer productivity. To my knowledge open source projects that have dropped or diminished their use of XML have only become more popular over time. Extrapolating a little bit, switching to JSON can only be a good thing.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#39

Post by sarreph »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #30

When I ask friends and family who use Facebook daily, privacy and security never come up as pain points. Media is blowing everything out of proportion. Replacing Facebook with RSS or Feedly is nonsense. My friends and family have no idea what those are. Facebook makes it easy for people to connect with old friends and family members through active human interactions: like this, follow her, read that. By doing so you…

Not only do (our) family and friends have no idea what Feedly is, most of them would have no idea where to start with the websites / content providers they’d want to add to their feeds.

This is clearly a huge appeal of social media sites, as they act as content aggregators that do the ‘dirty work’ (oftentimes very poorly) in getting relevant content to chosen eyeballs.

As much as I want there to be a reversion to more ‘vanilla’ content consumption, I’m completely in agreement with your refutation that Feedly would indeed be a nonesense bet to make on where we should be headed.

Re: Time to rebuild the web?

#40

Post by ekidd »

quantumwoke wrote: post #16
bhaak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes no sense. RSS and jsonfeed are just containers. Both may contain real or fake news. Everybody can put up a feed in RSS or jsonfeed without any trouble.

jsonfeed is a much simpler and more hackable protocol than RSS. It's much easier to build scalable and sustainable aggregators that filter fake news in jsonfeed without the cognitive overhead of RSS. Without hackable tools we end up with the walled gardens of Facebook and Google Reader.

I've written a couple of RSS aggregators. The main problem with RSS is that everybody thinks it's too complex, so they create a new syndication format, thus adding to the complexity.

RSS 0.9x was really simple, just XML and a half-dozen tags. But RDF was the new hotness, so RSS 1.0 was born, built around RDF and the Semantic Web. Then Dave Winer got annoyed at the complexity, and published a slightly cleaned-up up 0.9x as 2.0. Then a bunch of other people decided that this was a mess, and so they created a new XML format called Atom, which is only slightly more complex than 0.9x/2.0. (I'm leaving out some ancient politics and oversimplifying.)

When I was an author of feed readers, the only one of these formats that ever annoyed me was RSS 1.0, because RDF requires much more than a simple XML parser. Oh, and maybe 25% of webmasters are totally incapable of generating valid XML, so you needed to tell your XML parser to use a dodgy "recovery mode".

In practice, this has very little "cognitive overhead", because you just hand a URL to a library and it figures out what parser to run.

But as usual, it looks like people are frustrated with RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/etc., and think that the solution is to create yet another format that does the exact same thing. I'm sure somebody out there is writing a "robust jsonfeed" parser that can handle badly-mangled invalid JSON.

In 4 years, people will be saying, "The whole RSS 0.9x/RSS 1.0/RSS 2.0/Atom/jsonfeed mess is terrible, and we need to create a simple new syndication format based on _____!"

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