I still don't understand all this React tuttiness
HTML is the Web
31–40 of 341 posts
Re: HTML is the Web
#32Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…
> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police".
Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly preferred good old HTML and eventually CSS and JS.
There's a lot of value in having constraints, especially when those constraints (HTML) are specifically designed for displaying documents.
Re: HTML is the Web
#33So, frontend tooling is freeing developers from mundane tasks and cognitive overhead at the cost of not strictly following standards and recommendations. The tooling could be improved to more closely follow standards, but maybe those standards ought not be followed? Maybe the standards need to evolve with real world use. DIV has broader applications than what a committee envisioned. Sites are running, business is accomplished, goals are met while not strictly adhering to antequated standards.
If I make a tool with an intended use but the world uses it in another unanticipated way, and they're happy about doing so, then that is a very fortunate accident. I then shape the next iteration of my tool around real world use.
Re: HTML is the Web
#34A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…
> Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything
... yes ? the name of this "tree of nodes" is not "Document object model" for nothing.
Re: HTML is the Web
#35A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…
> Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything ... yes ? the name of this "tree of nodes" is not "Document object model" for nothing.
I know. The problem with that name is people seem to stop reading after "Document".
Re: HTML is the Web
#36Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…
> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly prefer…
Flash had several problems that should have been addressed differently. Among others:
- it was owned and controlled by a single company and thus a target for other companies instead of other companies helping to improve it
- that single company was unable or unwilling to fix security holes in the sandbox and browser makers eventually got fed up with that
- while there were some ways to interact with the underlying browser environment, ultimately a Flash instance lived in its own little bubble, creating usability problems
Putting the HTML+CSS layout engine into a separate module doesn't mean that it wouldn't remain the standard way of doing document-layouts on the web, it would just mean that higher-level solutions wouldn't need to use hacks and workarounds to map their concepts to HTML+CSS (same way as Javascript had to be used as a less-than-perfect compile target before WASM because it was the only option to run code in a browser).
Re: HTML is the Web
#37I don't need to know HTMl to become a Frontend Engineer. It's the same like, i don't need to know Assembler to be a C programmer. HTML is the compiled format which browser could understand and run, it's not for human to produce/read it. We need more powerful tooling/language/framework/library just like what we see in React, Vue,...
That’s a very narrow view. Machine code is ran in one context – the CPU – with the compiler worrying about this one context. Meanwhile, HTML is parsed by much more than a browser. Like the article says, there is literally zero drawback to being slightly more semantic. In fact, semantic HTML probably improves your own code, making it easier at a glance to see what components do.
> Meanwhile, HTML is parsed by much more than a browser.
Any examples?
Re: HTML is the Web
#38The biggest takeaway is that HTML was originally designed to degrade gracefully. If your browser didn't support the intended graphical layout, it would still be able to extract the hierarchy and display a usable web page, even if you were using pure text (e.g. lynx). This kept the web accessible no matter what you were using.
These days, none of that occurs. Just try switching off Javascript (I use NoScript heavily to avoid invasive ad trackers). 75% of web pages don't load at all. Others completely mangle their layouts into an unnavigable mess. Only a very small subset of pages are readable. And these are just landing pages - pages that should welcome one and all to the site. Most of the time, unless I'm looking for something specific on the site, if it loads a blank or mangled page, I just move on. If everything's a dynamically-arranged , the browser has no hope of making sense of it.
You can lead a horse to water, sure...
Re: HTML is the Web
#39A Web page is a document. No it's not. It never was. Even a long time ago when websites were static things rendered by the browser once and then left alone there was always a tree of nodes underlying everything. The only thing that's changed in the past three decades is that now when we make websites and web apps we often ship a little JS application that lets the user modify the underlying tree. That's what the web…
> Users demanded interactivity
(Citation needed.)
Developers love interactivity. Users despise it but put up with it because there's not much choice.
Does anybody think the Web is a better experience now than it was 15 years ago? Honestly?
Re: HTML is the Web
#40Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…
> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly prefer…
The case against Flash was, I think, not so much about what it was, but everything around it.
- It wasn't visually scalable. (Today we say "responsive", mostly, but that's too easy to confuse.)
- It didn't integrate with HTML and CSS in any interesting way other than sitting there in the middle.
- Performance was mediocre to terrible.
- A rent-seeking company was in charge of it.
As you say, eventually JS supplanted it.