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HTML is the Web
41–50 of 341 posts
Re: HTML is the Web
#42Unpopular 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…
No one's delivered? There were and are plenty of platforms for full apps on the web. All of them require: loading each time or elevated privileges above the normal browser. This is not the reason they haven't taken off. Security isn't the reason either.
It isn't used because it's just not how the suppliers of content nor consumers of the web want to use the web.
If they want a full featured app, they use it. Even with super fast speeds, latency and minimal startup time still make the browser unattractive for this.
Web users and content providers want linkable documents.
I'd argue that the modern browser stack is so good that we see installed apps adopting html/css/js for the presentation layer.
Re: HTML is the Web
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Bots and email clients. Microsoft word. Libre Office.
Re: HTML is the Web
#44A 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…
> We moved forwards. The same is becoming true for HTML. Users demanded interactivity, and we gave them exactly that, and browsers turned in to things that run little applications rather than things that render mark up. As I like to occasionally point out in wasm threads, the browser was a thing that ran little applications all along, in the form of Java applets. I have yet to see an explanation of how wasm applets a…
> I have yet to see an explanation of how wasm applets are a different approach to the problem
Here is one: wasm is smaller and better sandboxed
Re: HTML is the Web
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 br…
Those were all problems but none of them had any real bearing on the general population avoiding it for general sites.
The thing is, most people don't want a blank canvas to go nuts with for the general use case. It's too complicated. Suddenly you need to learn entire SDKs and pull in many dependencies just to render text on the screen.
The reason HTML and the web was so well accepted back in the day was all you had to learn were a few HTML tags, a couple of properties and then drop it onto a Geocities site and you were good to go. It was something you can do and see real progress on in 10 minutes with very little background knowledge.
Compare that to now where if you wanted to be a "trendy front-end dev" you would probably reach for Vue / React + Webpack* and go SPA style for all of the sites you make because you learned something and now you want to apply it everywhere. Meanwhile to serve a document such as a blog post, you just went from having 15 HTML tags in a single HTML file and some CSS to pulling megabytes of Javascript sprawled across hundreds of dependencies and now you have build tools, an entire runtime environment (Node) and are using APIs that don't exactly match up with HTML exactly, and then your entire site isn't even crawlable by search engines unless you introduce even more complexity to do server side rendering and before you know it, you're dealing with something that's even more complicated than Flash was back in the day.
* I personally use Webpack to handle my assets too, but I don't write SPAs for sites that are document based (which tbh are most sites).
Re: HTML is the Web
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
My usage, as well as majority of friends that are non-geek, involves around - Scrolling through IG, Facebook, other Social Media, Forums, Online Shopping and News Site. Along with Video that in itself is a category as well as well as used within the previous few categories. News is arguably the biggest addiction of the 21st century, and IG, Facebook, Forum, are all really just "news". News about your friends, family,…
This is grossly underestimating the complexity of IG, FB and the likes. Everyone likes to tell other people how they should build their stuff, that's the easy part. Do you think React would have been created if "HTML and a little Javascript for interactivity" was enough for Facebook to deliver the UX they wanted to? No, there was a business need, and what existed simply wasn't good enough, maintainable enough or easy…
No, its not for the UX, but for tracking you in every way as precise as possible.
Second, most of you is not Facebook or Google either and have no need for additional complexity.
Third, a strategy some of the big companies do to slow down startups that may compete with them is to create an illusion of how fantastic it is to develop applications with this new tool. So instead of focusing on actual business value, a lot of people spend time on premature optimizations and think API's that are breaking daily is perfectly fine as their favorite tool is only getting better.
Re: HTML is the Web
#47Unpopular 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…
This. absolutely this! We didn't get the crossplatform UI framework we needed, we got the one we deserved. SwiftUI looks amazing - but again - apple only. React looked promising, but mainly for desktop, and it's not without its own issues. I think the W3C are a big part of why the web works so well cross-platform... even though the web was supposed to be "so much more". It's quite hard to imagine a similar kind of bo…
What makes React inherently un-mobile except the fact that all browsers have a touch timeout thus making UI seemingly slower?
Re: HTML is the Web
#48Wow you guys. Just use Wordpress or Drupal its the best.
Re: HTML is the Web
#49I recommend everyone that writes HTML to check out Pug (formerly Jade). It makes writing HTML so much easier when it comes to handling classes, attributes, nesting, readability ... well, basically anything. It transpiles to HTML and when using the pretty flag (-P) you can ditch pug anytime if you don't like it and work on the HTML output again. And please tell if you do the latter (and why). I still wait for the person that I recommended Pug to and preferred to keep writing vanilla HTML afterwards.
Re: HTML is the Web
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
JS didn't suplanted it from day to night. It was Steve Jobs who killed Flash, not letting Adobe from conquer their new iOS platform. They tried it so hard, even on Android back then, but they failed to deliver something solid. Eventually, both Google and Apple released their SDKs to develop apps, way more solid and faster than running a Adobe Flash player layer on top of the OS. This article shows the jump on technologies, from the CSS perspective http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/