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HTML is the Web

petelambert.com

121–130 of 341 posts

Re: HTML is the Web

#121
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That view of the browser is what I want to have. It blows my mind that we still have to tell people “don’t click links in your email” because it’s still possible for something terrible to happen if they do.

The real question is why should links in an email message be clickable? Restricting email messages to plain text would make it much more difficult for attacks like that to succeed.

... and make emails completely useless.

Re: HTML is the Web

#122
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

(Citation needed.) They didn't demand it per se because no one actually asked. I'm inferring from the fact that users spent much more time on the interactive websites which resulted in more revenue for those sites and everyone else copying. There might have been a reason other than the interactivity itself, but we are where we are now because of user behaviour.

How efficient was that increased time spent? Does the user actually read more text or are they spending more time just fighting with the site layout? I guess the answer doesn't matter if there is an ad on the page.

Re: HTML is the Web

#123

Unpopular 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…

If I remember Xamarin can be used to target all existing platforms, even using native looks and feel. In practice I don’t think I’ve seen it in the wild. Maybe it’s being used by Microsoft for crossplatform applications? (E.g: word, excel, OneNote, etc)

Re: HTML is the Web

#124
post #5

A 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?

Yes. I do. Not that my opinion matters much. I was born in 91, I grew up as the internet grew up. Before I understood HTML or anything about programming, I used the web to watch videos on Lego.com or play really bad flash games on Newgrounds. My experience with the web has always been visual and interactive. Only time I used the WWW for purely document purposes was when doing homework.

Re: HTML is the Web

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you ever written anything in Qt?

I've recently been using it and I am very disappointed. Some tasks that should be totally trivial are incredibly hard to get right and require platform specific solutions. Nothing unsolvable, but I was expecting a much more straightforward experience from a product that has been promoted as the cross platform toolkit since the 90s.

Re: HTML is the Web

#126
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

Web pages that don't show anything without JS are broken. Ones that show only a message about enabling JS are worse. It seems JS;DR was already a thing long before I felt the need for it yesterday, when I simply missed that article about synths at ableton.com because it was broken. https://indieweb.org/js;dr

One of those linked articles hit HN 5 years ago and almost nobody cared. I use NoScript since 2005, and I'm watching more and more things break, and it's "unpleasant"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9247871

Re: HTML is the Web

#127

The 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 t…

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

Web pages should be designed to be standards-compliant. While you are free to turn JS off (and that's part of what makes the web great), you shouldn't be surprised if things break. Your browser is no longer standards-compliant.

Re: HTML is the Web

#128
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web pages should be designed to load without js.

Web pages that don't show anything without JS are broken. Ones that show only a message about enabling JS are worse. It seems JS;DR was already a thing long before I felt the need for it yesterday, when I simply missed that article about synths at ableton.com because it was broken. https://indieweb.org/js;dr

What about web applications? I am the office champion of accessible web, but recently we made a web based game, in canvas. Without js, there's no game engine, so we had a noscript tag.

That synths article uses built in JavaScript synths (using audio apis). I agree the text should display without JavaScript but the purpose of the article (get hands on with synths) is eliminated without JS.

Basically, the web not only is a document delivery place, it's also the new Newgrounds. None of those games would work if you disabled flash, why should web applications (beyond ones that are simple documents) work without JavaScript?

Re: HTML is the Web

#129
post #28

The web has become a compilation target. Vue -> HTML, CSS, JS

Essentially yes. But I think the problem comes from the fact that it is at the same time a compilation target, and a pretty okay document markup format.

I think people living at the edges of web apps and web pages are pretty happy, but the contention is when one is in between.

Re: HTML is the Web

#130
post #77

Unpopular 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…

I'm inclined to disagree, but I guess the real problem is that webpages on the internet are being forced to serve both purposes. Paradigm 1 - interconnected, hyperlinked web of text-and-content-based documents: open, accessible, amenable to indexing and tooling and so forth. Paradigm 2 - delivery vehicle for cross-platform, full-featured, somewhat-security-sandboxed, applications. I agree with the article that it's s…

I think what the author is saying is that paradigm 2 is built _on top of_ paradigm 1 and if you can't do #1 right, then by definition _neither_ can be right. It's astounding the number of interview candidates who are super-fluent in JS but can't tell you to save their lives why it's a bad idea to put a click handler on a div. React will die (It's already started to) and we'll migrate back to the actual Web at some point and for my money it can't happen fast enough.
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