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HTML is the Web

petelambert.com

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191–200 of 341 posts

Re: HTML is the Web

#191

Post by mosdl »

meerita wrote: post #50
dsr_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 technol…

Flash was already mostly dead by the time the iphone came. Adobe was not investing much into it and it was mainly being used to show videos.

Re: HTML is the Web

#192

Post by z3t4 »

There are four types of web sites: static sites made using HTML, dynamic web sites that use both HTML and JS. The third type however is web apps, that like dynamic sites use the DOM, but no HTML! And the fourth type is web apps that only use the Canvas eg. no DOM! So its possible to make a web "site" that only has a script element, and the only DOM interaction is to append the canvas element and add event listeners.

Re: HTML is the Web

#193

Post by reallydude »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #66
nickjj wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you kidding me? Flash was an absurdly popular platform. Careers were launched on Newgrounds! I'm not saying it wasn't popular, but what do you think the percent spread was between sites that were fully driven by Flash vs not Flash? I don't have the stats in front of me, but I would guess it was probably 2% Flash vs 98% non-Flash. Now, a lot of sites had sprinkles of Flash but very few sites in the grand scheme…

> very few sites in the grand scheme of things were solely rendered with Flash ...yeah, because that's not what Flash was about. Flash was an application platform (ok, so more like an Animation platform) first and foremost. Why would anyone run their whole site in flash? It wasn't the right tool for that job.

Yet people did this all the time (2advanced, HomestarRunner, etc) because the web as an application (a product) was served particularly well by an application platform.

Re: HTML is the Web

#195

Post by myguysi »

Lowkeyloki wrote: post #189
Lowkeyloki wrote: post #185

The author is right, but this comes off very much as "old man yells at cloud" to me. Sorry.

Let me give slightly more context. As a developer, I'd love to use div less often. However, I feel like the promise of the "semantic web" fell short. And "web components" as a first-class HTML citizen isn't really there. So React/Vue components are the best we've got even though they're actually just divs and spans at the lowest level. I want the web to be semantic and componentized. But it's not there yet and this i…

You can use React/Vue and still write semantic HTML, no?

Re: HTML is the Web

#196

Post by old-gregg »

flohofwoe wrote: post #9

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…

> the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code

Unfortunately it's not true. Zero day exploits happen all the time, even the recent Intel CPU vulnerabilities were exploitable via JavaScript. Morevever, some harmful effects of arbitrary code execution cannot be mitigated (like the drained battery or user tracking), that's why I have recently adopted a view that code execution on web pages is just a Bad Idea and my non-work browsers are configured with JS turned completely off.

This gives me nearly 2 full days of battery life on my phone and I'm less worried about privacy/security aspects of visiting random web sites.

Unfortunately, even within the last year, I'm noticing that more and more web sites simply serve me a blank screen without JS enabled. This forces me to stop using such sites, which is gradually reducing the size of the usable web for me. My only hope is for a new trendy server-side rendering fad to come along and rescue the Internet :)

Re: HTML is the Web

#197

Post by [deleted] »

flohofwoe wrote: post #9

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…

[deleted]

Re: HTML is the Web

#198

Post by Lowkeyloki »

myguysi wrote: post #195
Lowkeyloki wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me give slightly more context. As a developer, I'd love to use div less often. However, I feel like the promise of the "semantic web" fell short. And "web components" as a first-class HTML citizen isn't really there. So React/Vue components are the best we've got even though they're actually just divs and spans at the lowest level. I want the web to be semantic and componentized. But it's not there yet and this i…

You can use React/Vue and still write semantic HTML, no?

I mainly work in React. You can write semantic HTML up to a point. Things like article, section, header, footer, etc. are supported. But if you wanted to make up your own tag and expect it to act like a div, I think React would complain that it doesn't understand that tag.

That's what I meant by "the promise of the semantic web". As I originally understood it, you could make your own custom tags that describe the intent of the document. You wouldn't be bound by what the w3c or browser vendors blessed. Any tags that were unknown to the browser would be treated mostly the same as a div. Web components occupy a similar space.

Re: HTML is the Web

#199

Post by reallydude »

mpweiher wrote: post #170
flohofwoe wrote: post #9

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…

> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, As others have pointed out, that's hardly a contrary opinion. To quote Roy Fielding's Dissertation (p 109). "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) are both the simplest element of the Web architecture and the most important." https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/fielding...

> As others have pointed out, that's hardly a contrary opinion.

Opinions are almost universally contrary, despite the knowledge that the URL can be a tool. How often is it put forth that the URL is meant to be indempotent or the URL is supposed to be mapped to another routing system etc. The number of commercial sites where the URL is a field you are meant to manipulate (other than say search engines and even they don't point it out for you) is so small as to be significant.

Re: HTML is the Web

#200

Post by hypertexthero »

Someone I met recently met who delegates work to web developers for a living had this to say about JavaScript frameworks: They are very seldom necessary for a job, and their main function is to create more work for more developers to get paid.

As an “old school” designer who writes HTML and CSS by hand, with JavaScript for progressive enhancement, I found myself agreeing, and it reminded me of this, from back in 2001: https://www.thenoodleincident.com/tutorials/box_lesson/why.h...

> The idea of HTML et al is a document markup language that would grow. Its architects saw we were going digital and sat back and took a long view. A very long view. They laid the foundations for a language that would work with all the conceivable technology of the time, and would be expandable to the unconceivable technology that would follow. So that documents would never be unretrievable due to age. Ever. A browser in 2050 would be able to read a 1994 document. And in 2094. And so on. They made a stand of cultural importance to the world.

The slow, less usable feeling of JavaScript-heavy websites — my current personal website included — has remained a constant, and I mourn the reduced usability of View Source as a map for learning, lost in the forest of DIVs and obfuscated JS in much of today’s World Wide Web.

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