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HTML is the Web

petelambert.com

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Re: HTML is the Web

#331

Post by bmn__ »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #309
ricardobeat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but you’re mistaken. The parent never brought up IE - he was referring to the fact that when serving XHTML with the correct mime-type (application/xhtml+xml), any error causes the page not to render at all. This behaviour is intended per spec and was the same across all browsers, not due to lack of support. It’s called “draconian error handling”, consequence of being XML, and was a major factor in the death of…

The death of XHTML was brought on by the then crop of kids who don't want to understand how computers work and want it all done for them with someone else's code cause computer science is too hard and they'd have to think and thinking is too hard. While I often hear this "draconian error handling" about XML/XHTML by such people who then complain that a language compiler is just as draconian and real programmers compl…

That's all well until you have external content (e.g. blog with comments or blog roll headlines). Many an enthusiastic Web author in the 2000s migrated off XHTML again. Not because getting it right is too hard (each fix for each problem is quite straight-forward and often trivial), but because when you have the choice between having a completely broken page/site until you have time to log on and fix it and having a miniscully broken part of a page that's easily ignored by a visitor, then the idealism was just too bothersome. Unfortunately, that's human nature. Also see: rms's principles as exemplified by his life-style and how many follow his example perfectly.

Re: HTML is the Web

#332

Post by u801e »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #255
u801e wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

URLs are plain text... Can also easily be clickable, depending on your e-mail software.

They are, but some email clients will display text that doesn't match the original URL. Hence the advice to hover the mouse pointer over the link and tread the original URL text that way.

Re: HTML is the Web

#333

Post by BlueTemplar »

u801e wrote: post #332
BlueTemplar wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

URLs are plain text... Can also easily be clickable, depending on your e-mail software.

They are, but some email clients will display text that doesn't match the original URL. Hence the advice to hover the mouse pointer over the link and tread the original URL text that way.

If you use plain text mode they won't be able to. Hence the advice to disable HTML in e-mails.

Re: HTML is the Web

#334

Post by guyromm »

back in 2005 I recall losing a bit of faith in humanity, when a subcontractor who was asked to turn a design into markup and "not dare deliver pages laid out using tables" (as it was still quite common back then), delivered a pixel-perfect design, where even those pages that literally had tables displaying information, were laid out with stacks of divs...

Re: HTML is the Web

#335

Post by bandrami »

onion2k wrote: post #76
bandrami wrote: post #39

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.

OMG, that is perverse. Users spend more time on the sites because the sites are slower to load and more difficult to use.

Re: HTML is the Web

#336

Post by pistolpeteDK »

rocky1138 wrote: post #100
pistolpeteDK wrote: post #26

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 have not. I’ve looked at it quite a bit, and it looks interesting.

Re: HTML is the Web

#337

Post by pistolpeteDK »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #47
pistolpeteDK wrote: post #26

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…

What makes React inherently un-mobile except the fact that all browsers have a touch timeout thus making UI seemingly slower?

Don’t know if it’s unmobile per se. But it’s heavy, JS wise, tends to promote SPAs, and can be quite tough to get to play well with a hybrid. The react team seems to put their effort in React Native. And that might the only framework I’d never ever ever “touch” again - pun intended:) We do use react for some mobile stuff, the issue seams to be that you still need a lot of other stuff and your app/UX still feels a bit like a 2nd class citizen

Re: HTML is the Web

#338

Post by AlchemistCamp »

nickjj wrote: post #45
flohofwoe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the general population avoiding it for general sites

I'm not sure that happened. My friends and I got on MSN Messenger and shared flash sites all the time. Kongregate and similar gaming sites were part of it, but so was YouTube, and so were greeting card sites, ESPN, various other news sites and many, many others.

At least from my POV, maybe a few people hanging out places like here didn't like flash, but the general population had no problems with it until Steve Jobs did his best to kill it. Even then, people not on iPods/Pads/Phones didn't seem to have any problems with it. AFIK, the fast majority of people still installed it years later.

Re: HTML is the Web

#339

Post by tabtab »

orange8 wrote: post #295
tabtab wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: [A Web page is a document.] No it's not. It started out that way, but grew to TRY to replace GUI's, Flash, etc. We need three different standards: one for documents (HTML may be good enough); one for media, art, and games; and one for desktop-like GUI's. There may be some overlap between these, but the one-size-fits-all of HTML/CS/JS has been a big messy time-sink where otherwise simple UI tasks take rocket scien…

We already have 3 different standards: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. These are low level enough, and powerful enough that you can build document, multimedia or application frameworks on top of them. Simple UI tasks don't take rocket science, they take a proper understanding of those three standards, and a lot of discipline.

Re: "Simple UI tasks don't take rocket science, they take a proper understanding of those three standards, and a lot of discipline."

I appears to me you are contradicting yourself. It comes across as: "It doesn't take the discipline of rocket science, but merely the discipline of rocket science". GUI's didn't take "a lot of discipline" in say VB-classic, Delphi, or Oracle Forms[1]: you dragged it to where you intended it to be, and Wazaam, it was there and always there. WYSIWYG was a huuuge time-saver. Now to do it right you have to test on dozens of platforms and versions because they each have a mind of their own. WYSIWYG gave you one central coordinate reference point, not 30 different positioning engines.

Re: "We already have 3 different standards: HTML, CSS, JavaScript."

That's part of the problem, not a solution. They are not domain-specific, for one.

[1] They had glitches, but were getting better over time.

Re: HTML is the Web

#340

Post by orange8 »

tabtab wrote: post #339
orange8 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have 3 different standards: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. These are low level enough, and powerful enough that you can build document, multimedia or application frameworks on top of them. Simple UI tasks don't take rocket science, they take a proper understanding of those three standards, and a lot of discipline.

Re: "Simple UI tasks don't take rocket science, they take a proper understanding of those three standards, and a lot of discipline." I appears to me you are contradicting yourself. It comes across as: "It doesn't take the discipline of rocket science, but merely the discipline of rocket science". GUI's didn't take "a lot of discipline" in say VB-classic, Delphi, or Oracle Forms[1]: you dragged it to where you intende…

rocket sceince !== proper understanding

rocket science !== discipline

VB-classic, Delphi, or Oracle Forms have whats known as drag-and-drop/visual programming. Comparing them to CSS & HTML isn't a fair comparison, unless you compare that to a drag-and-drop GUI that creates HTML & CSS for you.

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