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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

macwright.org

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#251

Post by pbourke »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #231
_630w wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, I am convinced the problem is not web frameworks but browsers. Someone needs to take all the legacy bloat away and put it in the side while starting from the scratch. Web doesn't need three different languages. It doesn't need freedom that costs accessibility. It doesn't need to be so primitive. It smells. Awful defaults. import "reset.css" import "reset.js"

I'll take it a step further and say we shouldn't be using the Web paradigm at all. We've tried a million different ways now to essentially generate HTML. So many frameworks. So many libraries. Front end. Back end. Etc. But, we're still working within the paradigm of the stateless Web, designed to display documents and images. Trying to hammer an application in there (especially a SPA) really doesn't make sense. So, w…

> So, why do we just keep forcing it?

Because hyperlinked documents are the whole ball game. Web technologies are a pain in the ass for developers but a boon for the advancement of human knowledge and connectedness.

The great islands and continents of web space float in the same aether. They interconnect, despite being built at different times, in different styles, on different technologies. It all just, for the most part, works. It’s fucking beautiful.

The system is greater than the sum of its parts.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#252

Post by TeMPOraL »

MattGaiser wrote: post #156
userbinator wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. As a user and developer myself, that's the sort of selfish attitude that really really angers your users. I sometimes wonder if the people claiming to hate client-side technologies or disable JS in their browsers have actually ever had to build a complex website to put food on their table. My bet is the answ…

> As a user and developer myself, that's the sort of selfish attitude that really really angers your users. A user is only unhappy if they withhold some money over it.

As others said, user != customer. A big chunk of software (perhaps the majority) is bought by someone other than the end-user. Think workplace, or all the OEM garbage that ships with your phone.

On top of that, on the mass market, customers don't have a meanigful choice. They can't signal desires in the entirety of concept space; they choose out of what's available on the market. Which means the choice really lies with the vendors.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#253

Post by worble »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #231
_630w wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, I am convinced the problem is not web frameworks but browsers. Someone needs to take all the legacy bloat away and put it in the side while starting from the scratch. Web doesn't need three different languages. It doesn't need freedom that costs accessibility. It doesn't need to be so primitive. It smells. Awful defaults. import "reset.css" import "reset.js"

I'll take it a step further and say we shouldn't be using the Web paradigm at all. We've tried a million different ways now to essentially generate HTML. So many frameworks. So many libraries. Front end. Back end. Etc. But, we're still working within the paradigm of the stateless Web, designed to display documents and images. Trying to hammer an application in there (especially a SPA) really doesn't make sense. So, w…

I'm personally curious how far we could go with using just canvas and wasm. If we focused on making a browser that was just incredibly efficient and focused at using wasm and webgl, and had no other concerns, a lot of the cruft could be cut. Then any given "page" would essentially just expose the canvas for wasm to draw to, and GUI frameworks like Qt (which already can compile to wasm I believe) could just target this. We could then have different UI toolkits targetting this model, and hopefully even have something akin to Flash without being the same security nightmare.

Keep the current browser stack for the things it still makes sense for - static content like articles and blogs, and forums too, but anything with greater complexity and reactivity would run faster and get better gains from just abandoning html/js completely, and browsers themselves could stem the unending march of feature creep.

I'm just spitballing here, I'm not sure I think this is actually a good idea - you'd be losing a lot of accessibility you get for free with HTML for example, but I'd like to see some experiments in this area to see how far this could go.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#254

Post by TeMPOraL »

millstone wrote: post #194
MattGaiser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a user and developer myself, that's the sort of selfish attitude that really really angers your users. A user is only unhappy if they withhold some money over it.

Right. If your product is paid for in eyeballs, then by the time users have perceived your low quality, they've already paid.

This (and related phenomenon with subscriptions) is arguably a big drive for the software becoming increasingly infantilized; shiny toys instead of useful tools.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#255

Post by int_19h »

userbinator wrote: post #107
systemvoltage wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please write more about this because I feel the exact same. Use built in HTML forms. Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static. Why do you want things moving around and reacting? People of the internet - imagine if the internet protocols were given to us, but no browser existed. Would we develop this non-sense we have today…

Let the page refresh, what's wrong with going to `/orders/{order_id}` page to get information about the order? It is REST-ful and static Exactly. As a bonus, you automatically get the behaviour associated with a link that browsers already implement: people can bookmark a link for later use, open it in a new window, etc. All of which would need extra effort (and thus also easily break) if it was just a clickable eleme…

It's not even the ability to bookmark it. It's basic stuff like the ability to restart my computer (e.g. because Windows demands that for updates), and go back to the same exact spot I've been at. For desktop apps, this works. For web pages that are just web pages, it works. But with something like Facebook, if you close a tab in which you've been scrolling through the feed, that state is forever lost.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#256

Post by TeMPOraL »

rossdavidh wrote: post #80
c22 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered if we take shortcuts because we have to re-write everything every 14 months or if we have to re-write everything every 14 months because of all the shortcuts we take.

Why not both?

Why not all three? We take a shortcut by rewriting everything every 14 months, because this way we don't have to learn anything long-term.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#257

Post by int_19h »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #223
dahfizz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often said that web development has a big culture problem. In any other field, 'modern' is the opposite of a selling point. People want tools that work, that are proven and have years of stability and momentum. But in web development, there is an obsession with the new and shiny. It's 100% about the developer's own experience in creating a program and 0% about the user's experience actually using the half baked…

Is that really true? On the backend, shiny technologies like Go have been exploding — Go modules only stabilized this year ! Since React was released, we’ve gone through through at least two new ways of deploying a server — containers and serverless, replete with their own huge abstraction layers like Kubernetes — and we’ve moved from monoliths to microservices and back again. And in native land, the “Rewrite It in R…

Is Go really "shiny"? I mean, it's probably the most conservative mainstream PL on the market today, rivaling Java in some respects. Many claim that this is in fact why it's so popular.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#258

Post by [deleted] »

ng12 wrote: post #224
okareaman wrote: post #50

React is a great example of YAGNI and premature optimization. I'm sure Facebook benefits from it, but most websites don't need it. JSX is an abstraction encouraging deeply nested components, which makes state handling hard, necessitating the invention of React Hooks. "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming" -- Brian Kernighan. I see a celebration of complexity in modern website development and…

That's not why hooks were invented. Hooks are by definition component local.

[deleted]

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#259

Post by tsimionescu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #221
aryehof wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all one has been exposed is a development world of web-based consumer-facing front-ends (CFUI), it is hard to imagine that the majority of software lies elsewhere. Hard to imagine that anything else is important. It leads to a viewpoint that modern programming is mainly about UI interacting with a database.

I'd say you have to group business-facing front ends with consumer-facing front ends, as well as big chunk of mobile development, because all of these are done by the same people from the same programming culture, with the same technologies, patterns and ways of thinking. And with that, I'd argue this is majority of software.

By what measure? Majority of individual 'products'? Majority of programmers? Majority of investment? Majority of revenue?

I think that at best what you're describing is a thin simple majority by some of those metrics. But there are so many developers working on factory automation, networking, gaming, small embedded systems (anything with a chip in it, from washing machines to cars), not to mention the huge frameworks that power am off the simple apps you are taking about - Linux, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Android, iOS, the major SQL DBs, the major NoSQL DBs, the language tools for all of these, the web servers, the distribution frameworks at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Amazon and so on.

While the number of core technologies is obviously easily dwarfed by the number of applications, the number of people working on each of these core technologies is so large that I can't believe your assumption.

Also, some of these industries, particularly gaming, and maybe networking as well, are so huge in terms of revenue, that I don't think CRUD apps could win on that side either.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#260

Post by brailsafe »

I've found that using things like React, for things as mundane as a blog or marketing site, just makes me sad. If my pursuit was to spend my time thinking about tricky issues — which it is — I get sad when to output doesn't necessitate the complexity I navigated to get there. Whatever I end up doing next, I hope it's something more interesting than webpages re-invented. Even working on purely design is way more challenging and interesting, and necessarily so, than frontend web "engineering". Things that do fall outside of this reduction are fully interactive applications like Mapbox studio that really weren't feasible before.
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