Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

docs.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 85 posts

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#51

Post by blueblisters »

filleokus wrote: post #5

Maybe the next step of the "web" is just to fully embrace the browser as an app VM. Have one standard for reading Wikipedia, and another for running Figma in the browser. WASM + some common simple widget-esque API (like a small subset of Cocoa/GTK/QT). The browser provide implementations of some functionality like text-rendering and event handling, but then it's up to developer/frameworks to solve everything else.

10 years ago if you had pitched this idea to Steve Jobs, he might have embraced it and pushed for a cross-platform app container standard that can run productivity apps, games and more. Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#52

Post by jopsen »

We sometimes seem to forget that not all websites have to be web apps.

It's fine that you can use JS or wasm, and if you really want to you barely need to touch html/css

But for many things, plain HTML with a bit of CSS and tiny amount of JS is perfectly fine.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#53

Post by jazzyjackson »

ROARosen wrote: post #45

Couldn,t agree more. Factually, most websites created for presentation rather than documentation are wholly reliant on JS, even if they're structured to "also" work without JS (which itself shows you the issue.) So there's no reason not to create a standard from that for the future. We can even have a subset of JS to be used as some sort of safe mode which would only allow the representational parts to run. Of course…

I already have "safe mode" it's called disabling javascript.

Anyway, I understand that there's dogma around how necessary javascript is so lets say we agreed -- how do you want to draw the website?

For me I've never met a better box model than HTML. Tried looking at qt and flutter but they feel like visual basic to me, a handful of components to arrange according to their rules. HTML is like paper, I can cut out pieces in whatever shape I want.

(Then again, it took me a long time to get my head around html/css so now I'm building a GUI/no-code site builder, but of course the output is HTML/SVG so it can render anywhere. And I only use JS to update attributes instead of waiting for a page reload. I figure if amazon.com can work without javascript, it must not be very necessary :)

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#56

Post by jazzyjackson »

ROARosen wrote: post #47
tannhaeuser wrote: post #19

Yeah, no. The web is precisely there for networked info/doc access. OTOH there never was a reason to take regular apps away into browsers; that's what OSes are for. Especially not when the lock-in detour through browsers also undermines the above-stated principal functions of the web.

Your talking the web of 1990-2010, fact is most websites today are heavily reliant on - or even exclusively created in - javascript. Even if most websites wouldn't use the interactivity of JS, there is no reason for there to be three different standards. All those plain-text websites can be created in JSON just as well. The argument is, there is no need for plain HTML at this point, so why is this the base standard?

I still don't understand how people think they're going to build a website in pure JS.

I built a template preprocessor that lets me write all my HTML and CSS with the same syntax as a big JSON file, or a JS module if I want to drop in some loops and includes, and even working on replacing the JS with syntax that fits in the JSON file.

But I still need a way to think about "this box sits next to this box" and "this mask applies to all these boxes" -- what would I do without HTML?

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#58

Post by kortilla »

blueblisters wrote: post #51
filleokus wrote: post #5

Maybe the next step of the "web" is just to fully embrace the browser as an app VM. Have one standard for reading Wikipedia, and another for running Figma in the browser. WASM + some common simple widget-esque API (like a small subset of Cocoa/GTK/QT). The browser provide implementations of some functionality like text-rendering and event handling, but then it's up to developer/frameworks to solve everything else.

10 years ago if you had pitched this idea to Steve Jobs, he might have embraced it and pushed for a cross-platform app container standard that can run productivity apps, games and more. Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.

> Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.

We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#59

Post by johnny22 »

blippage wrote: post #42

HTML is a stateless protocol Everyone is trying to turn the internet into an application server, which is stateful. Developing for the web is, therefore, necessarily complex, because you're trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. All I really want from the web is to READ documentation, look at cats and Youtube and do a bit of banking. HTML already caters for the first two categories. Why do we need styleshee…

HTTP is a stateless protocol, not HTML. Please don't confuse one for the other.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#60

Post by nwienert »

kortilla wrote: post #58
blueblisters wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years ago if you had pitched this idea to Steve Jobs, he might have embraced it and pushed for a cross-platform app container standard that can run productivity apps, games and more. Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone.

> Perhaps we would have been living in a world where Apple does not take a 30% cut from all sales happening on the iPhone. We already do. Apple doesn’t take a cut of things you purchase in the browser. Nor do they take a cut of in-app purchases when it’s not consumed on the device for that matter.

And in turn they cripple the web on their devices so they can’t compete with apps.
Post reply on HN