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Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

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Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#71

Post by ROARosen »

timw4mail wrote: post #49
ROARosen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is a need for plain HTML. HTML is robust, can render incrementally, and can stand on its own. Javascript sucks. It's a subtle minefield of a language, takes more time to parse than HTML or CSS, and is by far the most brittle part of the website. Websites rendered only through Javascript are trash.

Whatever your dislike-level to JS is, we cannot dispute the fact that JS, or at least JSON can do pretty much everything HTML can do, but not the other way around.

Of course our beloved HTML can still exist, just as PDF exists. But in my opinion it shouldn't be the required standard. Since I can markup just as easily in JSON And like it or not JS is one the the core web components today, we can make JS the standard (we can keep it safe by allowing defining a safe subset of JS - e.g. JSON - which would work with general scripts disabled), with support for plain ol' HTML.

Point is, JSON can replace HTML, while preserving everything you like about HTML but not vice versa.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#72

Post by emteycz »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #63
phtrivier wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the web browser evolved, by accident, into the closest thing we have to a portable and usable desktop OS . However, to me the browser is more like a "requirement statement", than a solution. The success of the web is just a symptom that: - users want applications that work on computers. Win vs Mac vs Linux vs Mobile vs ... is all nice and well for us geeks, but to real-world people, it's just a fri…

The web made sharing information easy. That's it. That's all it did. Without the web, if I wanted to share information with you, I'd have to learn C, OS native GUI libraries, TCP/IP, and probably a bunch of other stuff if my information also had picture and sound. On the web, I just need HTML and I'm already a published author. What would a post-modern operating system need to do to make sharing information easy?

Gopher, FTP, newsgroups, BBS... Plenty of easy information sharing technologies existed before the web.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#73

Post by emteycz »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #56
ROARosen wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

window.body.appendChild(document.createElement(...))

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#76

Post by galoisgirl »

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…

> All I really want from the web is

You do know there are a few other people in this world, right?

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#77

Post by galoisgirl »

drknow007 wrote: post #68

Great job. I largely agree with the concepts in this well thought out paper. I have built several commercial grade products and the front-end is always where the most pain and cost exist. By a long shot. If someone doesn't agree this layer needs a serious overhaul, they are not the ones paying the bill or have not build a large scale commercial product. HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simpl…

> HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simple examples.

They do have a steep learning curve. The web is polluted with tutorials and StackOverflow answers from people who haven't learned them yet, like this atrocious thread where most upvoted answers are plain wrong: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4814398/how-can-i-check-...

> Masters of these tools sadly have their heads full of legacy hacks and trickery needed to get content to display properly.

The trickery is not needed anymore. I started in 1996 and I remember the table and float layouts. You can forget all this stuff now. IE11 supports flex-box well. Clean up your code and move on.

> Contrast this with algorithms, the middle-tier, and databases. These tools, while not perfect, are far better able to express developer intentions and therefore be maintained.

Well, I did understand flex-box after thinking in terms of layouting algorithm instead of a bag of properties and values. [1] But you're dangerously close to comparing apples to oranges here: front-end technologies are all about the user's experience, not the developer's intent. If you feel that strongly about them, consider sticking to the back-end.

> Sadly, the Web stack has largely become popular due to OS politics

No, the web stack has become popular because of the people from your first paragraph: the ones paying the bills. The ones who couldn't afford to lose customers by requiring a plug-in, nor building multiple versions of the same product.

> The concepts of types, intellisense, async/await, and other efficiencies are great examples of historically native benefits brought to the Web.

Types? JavaScript is typed, always was. Ajax was always asynchronous - do you mean the syntactic sugar?

[1] I then wrote that: https://dev.to/galoisgirl/how-to-finally-understand-css-flex...

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#78

Post by drknow007 »

galoisgirl wrote: post #77
drknow007 wrote: post #68

Great job. I largely agree with the concepts in this well thought out paper. I have built several commercial grade products and the front-end is always where the most pain and cost exist. By a long shot. If someone doesn't agree this layer needs a serious overhaul, they are not the ones paying the bill or have not build a large scale commercial product. HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simpl…

> HTML and CSS are not clean, intuitive, or efficient beyond simple examples. They do have a steep learning curve. The web is polluted with tutorials and StackOverflow answers from people who haven't learned them yet, like this atrocious thread where most upvoted answers are plain wrong: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4814398/how-can-i-check-... > Masters of these tools sadly have their heads full of legacy hack…

>> They do have a steep learning curve. The web is polluted with tutorials and StackOverflow answers...

Agreed.

>> The trickery is not needed anymore...

This isn't needed (as much) today because of browser consolidation. The point is that these Web technologies were too difficult for browsers to maintain. The tech didn't get better. Instead, we had to minimize the # of containers in order to control the havoc.

>> ... But you're dangerously close to comparing apples to oranges here...

I'm not trying to directly compare layer tech here. Rather I'm comparing how well each layer's tools serve the developer and project. I'm not interested in a career move, thank you - lol. This thread is about best software strategies that have the responsibility of serving the world. Far more important stuff than me. It matters and is worth continuous re-assessment.

>> No, the web stack has become popular because of the people from your first paragraph: the ones paying the bills. The ones who couldn't afford to lose customers by requiring a plug-in...

Just not true. Historically, Web dev meant crazy amounts of code hacks in order to target different browsers. Again, it wasn't better tech - it was far worse and costly. Remember Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, etc? Lots of successful sites and web apps used them to work around this problem.

Just stop and think about this. Flash devs didn't have to adapt their projects to their host container. It just worked. HTML/CSS/JS required lots more effort because of their intrinsic deficiencies. My point isn't that Flash (or anything else is better), its that HTML/CSS/JS is not where it needs to be, yet it still exists! And the reason it exists is because it runs on port 80! It's that simple - HTML/CSS/JS is one big loophole into x-platform development. Without this loophole, it loses much of its strategic appeal.

Again, I argue that devs really want to just use the tools they know and have their bits run everywhere. And 'everywhere' is a tall order because for today's consumers, this means total cross-platform on desktop, mobile, and web. Fast and fluid.

>> Types? JavaScript is typed, always was. Ajax was always asynchronous - do you mean the syntactic sugar?

Yes, I mean getting rid of the hacks and plethora of libraries needed to accomplish simple, age old software goals.

Imho, the Web stack has a real opportunity now to get focused and become a tech stack that most devs can love because it offers a x-platform strategy (although, importantly not because of HTML/CSS/JS - but because of port 80). But it needs to get better. It needs to get closer to the efficiencies and focus that native devs have been experiencing for decades. Cheers!

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#79

Post by nwienert »

bbatha wrote: post #69
nwienert wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And yet many of us prefer safari because of its incredible battery life and low overhead. The safari is the new ie meme is seriously overblown and only affects app developers trying to use the absolutely newest features and is more tied to safaris year long release cadence than actual malice. Not that there arent a few notable exceptions to apis that should have been implemented long ago.

I actually agree with you, I love Safari and agree the IE comparison is wack. But that doesn't mean they aren't dragging their feet in other areas.

Re: Grand Unification of Web Technologies Proposal

#80

Post by pcstl »

This pretty much summarizes the academic mentality: Everything must be neat, tidy, and follow a well-defined formal process, preferably one defined by a committee that uses a lot of big words and stands above mere mortals.

The reason the web has become such a big deal is exactly that its development is not constrained by such thinking.

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