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A clean start for the web (2020)

macwright.com

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#2

Post by skybrian »

The web is far too big to invent all at once. Evolution is how it's going to go from now on. Good ideas will start out in niches.

But maybe Markdown is the document language you're looking for? And to get started writing docs and code together, something like ObservableHQ is a pretty good way to go.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#3

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Do we really want to continue having "a web" ? Remember, "the web" was never designed for what we do with it today. If you're thinking of overhauling "the web", I think it makes sense to start from first principles, and build something that meets today's needs with the least amount of unnecessary bullshit.

You have to start from the user's experience, because nothing else matters about a computer other than what you use it for. What do people actually want to do with a computer? It's going to be very hard to throw away all your assumptions. Don't assume that they want or need what we have today. They may not need the internet, or even a visual interface.

After you understand the problems the user wants solved, then you can go about building products that address those needs. You may think technology is clay that we can shape to fit a user's needs; but what if what they were best served by was metal, or glass, or paper? We must look through all technological mediums and components to provide the best solution.

Many of the developers today literally have never lived their lives in a world without certain inherent technological expectations and limitations. We need to open their minds and show them that they really can make literally anything with technology, and that it doesn't have to resemble anything that we have today. If you think "oh but we can't make change too radical, it wouldn't work", that's what they said before we ended up with the technology of today! The only box you're limited to is the one you put yourself in.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#7

Post by egypturnash »

"But the early web wasn’t fun in many conventional ways - you couldn’t quite create art there, or use it as much more than a way of sharing documents."

This person needs to go look at some Geocities archives. People were trying to create cool-looking pages as soon as we had the IMG tag. People were using tables to organize a bunch of images in neat ways. People were doing weird little hypertext art things.

They were not using the technology in the "right" way. Nobody gave a shit about the right way. It took something like twenty fucking years for CSS to make it easy to vertically center shit the "right" way after persuading everyone that using tables for anything but tabular data was "wrong". If we waved a magic wand and suddenly everyone just had this theoretical Markdown-centric browser? People would immediately start looking for clever ways to abuse edge cases of its implementation to make their pages pretty. And people would start making enhancement requests, some of which the browser makers would inevitably implement, and... eventually we're right back where we are now.

I am not a fan of the modern corporate-dominated web, neither am I a fan of the modern world where more and more apps are horrible kludges of JS and HTML that have absolutely no care about the UI conventions of their host platforms, and are a couple orders of magnitude more resource-hungry than their equivalents that use native widgets and compiled languages. (Concrete example: Slack's 440 megs on disc, Discord's 370; Ripcord, a native app that talks to them both, is 40.) But thinking people will happily go back to a world with little to no control of the presentation layer after decades of struggle for more of that is a pipe dream. We all quit using Gopher the moment we had a web browser on our systems.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#8

Post by pronlover723 »

I think the web is mostly good the way it is and I don't want to see it re-invented. In fact, I hate Flutter because it's not "webby". It renderers all content and controls using Canvas which means all there is on the page is pixels which means no accessibility since there is no standard structure (the DOM) to dig through to find the content.

You might say there will be solutions like ideas to augment the canvas with meta data about what's in it but that IMO misses the point.

As a user I want to be in control of the data that's on my machine. With a standard like HTML, it allows me, as a user, far FAR more control then a native app. I can use userstyle sheets. I can write and/or install extensions that look through or manipulate the content. None of this is possible if all I get is a rectangle of pixels.

Translation and/or Language learning extensions would never have happened on native platforms because it's effectively impossible to peer into the app. Whereas it's super easy to peer into HTML based apps.

So, I like that most webapps work via HTML. I also like, that unlike most native UI frameworks, HTML has tons of relatively easy solutions for handling the differences between mobile and desktop. I've made several sites and web apps and while there may be a learning curve it's 2-3 orders of magnitude less work to get something working everywhere (desktop/tablet/mobile) with HTML than any other way of doing it.

Change to 2 modes, document mode, and app mode doesn't make sense to me. It'd be a net negative. People who want this I think want to take control away from the user. That's clearly Flutter's goal. All that canvas rendering means it's harder to select text, harder to copy and paste, impossible to augment via extension. It puts all the control in the app dev's hands and none in the user's.

So no, I don't want the web to be reinvented. Its provides something amazing that pretty much all attempts to replace it seems to missing. Its structure is a plus not a minus.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#9

Post by DougMellon »

> Firefox wasn’t the #2 browser - that’s Safari, mainly because of the captive audience of iPhone and iPad users. But it was the most popular browser that people chose to use.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I struggle to see how one can arrive at that conclusion. I imagine a large percentage of users actively chose to not use Firefox over Safari because of it's integration and their familiarity.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#10

Post by rektide »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #3

Do we really want to continue having "a web" ? Remember, "the web" was never designed for what we do with it today. If you're thinking of overhauling "the web", I think it makes sense to start from first principles, and build something that meets today's needs with the least amount of unnecessary bullshit. You have to start from the user's experience, because nothing else matters about a computer other than what you…

What feels unique about the web, that nothing else remotely resembles that makes it so much more compelling to me versus everything which came before, is urls. The web is a network of online resources.

There's HTML, an ok, fairly adaptable hyper-media markup- and CSS, and scripts, all fair or better- but the premise turns everything else we do in computing on it's head: servers send us resources, and we have a (imo pretty great) engine to render & execute our hypermedia.

I see endless torrents of anti-web attitude, from people who want more content-centric systems, from people who want applications. But almost never can the critics identify & mark out what makes the web better, different, & so flexible as to have arisen into all-pervading ubiquitous. By all means, consider first principles. I think you all have a lot of very important & enabling concepts you'll need to recreate along the way. The web's idea of urls & resources is one I think we'll have a hard time replacing.

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