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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)

#31

Post by kitsunesoba »

fennecs wrote: post #26
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

The problem with "one client to rule them all" is a massive lost of consistency, speed/responsiveness, and usability when it comes to documents. On the web, documents can come in anything ranging from the form of a tiny text file to a gargantuan "app" that weighs tens of megabytes and spins up your laptop's fans to render. It also means that the browser isn't nearly as smart as it could be because it has to be a general purpose jack of all trades.

A dedicated document browser would likely almost always blazing fast, regardless of the machine it was run on and the network over which the documents were transferred over. It could have features that would make no sense in a web browser but greatly enhance the experience of reading and navigation. It could reasonably cache nearly everything the user visits (since it's practically all read-only and small) to reduce server load and increase speed. In a nutshell, it could be far better at specifically working with documents than a web browser ever could, even with a laundry list of extensions installed.

Additionally, it would actually be possible to write brand new competing document browsers due to the vastly more simple specification, which is something the web will probably never have again.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#32

Post by david-cako »

Regular ass HTML and CSS works just as well as ever. Application frameworks solve problems that are convincing at hyper-giga Google scale (where an infinite number of participants and data models need to be consolidated) that aren't as important when I am trying to display words, pictures, and video to people across the world. For instance, if you're talking about advanced sharding, granular caches per data-field, or scaling microservices with the load on different parts of your application, then maybe you need something more complicated.

I like simple, and I like to be able to see changes I make in real time. React makes a lot of things more simple, so I use it often.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#33

Post by fartcannon »

alluro2 wrote: post #27
egypturnash wrote: post #7

"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…

I share your views on the topic. Early days of web were amazing from the perspective of people trying to express themselves despite the technological limitations. and animated gifs, tables, CSS, not to mention Flash... Obviously romanticizing to an extent, but to me personally there was value in people striving to set their content and themselves apart - vs today when it's so much about "streamlining" experiences and…

(The)Facebook used a sneaky trick to create scarcity by requiring you have an educational email address. It was an elite club, compared to the normies who had to use MySpace.

The force of FOMO that built up behind that wall, once removed, flooded the population.

You can say it was their style or whatever, but I think it was that one move.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#34

Post by EddieDante »

krapp wrote: post #17
pronlover723 wrote: post #8

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…

I have yet to see a suggestion to "reinvent" the web that expands on publisher or end-user capabilities, rather than taking them away. The end user doesn't want Geminispace, they don't hate that web publishers get to control layout and design, or that sites can be more complex than even the early web allowed. They don't want to write their own clients or stylesheets, they don't want the web to only be strictly static…

> They don't want to kill all advertising and commerce on the web in the belief that content creators should be forced to work for love instead of money.

Real artists have day jobs.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#35

Post by grishka »

fennecs wrote: post #26
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity?

Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear boundary between the document and the application parts.

Did the particular (Adobe's proprietary) implementation of Flash player suck? Yes, sure. Could this have been done better? Yes, sure. Is it possible to reimplement a Flash player from scratch within a reasonable timeframe with a small team of developers? Yes, sure, Ruffle[1] is a thing, and it's being actively developed.

I miss Flash. I hope it makes a comeback eventually.

[1] https://ruffle.rs

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#36

Post by thghtihadanacct »

pronlover723 wrote: post #8

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…

This is coming down to vendor control. My industry uses adobe more than I like and adobe knows photoshop is something people will try to pirate as long as it is a distributable application. Big business wants the next web so they get to say who loads their proprietary tools. Coming soon, you will be signing into all 'your' applications.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#37

Post by na85 »

fennecs wrote: post #26
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

>Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity?

You aren't allowed to have that, because it's not profitable for the web developer crowd's bosses. So your "slight bit of interactivity" becomes "several megabytes of surveillance and advertising".

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#38

Post by Tyr42 »

fennecs wrote: post #26
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

I think it's point 2. In the article, that it shouldn't be compatible, as you'll end up having to implement all of chrome again.

And the anecdote about adding the tracking code for one thing, but all the other market segmentation information getting turned on afterwards because it can.

But yeah, I do want comments on my blog posts, and hn linking to docs.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#39

Post by r-w »

If there is a document web, it needs to have paid subscriptions baked in. Like a 404 page but for those who aren’t paying subscribers, and maybe even a way to show an article preview.

That’s the only way monetization would work, other than selling personal data or relying on goodwill. And like it or not, profitability is a necessary part of writing for the web, for many people and almost all organizations.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#40

Post by sli »

r-w wrote: post #39

If there is a document web, it needs to have paid subscriptions baked in. Like a 404 page but for those who aren’t paying subscribers, and maybe even a way to show an article preview. That’s the only way monetization would work, other than selling personal data or relying on goodwill. And like it or not, profitability is a necessary part of writing for the web, for many people and almost all organizations.

> Like a 404 page but for those who aren’t paying subscribers, ...

We got HTTP 402 and nobody used it because it was never standardized (I guess).

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