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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)

#51

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…

I’ve been thinking about this as well. Something like an application markup language.

index.aml with an application object model. No idea what it would look like, but I’d love for html to just be allowed to be html.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#52

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

HTMX is fantastic. Today I built a proof of concept in Django+HTMX+D3.js. Fully reactive, interactive, HTML-first widgets with no npm nor "build" stage. Do anything with good ole HTML templates and just HTMX and D3!

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#53

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

I've always been shocked that HTML forms only support GET and POST and there's zero interest in supporting more HTTP methods in forms even in 2022. If forms supported the whole range of HTTP methods we could have a user facing web that's identical to a REST API, with different Accept and Content-type headers. Imagine how much development time we could save if forms supported DELETE and PUT!

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#54
In a landscape consumed with pushing crypto scams and web3 nonsense it was nice just to see a small blurp about someone explaining basically how I feel.

I like the web for different things but they are in a bit of a state of conflict. Things like Wikipedia are virtually unaffected by webassembly while things like Twitter and Facebook might make good use of it.

The future has yet to be written but like the article I kind of just know we are in a transition period from what we have to ...something.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#55
post #17

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…

> I mean if modern tech people had their way, the web would have never been anything but a bare data API on a blockchain, and no one without at least a bachelors' degree in CS or engineering would even know about it. And oh yeah, you'd need a license to publish anything.

They're looking for a technical solution to a social problem. They miss the Web as a space for people only like themselves. Having to share the web with normies who don't create out of _love_ or don't spend hours researching a small change like they want everyone to means folks different from them end up inhabiting the web. It's thinly veiled gatekeeping, a desire to make the web a space where only folks like them would inhabit.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#56
post #53

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

I've always been shocked that HTML forms only support GET and POST and there's zero interest in supporting more HTTP methods in forms even in 2022. If forms supported the whole range of HTTP methods we could have a user facing web that's identical to a REST API, with different Accept and Content-type headers. Imagine how much development time we could save if forms supported DELETE and PUT!

it's incredible that we got WebGL, Web Assembly and a million other things that are neat, but not really crucial to a proper hypermedia implementation, but they can't give us DELETE, PUT and PATCH in HTML, even though they are sitting there in HTTP just staring us in the face!

the irony is that DELETE, PUT and PATCH are used today almost exclusively in non-hypermedia JSON data APIs

crazy world!

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#57
post #53

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

I've always been shocked that HTML forms only support GET and POST and there's zero interest in supporting more HTTP methods in forms even in 2022. If forms supported the whole range of HTTP methods we could have a user facing web that's identical to a REST API, with different Accept and Content-type headers. Imagine how much development time we could save if forms supported DELETE and PUT!

Does that save us much time? In the systems I've worked on, the problems of deletions and edits aren't HTTP verbs, they're wild, complex business rules around authentication, authorization, auditing, etc.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#58
We need to go back even further. Consider one of the things Markdown makes “easier”… making text italic or bold. Now ask, why do we have to resort to special syntax formats for this? It should be a simple function of the keyboard itself, no more complex then shift (or caps lock). Extend this to superscript, strike-thru, etc. and a good chunk of Markdown just evaporates.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where would https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ fall? In the document web or the application web?

It can fall under any of these with minimal changes, so your question is not very meaningful. I'd say it is better suited for the application web though, because you expect interactivity. The point here is that there are not many documents that do necessarily need interactivity.

But that article is exactly what we want on the internet. It's the kind of interactive teaching demonstrations that forward looking educators have been thinking about for decades. It's not bloated or overdone; it doesn't take up significantly more processing power; it works far better than a traditional article ever could. This is what we desire the internet to be like.

It's because of articles like this one, or 3Blue1Brown videos, that I feel like the idea of "the document web" is really a step backwards: the internet is not just a glorified transmission method for paper anymore. We have computers, which are able to do so much more than paper ever could. To not exploit them for their capabilities, simply due to fear of exploitation, is far worse. How much worse do you think https://thebookofshaders.com/ would be to learn from if it couldn't include live editable demnostrations? To divide up the web into "interactive" and "non-interactive" content is to remove the ability for creators such as the author of the Mechanical Watch article to add progressive interactivity to their documents, remove the ability for learning resources to fully utilize the power of computers, to remove the ability for small fun things to be added to sites such as a Konami Code easter egg or https://bruno-simon.com/'s interactive website. And before you reply with something like "these would all go on the interactive web", my point is that dividing the web like this would not only be pointless but would also be ultimately harmful to the creation of things such as these.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#60
This kind of initiative could take off. Only if it is backed by a big player. Basically Apple Google and Microsoft.

WebAssembly is not a stand-alone application development package. It doesn’t have many of the functionalities of Flash, Applets, Silverlight or even NaCl. It has no API on its own to interact with display or keyboard and mouse. and none of the features you find in a VM such as multi threading or a memory allocator

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