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A clean start for the web (2020)

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#81

Post by brabel »

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…

> 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!

No, the technology of today developed extremely slowly for the most part, it evolved in tiny, tiny steps, sometimes taking centuries.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#82

Post by shmde »

Aaand internal leaked restricted bug show firefox is testing its frontend to use blink[1] ( developed by google ). I thought abc.xyz which is owned by google was an obnoxious thing to do which meant the internet began (abc) and ended ( xyz ) with google. But now its clear that it really is just them playing god. Really wondering how long till ftc breaks up google. Every fucking engine is now chromium derivative or google made.

edit: added leak link.

edit 2: Turns out to be fake, confirmed by mozilla employee[2]. Stupid 4chan.

[1]https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/86921913/

[2]https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/uovcdh/only_a_rumo...

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#83

Post by wewxjfq »

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.

In the heyday of the web, people weren't doing anything for money and it created good content. Where is the good content now? A billion useless "Best $product to buy in $current_year" articles with 20 affiliate links to drown the web in SEO spam. Commercialization is a race to the bottom. Good art and literature was created by people who had an urge to create and not by people who had bills to pay.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#84

Post by lifthrasiir »

virchau13 wrote: post #78
lifthrasiir wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't get me wrong, I like interactive documents a lot, but they also take a lot of time and effort to produce and thus will remain a minority. Texts greatly outweigh every other medium primarily because they are very easy to produce and distribute.

> they also take a lot of time and effort to produce This is a case of bad tooling, not an intrinsic fact. https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/understanding-layout-algorit... is an article that could have easily been written without any interactive components. All the author did was replace traditional code blocks with an embed to a web playground (e.g. by s/Code/Playground/g in a MDX file). Ta-da, the demonstrations are…

> All the author did was replace traditional code blocks with an embed to a web playground (e.g. by s/Code/Playground/g in a MDX file).

Well, not surprising given that the article was about the web technology (which powers the application web, of course!). I might have been convinced otherwise.

There is indeed some negative feedback loop going here. But I think the cost to achieve interactivity has been decreasing over the time (compare with, say, 1990s' interactive CD) and the gap is still very significant, even with a very favorable condition (nowadays you can practically have interactivity anywhere anytime!). I'm happy to be proven wrong, but for now I'm not optimistic about that.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#85

Post by chrismorgan »

shmde wrote: post #82

Aaand internal leaked restricted bug show firefox is testing its frontend to use blink[1] ( developed by google ). I thought abc.xyz which is owned by google was an obnoxious thing to do which meant the internet began (abc) and ended ( xyz ) with google. But now its clear that it really is just them playing god. Really wondering how long till ftc breaks up google. Every fucking engine is now chromium derivative or go…

Citation?

(I haven’t heard anything about this, and from what I do know of Firefox I can’t see how anything even vaguely like what I think you’re describing would be technically feasible.)

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#86

Post by gmueckl »

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…

The distinction can be maintained easily by limiting the application client in its ability to display fancy text. In fact, it should have very little support for styling and layouting should be restricted to some nested grid like dynamic system without pixel perfect control. Part of the predicament of the current web is the expectation that you get fancy corporate designs reproduced pixel perfect everywhere. Break that for applications and you will limit the viability of reader applications for content that should be served as documents.

Imagine a browser that throws out almost all CSS the moment it sees a form tag or a line of javascript.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#87

Post by hutzlibu »

arbenpurben wrote: post #70
recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

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…

This. This gets us 98% of the way. The people that have to worry about the 2% are not you, because your web app almost certainly doesn’t need offline-first of FPS-like user interaction, so in 98% of cases, hypermedia + tech like htmx gets you 100% of the way. For pete’s sake, just let your server serve html. Replace only the parts of the page that need to update… with html. From your server. The poor thing is just si…

"“But it serves JSON” … is like buying a Bugatti Veyron, just to park it in your garage and use its exhaust fumes to dry your clothes 6 days of the week, with a 2 minute drive around the block on Sundays."

That is a very creative analogy, but not one I agree with.

My servers should do as little as possible. They should not serve files just for the sake of it, because they have all these shiny serving features.

And I like JSON as it is not as verbose as html and I can directly work with it in javascript. And then update my html where I need it locally.

If you prefer it differently, than this is fine. The web supports many ways.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#88

Post by shmde »

chrismorgan wrote: post #85
shmde wrote: post #82

Aaand internal leaked restricted bug show firefox is testing its frontend to use blink[1] ( developed by google ). I thought abc.xyz which is owned by google was an obnoxious thing to do which meant the internet began (abc) and ended ( xyz ) with google. But now its clear that it really is just them playing god. Really wondering how long till ftc breaks up google. Every fucking engine is now chromium derivative or go…

Citation? (I haven’t heard anything about this, and from what I do know of Firefox I can’t see how anything even vaguely like what I think you’re describing would be technically feasible.)

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/86921913/

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#89

Post by zozbot234 »

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…

> except it's missing certain document features like italics, bold and superscript

There are ANSI escape codes for these features. It's not missing.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#90

Post by Tade0 »

fredrikholm wrote: post #79
anoy8888 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who is not excited by this new web idea ? As a web developer, we have to deal with framework and library major reinventions every couple of years and now you are telling me that you are going to reinvent browser rendering engines that we need to develop and test and then also your crappy reinventions . Thanks but no thanks . Please just build on top of giants . Not reinvent everything all the time .

New idea? Hypermedia is from 1965, and has been a thing since 1991; HTML. recursivedoubts HTMX library is cutting edge 2005 technology. To add to both of your arguments, "JS-routers" like SvelteKit/NuxtJS/NextJS are literally reinventing server side rendering for the client to then call the actual server to get data ... to render HTML. HTMX, LiveView, Livewire, Hotwire etc are escape hatches back to sanity.

> SvelteKit/NuxtJS/NextJS are literally reinventing server side rendering for the client to then call the actual server to get data ... to render HTML.

It's all done in one call - at least in Svelte. You can even render all this into a fully static site.

Meanwhile htmx and the like is the same idea that was popular 15-ish years ago, which died for good reasons.

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