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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)

#91

Post by gmueckl »

rektide wrote: post #66
grishka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This sort of "wouldnt it be great to have some other thing, so we can murder the rest of the web platform" is so grotesque to me, just repugnant & vile & cruel. Flash is a comedically shit technology. There's a couple animation capabilities it had that were nice & simple & people adore it endlessly for that. But Flash hated users, gave them nothing, no power (alike a native app) & was a big proprietary anti-hypermedi…

Your rant is focused so much on the actual implementation details of Flash that it misses the point that the abstract concept of a VM based application container/sandbox could have been a great thing. In fact, it was such a great idea that browser developers were forced into a pretty tough struggle to actually kill it in order to stay relevant themselves. Adobe's poor stewardship sealed the deal, not conceptual shortcomings.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#92

Post by brtkdotse »

hutzlibu wrote: post #87
arbenpurben wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My servers should do as little as possible.

Why? It’s not like they wear and tear?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#93

Post by jacobr »

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…

Instead we get Web Components, where HTML is an afterthought. Only years later are we getting things like Declarative Shadow DOM. You’re always expected to write custom JS for every single component on your page, instead of doing something like “add this functionality whenever you see the `foo` attribute on any HTML element”

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#94

Post by chrismorgan »

shmde wrote: post #88
chrismorgan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/uovcdh/only_a_rumo...: multiple authenticated sources confirm this to be a fake. Beyond that, some details about the presentation of the page don’t match what you’d expect (covered in the comments), and the terminology in the comment looks quite wrong to me too (it’s a mixture of technically incorrect, suggesting technical unfamiliarity, and overly specific, suggesting technical familiarity).

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#95

Post by seydor »

I don't know, i want the web to be steered back to basics. The whole SPA thing should not exist, HTML is documents. Instead, native platforms should provide each of the widgets and UIs that the SPAs download in each and every page load. There's already a lot of tags for things like date and such. We should have more native support for all kinds of interactions in touchscreens too. After all they are not that many - after so many years only few kinds of touchscreen interactions have survived

Then CSS needs to be trimmed down to basics too. Why is grid layout implemented in CSS instead of a tag, it doesnt make sense and is very hard to read.

Then there's the browser, which has remained fairly consistent and provides lots of functionality for navigation that is generally OK and well understood by people. SPAs destroy that by building another virtual machine layer on top of it (my pet peeve is ?force_cold_boot=1)

And then, why is WebRTC so complicated ? do we need to support all those codecs and nat traversal rules forever? Video communication should be as simple as adding a tag

HTML should be readable by common people, they should be able to easily experiment with it, that's how the fun begins again

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#96

Post by dgb23 »

wewxjfq wrote: post #83
krapp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

The good places of the web still exist. Nobody is stopping anyone to participate and enjoy them.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#97

Post by _448 »

brtkdotse wrote: post #92
hutzlibu wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"“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…

> My servers should do as little as possible. Why? It’s not like they wear and tear?

One advantage of pushing the computing on the user-side is that it reduces the load on the server: less requests, less processing and smaller request sizes. Thus it reduces the bill for the developers/companies :)

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#99

Post by thestepafter »

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…

I have been reading a lot about HTMX and planning to develop an app in it on top of a JSON API. With that being said do you know if any open source apps that do authentication on top of a JSON API using HTMX? I’m having trouble conceptualizing the structure and flow of data from just reading the docs. Primarily around maintaining state between pages. (Looking to use JWT for authentication.)

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#100

Post by dgb23 »

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…

Htmx is very well designed library and I‘ve been using it more and more. It’s great to have it in my toolbox.

The reason it, and the many other cool libraries can exist is borne out of the strength of the web, namely a solid, accessible foundation of protocols and formats with extensibility via JavaScript.

This last part is incredibly important, because it gives us enough power to create and explore new things, while the web standards can conservatively adopt new capabilities.

The web is working as intended, and while there are many issues and lacking areas (which htmx illustrates beautifully), we can take a step back and appreciate how amazing and empowering a platform it is.

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