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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)

#121

Post by recursivedoubts »

Tade0 wrote: post #90
fredrikholm wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the reason it, that is the idea of hypermedia, died was because you weren't able to achieve the same level of interactivity as you could with javascript-based applications, even back in 2005

this was due to the fact that HTML stopped advancing as a hypermedia, as I say in my original comment

htmx and other libraries are attempting to address that by pushing HTML forward as a hypermedia, which allows you to implement more sophisticated user interfaces purely in hypermedia terms:

https://htmx.org/examples/

the hypermedia idea itself is extremely innovative and interesting and, at some level, today's javascript applications are new iterations of an even older idea: client-server based RPC applications, as we built back in the 1980s

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#123

Post by snomad »

_448 wrote: post #97
brtkdotse wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 :)

Since all the clients have to do the work, doesn't that result in a net increase in electricity consumption? Since most electricity comes from fossil fuels doesn't that in net hurt our battle against climate change?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#124

Post by codethief »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #121
Tade0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

the reason it, that is the idea of hypermedia, died was because you weren't able to achieve the same level of interactivity as you could with javascript-based applications, even back in 2005 this was due to the fact that HTML stopped advancing as a hypermedia, as I say in my original comment htmx and other libraries are attempting to address that by pushing HTML forward as a hypermedia, which allows you to implement…

> HTML stopped advancing as a hypermedia

Nitpick: "media" is plural. The singular is "medium".

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#125

Post by mattcwilson »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #55
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…

> 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…

Not sure if either or both of you are lumping the article author in as “modern tech people.”

From the article:

> I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in a fraction of the time of the web. The memory consumption could be tiny. It would be incredibly accessible, by default. You could make great-looking default stylesheets and share alternative user stylesheets. With dramatically limited scope, you could port it to all kinds of devices.

> And, maybe most importantly, what would website editing tools look like? They could be way simpler.

And:

> There are a lot of other ways to look at and solve this problem. I think it is a problem, for everyone except Google. The idea of a web browser being something we can comprehend, of a web page being something that more people can make, feels exciting to me.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#126

Post by sodapopcan »

brtkdotse wrote: post #108
_448 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

So by spending thousands of dollars on developer time we can save dozens of dollars on server costs? ;)

Eeeeeeexactly

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#127

Post by mattcwilson »

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…

... so why doesn’t Hacker News do any of that? Isn’t it ironic that it was built by a Silicon Valley VC?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#128

Post by bsenftner »

IMHO, the human race has degraded in maturity in the last 20-30 years, and today we do not have a critical mass of technically adept, intellectually mature and who are also skilled debating communicators capable of making this change without the entire process derailing, and the result being far, far worse than what we have today.

Just as described in the article: as soon as the opportunity presents itself, the business suits start mucking with the implementations and strategies, and at that point either the technically mature debating communicators step in and end the off-goal meddling or the entire process and effort is lost.

We do not have it in us anymore. We are not the generation that went to the moon. We're the consumer marketing ruined follow-on generation with a diverse mind filled to the brim with web3/crypto/socio-political-religious-end-of-the-world panic.

Case in point: https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-stud...

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#129

Post by Tade0 »

cassepipe wrote: post #101
Tade0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Curious about those good reasons. Care to elaborate ?

The chief reason was organisational - you needed full-stack developers for just about anything and they had to specialize in your stack - especially the language used on the backend.

While there's no shortage of frameworks on the frontend, it's all still JS/TS, so everyone is using the same idioms.

Other problems:

1. 1:1 mapping of endpoints to presentation. Common cases where this blows up:

A. A list of items which looks different depending on the context or has different styles of presentation switchable via buttons.

B. Two or more different data sources, combined in different ways.

Now you need endpoints for each context(A) or combination(B), which makes a mess in your cache. You also send way more data this way - especially if your users tend to fidget(A).

2. Inherently slow. You either replace whole parts of the DOM - which triggers a massive reflow or you make smaller changes by comparing new and old HTML in which case you need to parse both versions and deduce what changed and how.

Unfortunately since this is all just HTML you don't have object references to the data that was used, so you can't employ some of the neat performance tricks modern frameworks use, like detecting a row swap.

3. HTML elements with state, e.g. a canvas, video/audio, file upload input or even a textarea with a selection. You have to store this state somewhere, but sometimes (like with a "tainted" canvas) you can't access it at all due to security reasons, so now you have to cut around it when you're updating.

Selection is especially a piece of work, because browser implementations differ significantly to this day.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#130

Post by antifa »

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…

> end users don't want to write their own stylesheets

They probably do, but not at today's complexity of CSS and not in constant defense of every website with atrocious over-design.

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