I miss the programmable web (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#21

Post by pjerem » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

ehecatl42 wrote: post #13

drran wrote: post #9

IMHO, we need a browser optimized for power or professional user experience (PPUX), instead of browsers optimized for dumb users (DUX).

¿ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ ?

Looks nice, thank you !

Tree-based history is smart, so smart that I don’t understand why no « mainstream » browser implemented it yet.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#22

Post by mg » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:01 AM UTC

    I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts

I use bookmarklets all the time. I can't imagine living without them. For example, this is how I read HN:

https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1551483561621979136

The bookmarklet takes me to the latest HN post I have not seen. When I click it again, it takes me to the next I have not seen. As soon as I see a post I have seen before, I know I am up to date.

I can't imagine reading HN any other way. Because otherwise, I would have to skim the whole front page to see what's new.

It also works on threads. So, when I post something on HN and want to see the latest replies, the same bookmarklet does this for me.

I have bookmarklets for every site I use frequently.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#23

Post by ngc248 » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:04 AM UTC

ozten wrote: post #3

I thought this would be about the glory days of “Mash-ups” using web APIs. Flickr + Twitter + Delicious tags to create a new experience. 2007 ? What a period to be a hacker!

Oh those were the days. Yahoo pipes and all of the various mashups. Then the walls started closing in :(

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#24

Post by tannhaeuser » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:18 AM UTC

On a related note, Chrome has removed its user stylesheet feature years ago. I've often asked myself why we then still need this "cascading" of style sheets. It seems to have degenerated into a feature for web developers who can't make up their minds, and pushing conflicting styles to every browser for late evaluation, negatively impacting energy consumption. Or maybe they want component-like behaviors from their third-party stuff they can then adapt and override, but at the same time the comfort of not having to do so when unnecessary? And they don't want preprocessing either; nope, it has all to be in the browser, with accessibility a fig leaf for this complexity. In other words, CSS was hijacked by web devs for their convenience, as can also be seen by the custom properties feature, the upcoming nesting feature, and so on.

Another way to say this is that we have web developers now when the original web was for web authors.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#25

Post by marttt » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:21 AM UTC

grishka wrote: post #10

Huh? Userscripts are dead according to author, but I apparently never got the notice because I have about a dozen of those things installed right now. Three of them are for YouTube because it's this much annoying as is.

+1, I use somebody's Greasemonkey script to keyboard-navigate the Gmail simple HTML view. Very handy.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#26

Post by schwartzworld » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:22 AM UTC

mg wrote: post #22

I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts I use bookmarklets all the time. I can't imagine living without them. For example, this is how I read HN: https://twitter.com/marekgibney/status/1551483561621979136 The bookmarklet takes me to the latest HN post I have not seen. When I click it again, it takes me to the next I have not seen. As soon as I see a post I have seen before, I know I am up to date. I can't imagine readi…

I use then to automate annoying workflows for FE development. Sometimes you need to click through a series of things to get the UI into the state you need. A bookmarklet is a perfect solution.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#27

Post by anonyfox » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:31 AM UTC

ozten wrote: post #3

I thought this would be about the glory days of “Mash-ups” using web APIs. Flickr + Twitter + Delicious tags to create a new experience. 2007 ? What a period to be a hacker!

If we could *force* all the walled gardens to have an open API again, like some of them had back in the day, that would solve soooo many issues.

Make all the data free to use for everyone, while ML techniques get even more accessible, and let people build products with that - where they also have to provide APIs for their enriched data.

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#28

Post by incangold » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:43 AM UTC

abvdj2 wrote: post #17

grishka wrote: post #10

Huh? Userscripts are dead according to author, but I apparently never got the notice because I have about a dozen of those things installed right now. Three of them are for YouTube because it's this much annoying as is.

What do your user scripts do if you don't me asking? On a site note: Been looking for one to show reccomendations always based on simmiliar vids, not my recently watched and whatever the black box algorithm is offering me. Unfortunately I never figured out how do it properly, since the position of the element seems to be random and sometimes straight up missing.

The one that switches off the comments section makes the platform quite a bit more pleasant

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#29

Post by saurik » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:46 AM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #20

grishka wrote: post #10

Huh? Userscripts are dead according to author, but I apparently never got the notice because I have about a dozen of those things installed right now. Three of them are for YouTube because it's this much annoying as is.

They aren’t dead but with more and more build systems that obfuscate everything in the page, including CSS classes and IDs, it’s sometimes hard to do something really useful.

Would you mind giving me an example of something you've wanted to do that is really hard (or even nearly impossible) due to the these issues (so I have a standing concrete challenge case)?

Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)

#30

Post by xorcist » Sat, Jul 30, 2022, 7:48 AM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #27

ozten wrote: post #3

I thought this would be about the glory days of “Mash-ups” using web APIs. Flickr + Twitter + Delicious tags to create a new experience. 2007 ? What a period to be a hacker!

If we could *force* all the walled gardens to have an open API again, like some of them had back in the day, that would solve soooo many issues. Make all the data free to use for everyone, while ML techniques get even more accessible, and let people build products with that - where they also have to provide APIs for their enriched data.

Even at the time, html scraping was necessary for a lot of things. And lots of services that has open APIs requires access keys. I'm allowed to read your twitter feed in html anonymously, but for json I need to apply for an account in advance and login, for example. Even if we could force open APIs, it's not sufficient.