Is it because in the beginning of the web the percent of tech users was much higher than now and not revenue optimized?
I miss the programmable web (2021)
61–70 of 180 posts
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#62On 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 thi…
Isn't this just how technology progresses? Things start off as amateur pursuits but once a field becomes profiting making then professionals move in and industrialise things.
This is a good response to the vast majority of curmudgeonly HN posts tbf
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
ca. 2014 I was able to write a bookmarklet that scraped a twitter thread by accessing the DOM (even causing page navigation) and rendering it as a reply-tree.
Two things make this vastly more difficult now:
1. Twitter uses obfuscated css classes that appear to change on every deploy, which makes scraping hard.
2. You used to be able to get around the limit on bookmarklet code size by adding a script tag to the page and loading remote javascript. Now browsers respect HTTP headers that sites can use so that only scripts from whitelisted sites are loaded.
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this just how technology progresses? Things start off as amateur pursuits but once a field becomes profiting making then professionals move in and industrialise things.
This is a good response to the vast majority of curmudgeonly HN posts tbf
C'mon, let's not imply that web developers are, generally speaking, professional. ;-)
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#65Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#66this has nothing to do with security and everything to do with trying to charge $4.99 a month for everything to the maximum extent permissible under law.
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#67On 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 thi…
Isn't this just how technology progresses? Things start off as amateur pursuits but once a field becomes profiting making then professionals move in and industrialise things.
I think it was meant to be a reference to this bit in the original CSS spec:
"One of the fundamental features of CSS is that style sheets cascade; authors can attach a preferred style sheet, while the reader may have a personal style sheet to adjust for human or technological handicaps."
So CSS was originally intended for both users and web devs, but web devs "hijacked" it to be for them alone - ultimately, by removing support for user stylesheets in the dominant web browser.
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#68IMHO, we need a browser optimized for power or professional user experience (PPUX), instead of browsers optimized for dumb users (DUX).
I think Vivaldi comes the closest, if you're okay with a non-FOSS browser.
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#69I miss the "immediate web". Being able to work on simple things without feeling like they are useless, pointless or perceptibly outdated. Now it's install node, install git, install npm, install a gazillion packages, run localhost then hope everything works. Build command, clean command, eject commands, deploy command, pre processors, post processers, documentations full of so much jargon that i feel burnt out lookin…
If you build web pages without the whole JS frameworks and Node circus, they are pretty durable. Those helpers were invented because people started to build empires (complex applications) on sand (the web), so they are pretty useful for larger projects, but simple websites can still be easily built with plain HTML/CSS/JS.
Re: I miss the programmable web (2021)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)?
Anatine[0] was a Twitter client maintained by Sindre Sorhus, a popular open-source maintainer. It made use of a userscript to add extra functionality to Twitter. Sadly, this meant keeping up with Twitter's ever-changing DOM class names.
It was eventually abandoned.