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I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

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Re: I’m done with the web

#141

Post by d4nt »

laumars wrote: post #109

> The hilarious obsession with file size is the start of my frustrations with the web community. It's not so hilarious if you're the one paying for bandwidth when hundreds of thousands of users are accessing your SSL site each day. Or if you're desperately trying to pull one page up quickly while on your smart phone in a region with sketchy (at best) mobile reception. I'm one of those people who are obsessed with kee…

Yes, the relationship between page load speed and bounce rate is well proven: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1

Re: I’m done with the web

#142

Post by kevincennis »

paulirish wrote: post #123
kevincennis wrote: post #24

Kind of surprised to see that this was posted by Paul Irish, considering he's such a huge web evangelist. There are definitely some valid points in the article, but at the end of the day, it's hard for me to accept that The Right Way™ to do web development is to completely abstract away HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Certainly I live and breathe the web and do everything I can to advocate for its success. I helped out Randy with this post because I think this perspective is both legit and underheard. Plenty of folks that work tirelessly to improve the web platform share frustration that many developers for the platform don't take it seriously as an application development platform, don't learn from past mistakes, and don't adopt…

Thanks for the reply. I was hoping you'd weigh in.

Re: I’m done with the web

#143

Post by mooreds »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #101
pifflesnort wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. It won what , exactly? The war against Gopher for presentation of hypertext documents and information display? There's more to heaven and earth than data presentation and consumption. The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer? Cappu…

> The examples of genuinely great web applications are few and far between, if not near non-existent. Are Google Apps really the best the web has to offer? Every good web application beats its desktop rivals simply by being ubiquitious. People who dismiss the web typically ignore this simple fact completely. But it's always been true, you can look back to 1997 when Yahoo Mail killed the desktop email client business…

I agree. Here are two (old) essays that really sum up this argument for me:

How Microsoft lost the API war: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

and

The Location Field Is the New Command Line: http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/location_field

Note that both of these articles kvetch about user experience and how the web simply can't compare to native apps, but emphasize that the ease of deployment matters more.

Also, note that the app store model obviates some of the deployment difficulties of native apps and makes it almost as easy to install native apps on the phone as it is to visit a web page.

Re: I’m done with the web

#144

Post by parasubvert »

jacquesm wrote: post #23
lukifer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On top of all that the web is incredibly messy. That is arguably both a bug and a feature. The web is an untended jungle, possibly the most diverse of any technical ecosystem. Democracy and markets are messy too, but I think most of us would rather not give those up.

When it comes to technology messy is not a feature but a drawback. It precludes a very important thing from manifesting itself, reliability. The difference between the backbone of the internet (TCP/IP) compared to the maze that is web development is simply astounding. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do stuff that was child's play on any computer 20+ years ago just because it is on the web completely b…

I was on the Internet regularly 25 years ago. "Simple network games" did not exist, they had incredibly complex protocols and failure conditions (remember setting up Netrek?).

Chat services also incredibly difficult to run correctly over the Internet that there was no proliferation, there was... IRC. Which had its own major messes (recalling EFnet netsplits almost hourly in the early 90s).

Or let's talk about BBS'. So, you could do ANSI art fairly easily, but let's recall the hassle of handling multiple users on the software of the day. You usually didn't. BBS games (Tradewars, Legend of the Red Dragon, etc.) were turn based - someone dialed in, played their turn for the day, and waited for everyone else to dial in and play their turn. Email and Fidonet EchoGroups came in daily, or maybe twice a day, when you dialed into your upstream provider. The only way you could run a multitasking BBS with multiple phone lines was mostly DESQview, OS/2, or the BBS software itself had its own multi-threading.

The Internet didn't replace IRC and BBS'... the Web did. Not that they're gone completely, just no where near as important as they once were.

Network games are OTOH are still as complex as Netrek because they don't fit a Hypermedia architecture.

But ultimately I think you have nostalgia for a better world that never existed. Which is fine if you want inspiration for new ideas but... it is important to understand why the Web won: for many cases, it was better than what we had.

Re: I’m done with the web

#145

Post by at-fates-hands »

It seems like the author has been out of the workforce for several years, came back and realized this wasn't how things were when he left and now he's pissed.

The rate at which technology moves, you can't have any kind of framework that requires huge overhead, no matter how good it is. If people can't pick up and start building stuff with it right away, it's not going to gain traction. Add in decision makers don't allow you to just take a week to learn a framework you think will be awesome for a project you might be working on soon. Time is still money and nobody has the time or patience to learn something which has a high overhead. While I agree this sucks, it's just the way the industry works these days.

I do believe there will be a cost to this somewhere down the road, and the collective pendulum will swing back to how the author prefers it.

Re: I’m done with the web

#146

Post by mooreds »

jacquesm wrote: post #51
corresation wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. Re-read that again and seriously think about it, because comments such as yours don't accept that simple reality. Do you contest it? Do you argue that the web somehow circumvented the competition? For 15 years I've been promoting the web with groups that I've…

Windows also 'won'. That does not make it the best solution. Merely the most successful.

What is your definition of 'best'?

Unfortunately, this argument (which tends to imply technical excellence should trump all other factors in the success of a technology) has been used in technology for a long time, but frankly, in the end doesn't matter.

Ask Betamax, OS/2, etc, etc.

Re: I’m done with the web

#147

Post by cromwellian »

The biggest problem with Web Development today, IMHO, and the biggest reason why people desire Widget frameworks in the first place, is that the modern browser rendering pipeline is too complex for most people to understand.

If you want to create an app which can consistently animate or scroll at 60fps, avoid jank, and random hiccups, and do cross-platform between WebKit, Firefox, and IE9/10, you will find it enormously painful. And often, a solution for one particular UI design won't compose cleanly with others.

How many developers use the Chrome DevTools timeline, and minimize the time spend computing layout and the amount of repaints? How many of them arrange for optimal use of the Compositor?

This is one of the challenges in Web developer vs iOS or Android, where the UI performance is more predictable with fewer surprises. Hence, the desire for a Web framework with Widgets that is "idiot proof" when it comes to high performance. This rubs some people the wrong way because you lose flexibility to control the look and feel in many cases and must settle for building with out-of-the-box stuff, but the productivity benefits are undeniable.

Re: I’m done with the web

#148

Post by ahoge »

> Ember [being 49kB in size is] still far too big for many. Yet we conveniently forget that loading just a few images will quickly surpass that 49K of code.

50kB of compressed and minified JS aren't the same as a 50kB JPEG. The JS must be parsed and compiled which is a far heavier operation than decoding an image.

The last time I looked, it took about 100msec to parse and compile 100kB of minified and gzipped JavaScript on a desktop. However, after all of this you still won't get the full speed. It needs to run for a bit and then the hot parts of the code will be replaced with more optimized code. Again, this takes some precious resources.

An image, on the other hand, is decoded within a few msecs and that's the end of that.

Size is just one metric. It won't tell you the whole story.

Re: I’m done with the web

#149

Post by Irregardless »

> Google Now is one of the most exciting pieces of technology I’ve seen in a long time. It’s solving problems that couldn’t be solved four years ago.

Showing people sports scores and traffic reports before they ask for them? Well, at least that gives us an accurate picture of your perspective (or lack thereof). The Galaxy Nexus is the best phone I've ever used or owned, but I couldn't possibly care less about Now. It's usually known as "that annoying thing that keeps popping up in my notification bar".

Everyone in the IT industry understands the frustration of trying to help people who are unwilling to change and insist on repeating history. Most of us don't give up quite as easily though...

Re: I’m done with the web

#150

Post by paranoiacblack »

nkuttler wrote: post #70

I had a quick look and cappuccino apps are not crawlable, at least the demos aren't. Sorry, but it doesn't look like cappuccino gets what the web is about. As somebody who uses text interfaces primarily I don't think desktop apps are amazing anyway, even if I see that they are better for some tasks. The web browser is the only graphical tool I use daily, I don't need things inside to look like desktop apps. shudder

Yeah, this was my reaction as well. I'm kind of surprise someone has fondness for Desktop Apps anymore, because I only have one and it's my web browser so I do development and get other work done. Other than that it's terminal based running non-gui applications. Desktop doesn't really have a place on the web from where I'm sitting.
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