Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat • Hacker News Board

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#151

Post by pjc50 » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

Margh wrote: post #146

pjc50 wrote: post #9

Four points: a) Tooling: yes, it's still much easier to debug a native app than a pseudo-native app. b) "Emulating native leads to bad UX": this section is absolutely right. Stop hijacking scrolling and building in cruft. c) "Hassle-free web": absolutely right. You don't need an app for that. Just give us the information and let us have the basic interaction we want. No, you shouldn't present your menu as a PDF eithe…

> It's hard to deep-link into an app. Disagree. Case in point: steam://friends https://www.iana.org/assignments/uri-schemes/prov/steam /s/ steam for news://home or news://business/26-05-2015-oil-prices The content could (and definitely should) still be html, obviously not everybody you link to is going to want to install the news app and it should fall back to opening in a browser, but if you want to wrap a fancy int…

Which newspaper's app would the newspaper:// URL link to? It's certainly possible to do this, but it's often done badly. And if the app doesn't display its URLs, and they're not made available nicely in its "share" functionality, then the user isn't going to be able to work out how to refer to the article.

Also from that link: "Security considerations: Unknown, use with care." Great!

(news:// is already taken by Usenet NNTP to refer to articles by ID)

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#152

Post by the8472 » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:02 PM UTC

pswenson wrote: post #138

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

sadly and inexplicably, youtube still uses flash for video on the desktop...

check https://www.youtube.com/html5

I get full playback capability in FF nightly on windows and linux

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#153

Post by frik » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:04 PM UTC

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #105

Currently, best practices are web apps for light user interaction, native apps for heavy user interaction or complex graphical presentation, and hybrids (native app that is essentially a container for a webview) for best-of-both. My money is on hybrids for the near term. A native app with a webview gives you a lot of local control but still leverages the server power and advantages of centralized web apps. The Youtub…

I see it the same as you.

I don't have the same opinion as the author of the article. His arguments read like the article is from 3-4 years ago when the old iOS UI was still hip and Web Apps tried to recreate it with slow JS libraries.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#154

Post by cbd1984 » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:05 PM UTC

This page is so narrow, and the text so small, it's unreadable.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#155

Post by msl09 » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:05 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #144

adamc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think media playback is only part of the core functionality. The other key piece is discoverability, and on that front, YouTube is far, far better than a native media player. It also benefits hugely from urls, which allow users to share what they've found. So, arguably, YouTube's success is more about what the web does well than about it's media playback -- it just has to be "good enough" on that front.

> It also benefits hugely from urls, which allow users to share what they've found. how about http://some.storage.service.tld/path/to/video.mkv or even rtmp://some.streaming.service.tld/path/to/stream ? For sharing that would be sufficient. Of course there are some business realities (ads, copyright, paying for storage) that make direct, free access to videos unlikely. But that's basically arguing that the web is a s…

I would like to complement that native youtube(the one used on mobile) is far better at playback while keeping nearly every other advantage that it has on the web.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#156

Post by forgotAgain » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

The post forgets a lot of the history of why web apps were originally welcomed: they allowed a choice of platform. Going native undeniably gives a better user experience. However there is a trade off in developing for a single platform that cross platform tooling cannot yet remove sufficiently.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#157

Post by joeblau » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

I just had this discussion a few weeks ago and it wasn't even about mobile applications; It was about mobile application testing frameworks. We were deciding between a hybrid approach to testing (Appium) vs native (UIAutomation). I don't think these types of debates are going to end soon because most of the decision makers in large companies have grown up with and love the web. For the most part, I've only seen the web get faster and better since the mid 90's, but that was limited to the platform of a computer.

The theoretical maximum benefit of writing a program once that runs everywhere (watch, phone, phablet, tablet, laptop, desktop, tv) and is always up to date (computing is done in the cloud) is extremely enticing but has serious performance implications. What you always end up with is a developer friendly framework that contains cases for each platform and in most cases, doesn't have all of the features each individual developer needs (Bootstrap, Appium, Node.js, React, Angular, etc...).

I want the web to win, but in most cases the DOM was not built and designed for the direction that native applications are going.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#158

Post by wernercd » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:07 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #85

fizk wrote: post #42

Remember Flash? Narrow the gap, add a bit of Steve Jobs and Boom! The web Won. Look at a site like YouTube today. All the tooling we've created and all the progress of the open web platform that has made that site happen is incredible. If we've just given up 10 years ago, saying to ourselves that the web should only be for documents, then we would be missing out big time right now. It’s not for every site to try and…

> Look at a site like YouTube today. And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback. Often I find myself using youtube-dl to fetch a youtube video and just play it in a regular media player because it just works better than what browsers have to offer. There even are addons to export YT playlists to VLC and stream them. pdfjs is great. but every 3rd scientific paper I read tends to be som…

> And yet any media player beats it at its core functionality: video playback.

And at it's core, BetMax is better than VHS. HD-DVD is better than Blu-Ray.

Often, it's not about what is "better". It's about who has the most moment, is easier, less encumbered by DRM, etc.

Sometimes it's better to download Youtube... more often than not, Youtube "just works".

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#159

Post by karl42 » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:08 PM UTC

felipeerias wrote: post #100

nkuttler wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After 25 years, why do web designers need to create their own page transition mechanics for long-form articles Why do you need page transitions for articles at all? The only reason I can think of is for more ad displays. Ok, if you have, say, a long manual with multiple chapters that would be several hundred pages when printed it can be nice to break it up, but that's probably not what you meant. > photo galleries…

Have you tried to disable pagination in reading apps like iBooks or Instapaper? Long articles and books are more comfortable to read if they are paginated: one small tap, one pageful of new stuff. Far more convenient and less prone to losing your place than scrolling.

Using pages to display text is fine. I regularly use space to scroll a page down when reading a long text in the browser because it is more pleasant than constantly scrolling. But fixed pages should not be part of the document markup in most cases. Reading a PDF on my phone is not a pleasure just because I can't just flow the text to fit my device.

Re: Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

#160

Post by cicero » Tue, May 26, 2015, 1:09 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #98

pjmlp wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... TCPIP, DNS routing.. Also known as Ethernet protocols, nothing to do with "The Web".

I thought I was clear that I'm not using the traditional definition of "web" but to explain what "the web" has become . It's about the evolution of how society sees the web and not about what its original purpose is. Dropbox uses html and http. Drew Houston and his team are not going to submit an RFC so that the internet has a new protocol and port "dropbox://myaddressoffiles:8675". No, Dropbox the application will j…

My experience is it's the other way around. I am the Technology Director at a school, and when a teacher tells me "the Internet is not working," he is saying that when he clicks on the Internet Explorer or Chrome icon, he's not getting what he expects. Rather than the web becoming the Internet, to them, them Internet is only what they see through the browser. The fact that Dropbox or Facetime also uses the Internet does not occur to many people.