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Web vs. native: let’s concede defeat

quirksmode.org

221–230 of 515 posts

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

#221

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> A little less contrast > Size Matters Strong disagree on both of these points. I view most webpages (including that one) at around 66% zoom these days, because the text is so goddamn big. And anyone advocating for less contrast needs a shovel to the head.

anyone advocating for less contrast needs a shovel to the head. Or they have the thing where high contrast makes the letters jiggle and therefore difficult to read. I get that when tired. Maximum contrast does not make for good general usability, even if you happen to like it.

This is also my experience. As long as the contrast is within the acceptable WCAG ratios for accessibility, I don't really see any problem.

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

#222
I think web technologies are a bit like AI and VR; they catch up in waves to meet demand, but they don't simply replace everything all at once.

IMHO, the reason for this is that once web technologies almost catch up to native, native buckles down and fights back (e.g., Swift), and as long as native can keep developers happy, it will always own serious market share, since it is closer to the metal (faster) and necessarily has access to more APIs (more features).

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

#223

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The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data all…

Sure. And you're also made out of meat and will die soon. And we're living on a planet that is in the long term doomed even if we half-evolved, tool-using monkeys get our shit together. (Did you know that we're half-way through the lifespan of forests ? [1] That one day the conditions just won't be right for them anymore? That never fails to sadden me.) But the interesting thing to me is what happens when we move pas…

He didn't say all technology is diseased. He was talking about the web. Writing native applications is still as fun as it has always been. Not that there isn't disease there too, but it isn't scripted and marked up to hell like the technostew that is the current web, which is what the parent was describing.

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

#224
post #59
post #47

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There's an answer to your questions. It is documented here: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

This is what you want => http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

> A little less contrast. Black on white? How often do you see that kind of contrast in real life?

While grey on white may look better, actually reading text is easier as black on white.

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

#225
honestly, thought the defeat was in the other direction. Although I am a stubborn native app loving, cloud denier, i fear more and more that I am in the minority. Everything new is web based. It is true that there are perfomance hits, communication bottlenecks and added complexity to developing on the web, but i think the biggest hurdles are slightly less obvious. Security requirements are exacerbated and the size of development units have grown intractably large. More speed requires better direct HW access but every time the web wants more, the blackhats push back and take even more. What happens when facebook advances react, google remodels appengine, AWS changes... Nothing is static, making the "who broke what" question sometimes impossible to answer.

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

#226
The web only works for mobile when you have a responsive design, which again for most people means adopting one or more frameworks. News stories should be perfect content for a mobile web presentation, and yet we have Flipboard. The app is free and the service is sub-based, so business model wasn't the issue.

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

#227
post #128

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They make more sense to my developer mind without designer background, don't suffer from CSS global namespace, inheritance side effects and browser specific behaviors.

Huh I also have a "developer" mind, and very few people would call me a designer, and those that do should re-think what a designer is. However, from my observations over the years, the cost of "browser specific" behaviors is equal to or less than the cost of learning entirely new styling paradigms every time someone puts out a new UI framework. CSS also has the benefit that over time browser specific behaviors fade…

> As far as the namespace goes - I guess, but there is nothing to stop you from coming up with your own namespacing scheme using nested CSS classes.

This doesn't work when you are just yet another developer on the team.

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

#228
post #190
post #167

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Dropbox can throw away HTTP and replace it with TCP, UDP or any other IP based protocol and it will keep on working. This is they beauty of the network communication protocols.

Dropbox without using http_port_80 would only work in a laboratory. One big reason Dropbox is valued at $1+ billion dollars is that it uses http so everyone can use it easily. Web browsers didn't require radical changes. Corporate firewall rules didn't have to change. That's how they got quick adoption and millions of users.

A business decision to use a specific network protocol doesn't define what web and network protocols are.

It is is just a consequence of what network protocols happen to be open by default.

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

#229

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> 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".

How is HD DVD better than Blu-Ray?

Maybe because it doesn't use Java for some people, :)

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

#230

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> 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…

That's certainly not what I want to share. One of the things that good video sites provide is context. E.g.: Who made this? What else have they done? How can I find them? Has this been widely seen? What do people say about it? Raw streaming urls don't get me any of that. URLs aren't just pointers to bytestreams. From a user sharing perspective, they're humans pointing to a unique thing. And what they're pointing to i…

> What do people say about it?

you want to share youtube comments with people? they are a significant value-add to you?

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