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Stop pushing the web forward

quirksmode.org

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Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#3

Post by charlesray »

>This sounds cool, but why would we want to do that? We’ve done without for years. More importantly, end users have done without for years, and are quite used to a slight delay when they load another page.

People were used to dying of typhoid, too.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#4

Post by skwosh »

As a corollary I'd like to say: stop pushing JavaScript forward. There seems to be a lot of focus on providing syntactic sugar for things that already exist (like classes, decorators, etc) at the expense of flexibility and composability (executable class bodies, @foo vs normal function application, etc).

What JavaScript needs much more IMO is a (better) stdlib, with more datatypes and procedures than currently available (including big numbers, the various flavours of trees, better support for equality and comparison, etc).

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#6

Post by terrywilcox »

charlesray wrote: post #3

>This sounds cool, but why would we want to do that? We’ve done without for years. More importantly, end users have done without for years, and are quite used to a slight delay when they load another page. People were used to dying of typhoid, too.

Quite a valid comparison.

The damage caused by the lack of Navigation Transitions in web browsers has made the news repeatedly for decades. My great grandfather died in the hospital after he was crushed by a non-animated change to a different webpage.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#7

Post by bhousel »

skwosh wrote: post #4

As a corollary I'd like to say: stop pushing JavaScript forward. There seems to be a lot of focus on providing syntactic sugar for things that already exist (like classes, decorators, etc) at the expense of flexibility and composability (executable class bodies, @foo vs normal function application, etc). What JavaScript needs much more IMO is a (better) stdlib, with more datatypes and procedures than currently availa…

>What JavaScript needs much more IMO is a (better) stdlib, with more datatypes and procedures than currently available (including big numbers, the various flavours of trees, etc).

Isn't that "pushing JavaScript forward?"

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#8

Post by ixtli »

> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course.

If we're doing unpopular opinion time, I think this is the real issue that no one wants to talk about. I'm all for whatever feature development the community can standardize. Apple, google, mozilla, and etc. all have smart people working for them and when they cooperate things seem to work out fine. The problem is trying to achieve the feel of native applications in a _non_ native application. Browsers should do one thing well, but that one thing has no real business being duplication of mathematica, quake, or visual studio.

It's always interesting to see a Show HN where someone cleverly gets an approximation of one or another of those things running in the browser, but come on. Making the browser the operating system is simply going to push the same old incompatibility problems into the browser. It's not going to solve them.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#9

Post by anp »

I've seen this sentiment a few times: "don't try to replicate native apps in the browser." Which makes sense from the standpoint that the browser is just getting ridiculous, like a mini-OS unto itself.

However, web apps also allow organizations to write once for many platforms in a much more seamless way than most cross-platform native toolkits I've seen. It's the same reason that desktop Java was in vogue for a little while: you only have to write one UI, and you can run it from a HTTP connection with almost no local permissions. Of course, this was (and still is) a security nightmare, but browsers now do a pretty good job of sandboxing individual code blobs, and also do a pretty good job of abstracting away the native UI. Web apps also provide low or zero installation overhead (low friction to getting a user onboarded/working/monetized/whatever).

It would be nice to see some progressive enhancement folks address how to resolve these pain points on the native side, rather than just saying web shouldn't be like native.

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