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Stop pushing the web forward

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Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#21

Post by rgbrenner »

We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to.

How about this.. YOU take a break. Stop trying to keep up with every little new thing that comes out. Wait a while.

And you'll get exactly what you want.

The tools that it turns out were a bad idea will die. And those that are good will thrive.

And you'll get more time to learn the actually useful ones... and you'll get to learn from the mistakes others made early on.

Yes, you'll be a bit behind.. but you're apparently already ok with that anyway.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#23

Post by mobiuscog »

cognivore wrote: post #13

"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." Does it? I used to think that. Until every medium-complexity or worse web project I've worked on took forever as we went through all the different browsers and OS's and now mobile and tablets and responsive and OMG just give me a decent native app tool now pleas…

It certainly allows (some) organisations to 'believe' this.

Unfortunately.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#24

Post by ebauch »

anp wrote: post #9

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 litt…

Totally agree. Just look at the mess with mobile OS. It is nearly impossible to develop a native app yourself without excluding half of the world population. In my opinion, native mobile apps have been always an intermediary and I wouldn't mind seeing all of them going away if some better web app alternative comes along.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#25

Post by Eric_WVGG »

“Everybody will have a favourite upcoming feature that would be hit by the moratorium — mine is offline capabilities.”

Mine would be next-generation image handling —  tags* and some sort of alpha-blendable lossy format.

I work for a lot of artists and designers, these guys want fast, retina full-screen responsive images, and I’m not sure that it’s an unreasonable expectation, but I’ve got enough technological hoops to jump through to recall the days of “Netscape Now!” and “IE 5” badges.

* don‘t talk to me about the unholy abortion that is srcset

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#26

Post by ams6110 »

rgbrenner wrote: post #21

We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. How about this.. YOU take a break. Stop trying to keep up with every little new thing that comes out. Wait a while. And you'll get exactly what you want. The tools that it turns out were a bad idea will die.…

I do this. I don't even really think about anything new until others have put it through a shakedown for at least a year.

Choose your tools and frameworks judiciously, learn them well, and you will be much better off (and less stressed) than the folks who are continually chasing the latest thing.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#27

Post by swalsh »

The web is an ecosystem, browsers are species. They create new mutations in a new attempt to thrive. The definition for what it means to thrive is always the same. To replicate oneself the most. That means the largest user adoption. If performance is what users judge by, then browsers will adopt to it. If transitions are what users what, than browsers will adopt.

IE had trouble adopting, it had the wrong balance of features. That's why it started to go extinct.

You can't DESIGN an ecosystem. You can't tell an ecosystem to stop churning. It just keeps going.

Timing also matters. If a fish evolves a hand, does that make a better fish? Maybe not, but if the fish starts breathing, and living out of water... maybe those hands would be pretty useful.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#28

Post by angersock »

bhousel wrote: post #7
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?"

It's slightly different.

The addition of sets and symbols, for example, did little to change what an existing codebase looked like. Similarly, adding explicit trees, binums, and so on won't really change much.

The improvements going on right now, though, seem mainly concerned with syntactical sugar and extra syntax. The problem (and I'm in a minority here, I think) is that this creep and bloat takes a quirky language that fits into one's head and instead starts making it a rat's nest of special-cases and odd interactions. This is the sort of thing that caused C++ so much trouble.

Once they add annotations and shared state and threading (and that's coming), the party will be over and the earth salted.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#29

Post by mrspeaker »

rgbrenner wrote: post #21

We need a break. We need an opportunity to learn to the features we already have responsibly — without tools! Also, we need the time for a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. How about this.. YOU take a break. Stop trying to keep up with every little new thing that comes out. Wait a while. And you'll get exactly what you want. The tools that it turns out were a bad idea will die.…

This works for the latest JavaScript framework, but is a lot more problematic when it comes to jamming fads into the browser: we have to support them, and work around them for a long long time.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#30

Post by rtpg »

ixtli wrote: post #8

> 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 try…

I'm sorry but how would making browsers the operating system cause the incompatability problems to reappear? I think this is massively ignoring the realities:

- there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment

- There's a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers. Differences among current browsers are more among performance and experimental features

So currently, if Google, Apple, and MSFT decided to jointly ban all native apps and only have a web browser on their smartphones, we would have a much better compatability situation, since so much functionality has been standardised on that end, and _actually respected_.

The browser is basically what the JVM tried to be, a write once work anywhere solution that is pretty well sandboxed. It's miles better than pretty much every other cross-platform piece of tooling in existence.

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