Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop pushing the web forward

quirksmode.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 307 posts

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#61

Post by apalmer »

pikzen wrote: post #52
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment Xamarin.Forms is the closest I can think of. Qt too, kind of. >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. It's true, the browser succeeded as a working everywhere…

I get where your coming from, and agree with a lot of what you say.

BUT, Fundamentally...

>The web as an application delivery medium is a failed experiment, patched up on all sides and held together with 40MB of polyfills on every page.

Is just not a true statement. Or rather, the web sucks, but it is the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#63

Post by golergka »

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.…

By the way, one of the best websites I know, c2.com (I don't know anything about this consulting company, but these pages constantly come up in search results and offer best advice possible), manages to deliver the best content with HTMLs that mostly can be read in Mosaic and Lynx.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#64

Post by thekingofspain »

apalmer wrote: post #57
bhousel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?"

Agreed. However I think to build on his argument, we should push JavaScript forward in a targeted fashion, based on its intended purpose. Level 1: There are known huge missing chunks of JavaScript that should be resolved as they severely limit the power of javascript as a development platform which lives in a network application. For instance modules, promises, etc... Level 2: There are known huge missing functionali…

Those phases exactly mirror the phases listed in the article.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#65

Post by JoshTriplett »

AlexandrB wrote: post #43
ebauch wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. As primarily a user of mobile apps I would mind. A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps…

> A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to.

That's one of many things that web apps have been fixing. It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app.

> In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look and feel of either major mobile OS.

They do, however, look like web apps everywhere, and if you primarily use web apps, you'll feel right at home.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#66

Post by Roboprog »

kabdib wrote: post #49
bcg1 wrote: post #41

PPK, I'm sorry but you are midair, directly above the shark on this. Its not too late to change course though. We realize you are a mobile consultant, and standardizing many features in a cross platform is a threat to you and your client base. But getting on your soap box and telling people to not add features to browsers is unhelpful and myopic. Not everyone uses your stupid mobile platforms. Some people in the worl…

I've spent the last two years doing "full stack" [yeah, those words, sorry . . . but going from bare metal to C++ to PHP/JavaScript to frobbing routers all on the same day probably qualifies], coming from a background of C/C++ driver and native code development for 30 years. What I see is an immature community that cannot make up its mind. I see fads, I see awful tools, and even more awful tools that try to fix the a…

I have also been doing software for a bit over 2^5 years, and the glass IS half empty. But, it's also half full.

Newer HTML/CSS standards appear to be defined in a somewhat compartmentalized fashion. I'm doing an app rewrite in Angular, and its actually working pretty well so far (1). It's much snappier than java/struts, and we are able to convert the legacy code into REST services for future product integration work.

The author mentioned horrible Chrome documentation. Mozilla / Firefox has EXCELLENT javascript documentation, including listing MS IE compatibility to save you the trip to the MSDN swamp.

Much of this is overkill for "pages", but not for "apps".

(1) "pretty well", with exception of IE, of course -- even 11 won't gzip or cache static files. At least IE 8 dies in Jan 2016, though.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#67

Post by backtoyoujim »

bjt wrote: post #47
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 is the part that feels the most misguided to me: > a fundamental conversation about where we want to push the web forward to. There's no such thing as a "conversation" between the billions of people with a stake in this. Or even the few million people building websites and web apps. Or even the few thousand people building web browsers. Attempting to have that conversation just means open-ended delay. There will…

"Attempting to have that conversation just means open-ended delay."

Isn't that the point? To slow this down because perhaps the people driving "innovation" are insulated from its disruptive effects?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#68

Post by dikaiosune »

adrusi wrote: post #48
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…

The cross platform experience will never match the native experience. Think about on the desktop. The only cross platform apps that behave natively on Mac, Windows, GNOME (and derivatives) and KDE are apps tha have completely separate front-ends for every platform. Firefox is an ok example of this, although it in a way forms its own platform rather than integrating with its host, still it pulls it off better than oth…

Agree completely, what I'm seeing though is "web" being the new native for a whole lot of apps. It's familiar to users across platforms, it usually looks good, and while it might not integrate with the host environment, it provides many aspects of the native experience.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#69

Post by dikaiosune »

pjc50 wrote: post #46
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…

We need a viewport-size-agnostic graphical native sandbox that works on x86_64 and ARM, and can be reasonably sure is escape-proof. Which is hard to do if you let it have multitasking and access to graphics drivers. Then we need a means of letting it have just enough network access to be useful but not enough to exploit the rest of your system, bearing in mind the discussion of WebRTC going on at the moment.

Isn't this kind of what most browsers are currently doing?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#70

Post by vezzy-fnord »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #65
AlexandrB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. As primarily a user of mobile apps I would mind. A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps…

> A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. That's one of many things that web apps have been fixing. It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app. > In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look…

Except the complaint about inconsistencies in native UI toolkits to argue in favor of web apps makes no sense, since by definition web apps have no singular look and feel whatsoever beyond the basic semantics of hypertext and browser navigation -- assuming the app doesn't break them. (and then WIMP has its own mostly consistent semantics too)
Post reply on HN