Things like webRTC are the real push forward. It turns the browser to an operating system that can do everything a native app can do. I agree about the attempts to mimic "cool" animations from iphones - that's just cheap.
Stop pushing the web forward
71–80 of 307 posts
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#72I'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…
We have the same philosophy. Most of my experience here is with iOS and Android, but also a bit of Windows/Linux/Mac. If it's going to feel polished, then it's going to need a separate UI front-end for each platform.
It's not that there's not yet a sufficiently good cross-platform library; it's that an Android app and an iOS app are different! They're structured differently! And if you try to use an x-platform library, you're going to end up with an iOS-app-that-runs-on-Android, or an Android-app-that-runs-on-iOS, or a this-app-doesn't-feel-right-anywhere.
My approach varies based on the application, but in general one of two things end up happening: either the majority of the processing gets pushed onto a server with a well-defined REST API, or the processing gets put in a C++ library that gets linked everywhere (with JNI shims, ctypes shims, whatever's needed to load it in the appropriate environment).
This approach does a few things: it ensures that you've got a UI that fits every platform, it improves code quality (you can't add a chunk of business logic in your view handler), and it makes porting so much easier.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#73> 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…
> But why do web developers want navigation transitions? In order to emulate native apps, of course.
This is just a misunderstanding of good UI. Emulating native apps is NOT inherently "Good". There are terrible native apps and great ones. Navigation transitions would be nice as a another arrow in our quiver. Using it wisely is another can of worms.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#74I've gotta say, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that we'd be better served by a period of focusing on stability and performance over new features... but talking about the IE6 stagnation era as a good thing? Yeah, no, that was awful, and if you're holding it up approvingly, well, now I officially disagree with you.
The IE6 era (2001 to 2005 or 2006) was a period of great creativity, and it was when a lot of dominant web properties became established. Examples include Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Second Life, The Pirate Bay, MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, OpenSreetMap, YouTube, MegaUpload, Pandora and Twitter.
Web 2.0 became popular during that era (2004 onwards).
That "stagnation" compares rather well with much of the flashy, transient rubbish being launched nowadays.
Also, when it came out, IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser and generally performed better than its main rivals.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#75[deleted]
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is shortsighted. In 5-10 years browsers will be more Virtual Machine than Web Browser. You can almost argue that they already are. As browsers and phones get more and more performant, the idea of emulating native apps in the browser won't have the performance stigma attached to it. This same thing played out with Java et. al. It was dismissed for being non-performant when compared to C/C++(aka native cod…
Oh, so a dumb terminal. Ok. It's 1980 again.
If it can do everything the user wants then what is the issue?
Just because it's been done before it's the wrong answer?
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
where in the article?
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#78“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…
> 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.
Do the users want those too?
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#79slinging around "web trying to be native is bad" in the way the author does is such a thoughtless argument: just because something exists in native land (a land of a lot of well paid researchers and designers, etc etc), doesn't make the idea bad for everywhere else. Maybe the idea is just a plainly good design decision? (I mean, do you have fond thoughts of the entire page flashing white, then pieces of the page boun…
"(I mean, do you have fond thoughts of the entire page flashing white, then pieces of the page bouncing around the screen as they try to position themselves based on content that hasn't loaded yet?)"
You mean like it does now?
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#80We 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…
> There's no such thing as a "conversation" between the billions of people with a stake in this.
Well, not exactly. That's how you wind up getting diversity of fields.
People have different interests and different visions of the future. People understand computation differently. People approach the same problem in different ways. Through conversation and code, the web is weaved together.
My thought is this. Put up or shut up. Why waste your time under a forum about a developer who wants more stable, secure software? Surely this view provides some benefit to the community, lest we prefer languages that compute incorrectly with regularity and a proliferation of vulnerabilities across every domain that has been coupled with technology.