WebGL that more often than not crashes the browse, CSS animations that saturate an octocore ... one wonders if there are no more pressing matters.
Stop pushing the web forward
121–130 of 307 posts
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#122We 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.
Perhaps the most Web 1.0 place on the Internet, which I mean as a compliment. I don't quite get the revision/comment setup, but it's great.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know PPK and his work? He's been at the cutting edge of web-standards and implementations for at least 12 years if my memory serves me correctly. >And you'll get exactly what you want. // If he wants to avoid the web being badly negatively effected by short term views of current browser companies and standards bodies then he won't get what he wants by sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the direction he…
> I find it funny that web pages are trying to be native apps and many mobile apps are shipping when they're ostensibly just web pages. Which provides some insight into what's missing from the web. It's almost good enough for most companies. They just need a little something extra so that they can "own the experience." But soon the browsers will catch up and then websites will be able to own your experience, too.
From a tech standpoint, yes. There are some pretty powerful interests that don't want to see the open web on mobile. Google and Apple get handsome cuts of all the revenue on their semi-closed platforms. Consumer demand may shift that, but I'm not holding my breath. The open web was an historical anomaly: historically the large information infrastructures have been nearly monopolized (telegraph, phone lines, cable/broadcast).
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's POSIX POSIX + a standard library for UI components + containerization + webassembly would be the "correct", cleanroom solution in my opinion. If you want to build and run "native but untrusted" applications on the user's computer on heterogenous environments and can't anticipate which APIs someone is going to need next. Well then give them access to a walled-off part of the computer. Same-origin policy? Rep…
Sounds like you're really poorly reinventing Inferno. I don't even understand why you would need WebAssembly in this hypothetical scheme. Container namespacing isn't fine-grained enough, and much of this is the result of traditional Unix-likes having large disparities between different ways of naming things that cannot be composed. The Spring solution was to have all of these descend from a name service, and the Plan…
I'm not too fixated on posix + containers. It's just what I'm familiar with.
It's more about what the complex web applications are trying to do: Run in an isolated context, run compiled code from whatever language the developer preferred and utilize various low level features in ways that people didn't predict in advance.
Basically, what's irritating is that the web standards committees are trying to hand-craft poor knockoffs of lower level APIs, one at a time in ways that are incompatible / don't interoperate well with existing native software. I mean you can't even pipe data in/out of a tab if you wanted to.
Instead it might be better to look at already existing APIs that have been refined over years + some security namespacing.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#125While I agree with the general idea, I completely and utterly disagree with both his examples and approach.
First, it's almost like he's arguing that IE6 was a good thing for the web. This one completely boggles my mind. Yes, some people came up with some pretty creative tricks. Did it stifle innovation? Absolutely. Countless hacks were made that are arguably(?) worse than polyfills. These hacks persist even to this days. Further, modern browsers must take all of these hacks into account when moving the web forward. This is massive technical debt. Additionally, how many man hours were spent creating these hacks to deal with the shortcomings of IE6? That time could have easily been spent working on something awesome.
The other example on page transitions is a bit more reasonable, so I'm being a little pedantic on this one. I agree that page transitions are a bit much, however why is a polyfill really necessary?
All that being said, I agree with the general sentiment. We need to slow down and put thought into the features we're creating. However, I don't think we need to stop working for a year and see how everything plays out. What happens after 5 years? We stop for a year and continue as if none of this ever happened, then continue pushing things forward for 4 more years. Then we run into the same exact problems. We need to have a way to vet experimental features, and a plan to remove them (and old features) if they don't pan out.
We've progressed far enough to where removing legacy features is as (if not more) important as introducing new ones.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#126Upvoted that article. I am tired too. I am not contributing to browser development, but I just want to get more work done instead of spending more and more time on learning.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know PPK and his work? He's been at the cutting edge of web-standards and implementations for at least 12 years if my memory serves me correctly. >And you'll get exactly what you want. // If he wants to avoid the web being badly negatively effected by short term views of current browser companies and standards bodies then he won't get what he wants by sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the direction he…
> I find it funny that web pages are trying to be native apps and many mobile apps are shipping when they're ostensibly just web pages. Which provides some insight into what's missing from the web. It's almost good enough for most companies. They just need a little something extra so that they can "own the experience." But soon the browsers will catch up and then websites will be able to own your experience, too.
What if I don't want corporations to own my experiences? An information-driven web with a document model is robust and can work with many different user agents. An experience-driven web with an application model is very fragile and will only be available to sighted, hearing, Mac-using people running a big 4 browser.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#128> 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…
>there's almost no native-feeling cross-platform UI library for native apps at the moment
wxWidgets is native and it has been working for decades now. May be some people disagree with its use of macros, but it certainly works, runs fast and it's native in Windows, OSX and Linux.
I repeat it again. It's not only native-feeling. It uses the native controls in each platform it supports. It is fully native.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find it funny that web pages are trying to be native apps and many mobile apps are shipping when they're ostensibly just web pages. Which provides some insight into what's missing from the web. It's almost good enough for most companies. They just need a little something extra so that they can "own the experience." But soon the browsers will catch up and then websites will be able to own your experience, too.
From a tech standpoint, yes. There are some pretty powerful interests that don't want to see the open web on mobile. Google and Apple get handsome cuts of all the revenue on their semi-closed platforms. Consumer demand may shift that, but I'm not holding my breath. The open web was an historical anomaly: historically the large information infrastructures have been nearly monopolized (telegraph, phone lines, cable/bro…
The web is an anomaly yes, but it has broader reach than any other platform in the history of mankind. Thinking that native apps will kill the web is to miss the forest for the trees. None of these proprietary platforms have the reach of the web. No computing device maker can release a credible device without web support. It doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't make your proprietary platform cross the chasm the web has crossed. Apple can't do it, even open-source Android can't do it, because Android is runtime, not a standard.
The common narrative of PC app -> Web app -> Mobile app is only superficially accurate in terms of where the tech hype was at different points. But in terms of long-term life cycles, mobile apps are much more like PC apps, and the web is something else completely different, which we've never seen before, and mark my words, it will not disappear or be superseded anytime soon.
Re: Stop pushing the web forward
#130[deleted]