Stop pushing the web forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#151

Post by anon4 » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:09 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #127

tedunangst wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

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.

Then you're SOL, because web-delivered applications that own the experience will happen. Hopefully someone would come up with a better user-respecting user agent by then.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#152

Post by kuschku » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:13 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #112

kuschku wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Java has succeeded, too. Look at Minecraft.

Minecraft has no meaningful UI; the entire window is just an OpenGL canvas.

Look at Google Chrome. You can’t even use any or that looks natively in Chrome – it’s just as native as the old Swing styles.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#153

Post by jmagoon » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:23 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #92

Klathmon wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

My reply was a bit ambiguous and snarky. I don't believe it's the wrong answer if it works. But people are commenting about moving the web forward to run apps in browsers and all and so there are parallels with what we did in the 80's. That's really what I was getting at. Nothing in computing is ever really new.

We're replacing a very nice custom SCO Unix backend developed at my work from 1980s onward (drops users into custom shell, multiple programs execute in the user context, leverages all the nice features of *nix) with a purchased desktop Windows ERP application and it makes me so sad.

Literally we will move from having 1 to 2 admin who can manage 300 users, decades of automation, and totally instantaneous program execution (in C) with heavy user load on a single server to distributed, client based programs running on separate machines that all have to be patched, updated, troubleshot, etc.--(and the 5 person support team that has to go with it), communicating with a central program server and separate DB servers, etc.,etc., all because the console application is "too old looking".

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#154

Post by Dysprosium » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:25 PM UTC

I don't see how pages transition is trying to emulate native apps. It still falls under the paradigm of accessing a resource at a given URI, which is what the web is. Personalizing the way the resource is loaded by the client and displayed to the user? That's just cosmetics we should definitely care about.

Currently, the most popular way of implementing "native apps" in the browser are Single Page Applications, which breaks the web paradigm and hence have practical drawbacks such as the inability to open some resources in a new tab or to bookmark them. One motivation of SPA is the fact that loading a new webpage produces a blank intermediate screen during downloading, which is lame, especially for pages which are almost the same. Pages transition can change that, and in a beautiful way.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#155

Post by rimantas » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

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.…

Imagine that you and your friend are hiking together. After a while your friend says: you know what, I think we are going in the wrong direction. You tell him something similar to your comment. And yes, he waits. And while he waits you get deep into the swamp. The only think you learn is maybe how to hike in a swamp. Yes he left behind. But being left behind while others run deep into the swamp is not the worst that could happen. Alas, everyone lost some time.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#156

Post by bshimmin » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:31 PM UTC

callum85 wrote: post #143

bshimmin wrote: post #5

This was the first I'd heard of "Navigation Transitions" (perhaps I don't read the right mailing lists), and ppk's right - this seems like an absolutely crazy feature to add.

What about the idea turns you off immediately?

Two things: 1) it requires an extra stylesheet (from what I can make out, at least); 2) you can already achieve this with JavaScript, if you really want it (which is, itself, debatable), so why add extra cruft into the browser?

Also, from the page ppk links to:

This makes absolutely no sense, though perhaps it has a place amongst the wealth of gibberish we've seen stuck between tags over the years - , anyone?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#157

Post by rimantas » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:33 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #127

tedunangst wrote: post #109

Earlier 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.

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.

Funnily, iOS offers much better accessibility support than web. And I'd argue that many more apps use it (also Apple recently promoted apps with good accessibility support) compared to modern "web apps".

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#158

Post by Animats » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:35 PM UTC

wmeredith wrote: post #73

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…

> 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.

Browsers should have one built-in navigation transition. When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately. It may take seconds for the new page to load, especially on cell networks. There's no immediate user feedback, resulting in multiple clicking, which restarts the page load. So on page exit, something visible should happen. Dim out the page, zoom it down to a tiny rectangle, swoop it off screen and replace it with a busy icon, or something.

(Unfortunately, you can't implement this with a Firefox add-on, short of patching every link in the DOM, or I would.)

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#159

Post by rimantas » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:37 PM UTC

benmathes wrote: post #123

tedunangst wrote: post #109

Earlier 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…

Once again, what so special about mobile? Somehow I don't see webtech proponents rallying for wining the desktop or winning the smartwatches. This obsession with winning the mobile is plain stupid. Instead of wasting time implementing half-baked features which will never catch-up the native offerings and stuffing more crap into already multi-megabyte web pages how about doing some spring cleaning?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#160

Post by rimantas » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 6:39 PM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #129

benmathes wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

The web ten years ago was indeed different when clean markup, separation of concerns, accessibility meant something. Nowadays it is just a mess, cannon fodder in the battle nobody asked for.