Stop pushing the web forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#181

Post by MacsHeadroom » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:29 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #100

apalmer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the only cross platform UI experiment that has 'worked' on any significant level. Users do not care about cross-platform compatibility, at all. They only care that it works on their platform. As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc. The only people who sho…

>As developers, we should be cheering for a diversity of widely-popular, mutually-incompatible platforms because there will be more work for developers to port the iOS version to Android to Windows, etc.

This is like saying "As construction workers we should be cheering for natural disasters, because there will be more work for construction workers to rebuild destroyed cities."

Job security is great- but at what cost? I'd rather see developers making completely new things than wasting time porting from one native platform to another.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#182

Post by kuschku » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:31 PM UTC

bcg1 wrote: post #180

kuschku wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. His suggestion is to stop, and wait. Spend a year on standardizing, fixing bugs (like the bug with chrome where it sometimes just "forgets" float-css rules), a year spent on improving issues and making everything behave consistently between browsers. A year spent so that we won’t have to use jQuery afterwards anymore. Or underscore.js. A year spent on fixing all the little bugs, and making a consistent roadmap wh…

You're missing my point. The world won't stop just because you decide to reflect on the situation and have small groups of people unilaterally decide what will someday maybe be standardized in some browsers. In the meantime the new features will get developed as non-standard features and you'll have even more proliferation of cruft, "polyfills" and whatever else PPK is complaining about.

Why not? Why do we have to push new features every few weeks? The web still works right now, and it did in 2009, too.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#183

Post by buckbova » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:33 PM UTC

> We’re pushing the web forward to emulate native more and more, but we can’t out-native native.

I can do better than native.

I can update web apps without troubling the end user, fix bugs and make improvements immediately.

I can balance processing where heavy lifting is done on my servers and simple processing done on the client.

I can store immense data in the cloud freeing the end user's machine from any such junk, aside from maybe a cookie, and stream it on demand.

Why should someone have to install anything on a phone, tablet or PC? Feels archaic. Open browser. Navigate to URL. Do work, enjoy media, etc.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#184

Post by applecore » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:34 PM UTC

Navigation transitions actually sound like a pretty good idea, considering it emulates one of the most salient features of a single-page web application.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#185

Post by Aleman360 » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:46 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #44

The cool thing about many of these features is that I can push out some code that I can share with a hyperlink and other people can run it without installing anything other than a browser. The authoring experience is still terrible. And the user experience still requires hopping over the secret, invisible wall into developer-tools land... but the potential is there. If you're savvy enough to open your web console and…

> The cool thing about many of these features is that I can push out some code that I can share with a hyperlink and other people can run it without installing anything other than a browser.

Both Windows and Mac have app stores now. Installing apps is a one-click affair, and you can even send URL's to them (in Windows 10 at least).

Most of the Windows 10 apps are only a couple MB. That's less than the typical media-heavy website.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#186

Post by kbenson » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #172

kbenson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who needs flash when we can have 15 competing application frameworks for the web that all just abuse the canvas as their medium, so we aren't even authoring HTML/CSS anymore?

Honest question: is abusing canvas really becoming prevalent? The only web app I've seen doing this is flipboard.

Prevalent? I don't know. I do think it's just a matter of time before some companies leverage this by providing a super simple web page developer tool a la Frontpage Extensions.

Photography studio webpage that just wants a carousel and music playing? Check.

Small companies that freak out about people stealing their inventory list? Check.

Vendor lock in for the poor souls that fall for this? CHECK.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#187

Post by Eric_WVGG » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #78

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #25

“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?

Do users want cellphones with 64bit CPUs, 1gb DDR4 RAM and an SSD, or a phone that turns on instantly and has near perfect responsiveness?

When I get the visuals dialed in a way that is quick and responsive, yes, the users seem quite receptive. I could do a better job for them with better tools at my disposal.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#188

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 8:55 PM UTC

applecore wrote: post #184

Navigation transitions actually sound like a pretty good idea, considering it emulates one of the most salient features of a single-page web application.

And, ironically for an article calling for "care for user experience", is proposed to improve user experience.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#189

Post by simoncion » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 9:00 PM UTC

GrinningFool wrote: post #169

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 a standard for most things happening in a browser, which means that things look pixel-perfectly the same on a huge amount of browsers he 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. That's a good theory. My experience as a consumer of web sites acr…

Agreed.

I feel a little twinge every time I hear someone say that something on The Web should be or is "pixel perfect". That phrase has a particular -and obvious- definition; one that is rarely correct when speaking of a web page that is viewed in more than one browser and/or on more than one machine.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#190

Post by simoncion » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 9:05 PM UTC

teacup50 wrote: post #59

rco8786 wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

The JVM itself got faster -- and in many places, relies on native code for particularly expensive functionality -- but it's still unusable for end-user applications because: 1) The long load time / hotspot JIT overhead when starting applications. 2) The large memory overhead of the Sun/Oracle GC's reserved heap. To some degree, Dalvik solved some of these issues, but has also retained the (very necessary) escape-hatc…

> [The JVM is] still unusable for end-user applications because [it makes application startup slow and uses too much RAM.]

I can't agree.

The poster child for "bloated, overweight, slow-as-shit Java application" is Eclipse. Circa 2013, I found it to be not substantially slower or any less usable than Visual Studio on the exact same hardware.