Stop pushing the web forward • Hacker News Board

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#221

Post by simoncion » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 10:37 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #219

simoncion wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you click on a link that leaves the page, something should happen immediately . On every browser I use, the UI changes immediately after clicking a new link. Pay attention the next time you click a link that's not in cache. Look for messages in the status bar (which is usually hidden, but typically becomes visible on resource load or when hovering over a link), changes of favicons to spinners in tabs, and the…

Here's Firefox, immediately after entering a site name into the URL window.[1] The only visible effects are that the tab name has changed to "Connecting", and the reload arrow has change to an "x". On Firefox Mobile, you don't get either of those, just a one pixel high progress bar at the top of the screen. It's worse on mobile, where things are slower and there are fewer auxiliary GUI items on screen. At this point,…

Those are things that happen to the UI immediately after asking it to navigate to a site that you typed in.

Now that you've demonstrated the UI changes that happen immediately after you type in a URL and press Enter, what UI changes happen when you click a link that leaves the page?

That's the complaint of yours that I was addressing in my comment. :)

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#222

Post by codeshaman » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 10:41 PM UTC

yellowapple wrote: post #217

codeshaman wrote: post #198

That happens all over tech, not just in web browsers. Just for fun, I've spent a couple of minutes compiling a list of technologies, just for the backend side of things , which many of us know or have heard of, which ilustrates the complexity and diversity that we have in our industry atm. It's both beautiful and scary at the same time - how will we be able to move all of that into the future ? How will we scale our…

> Step 1. Pick a language. Since the focus seems to be on web backends (given the section following this one), I'd imagine that trying to use C or C++ for such a thing would not be one of the obvious choices. Also, you've listed Scala twice, I'm pretty sure Xhp and Hack count under PHP, and God help you if you opt to use ColdFusion or ASP.NET (or PHP, for that matter) in anything new. > Step 2. Pick a framework for t…

Nice write-up. I hope you do understand that the original message was a sarcastic joke.

The point was - there's just so many technologies to consider and it's been just 15 years.

When I got my first PC, my choice was: MS-DOS 3.3. QuickBasic, Pascal, C or Assembler for writing programs.

There might have been other stuff, but I had no access to it. Ditto for documentation, tutorials or books.

Things have definetely evolved and if the rate continues, we'll have thousands of languages/frameworks in the next decade, unless something absolutely mind blowing comes up and replaces everything forever.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#223

Post by RubyPinch » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 10:47 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #79

RubyPinch wrote: post #12

slinging 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?

yes, which is why "imitating native", aka not reloading the entire page, is seen a lot more on sites like facebook and twitter (the ui stays the same as the main page reloads), this is done to provide a more comfortable experience, sans screen flashing rave party

navigation transitions (more of this horrible ugly "native" stuff) is standardizing a mechanism for this

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#224

Post by altcognito » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 10:50 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #205

altcognito wrote: post #146

ATM, The two top articles (Why Docker isn't Successful in Production) and this one are both cries for the world to slow down. It's not going to and everyone ought to strap in. If change is called for, it will be adopted. If not, it won't. Some technologies were rejected simply because they came about at the wrong time. Some technologies that are adopted now will later be deprecated as better solutions are found. Chan…

> If change is called for, it will be adopted. Please elaborate. This does not seem to be true but it's too short to fully understand.

Well, if the market sees a technology as solving a particular problem it will adopt it. As you suggest, this is more complicated than nine words can cover. It may only be temporary -- like flash video. Up until flash video took over, the existing solution were plugins like RealAudio/Video. If mobile application development solve a pressing need better than other solutions, ideally it will be adopted. Of course, technical merits are not the only issues at play here. Marketing, costs both hidden and direct are all absolutely factors determining whether change will occur.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#225

Post by thristian » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:06 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #201

mschuster91 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The tools that it turns out were a bad idea will die. And those that are good will thrive. We saw that happen with WebSQL vs IndexedDB. A well-designed API (with a syntax every decent webdev knows) vs a bullshit spec (ohai callback hell FOR DOING A SIMPLE FUCKING SORT AND GROUP), and the bullshit won.

All because Microsoft wouldn't break down and embed SQLite into their browser like everyone else did for WebSQL. It's actually really disappointing. IndexedDB could be built on top of WebSQL as a shim... you can't really do the reverse so easily. It's really disappointing... WebSQL/SQLite with a template string builder interface would be amazing. (I know it's an ES6 thing). I will say, that I do want what's on deck f…

Because Microsoft and Mozilla wouldn't break down - and Mozilla already shipped SQLite.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#226

Post by dendory » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:09 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #109

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #99

Earlier 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.

No they won't, because it would kill the web. That little bit is ownership: branding and control. There's no Adblock for their app. Their app isn't called Firefox it's Company Name. There's no dev tool for the app, so less chance to find out all the insecure ways it siphons my data. They control updates, so their ActiveX-style monstrosities are always going to be displayed the same. Get the idea?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#227

Post by RubyPinch » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:10 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #179

TeeWEE wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that PPK did a lot of good work on web, doesnt mean this article is good. Any genius can create crapwork. So did albert einstein. I once saw a presentation from PPK where he proposed JSON over SMS....( http://quirksmode.org/presentations/Spring2012/bigm.pdf ) IMHO that presentation was technically not very strong.

> I once saw a presentation from PPK where he proposed JSON over SMS. And that's bad because? Given some use cases it could be a very handy and pragmatic re-use of available resources and protocols.

because SMS has inherent costs in some countries, because SMSs are tiny (I'm pretty sure his example json structure was larger than a SMS max size even), there is already a mechanism in place (to see all SMSes), which would have to be hijacked (to not display what would be practically garbage to the end user)

push notifications already existed 3 years as a thing before this talk

Whatsapp, twitter, etc, all existed before this talk as mobile services (and twitter via a SMS interface, which is the far more reasonable way of using SMS uniformly across all phones)

It was a talk 3 years too late, data plans already existed, push services already existed, implementing such a thing via SMS would only lead a company to get ~6 months max use, wouldn't be as easy as other methods (receiving a push / making a web request, vs receiving a possibly fragmented SMS, and then having multiplatform hiding of this message), etc etc etc. I personally have to wonder if the talk was comedic (the part about how app stores make it impossible for people to find your app, makes me wonder this as well)

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#228

Post by teacup50 » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:13 PM UTC

jebblue wrote: post #83

teacup50 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Minecraft alone shows your first two points are not valid. Write a hello world app in Java, the startup time is miliseconds, the memory is not humongous.

(non-casual) Games aren't generally known for fast load time, sharing resources on a multitasking system, or short playing sessions -- all of which plays to the JVM's strengths (or avoids its weaknesses).

As far as fast load time; just launching my (JVM-based) build tool (sbt) takes 7 seconds on my laptop.

Running 'Hello World' from an uncompressed class file takes 0.12s, and most software is quite a bit larger than a couple lines of bytecode in an single uncompressed class file.

The C version, by comparison, completes in 0.005s.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#229

Post by pfooti » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:20 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #204

nostrademons wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has been the standard Android browser since KitKat, and it auto-updates since Lollipop. Ditto the system webview.

It's such a shame that there are still new Android 4.x devices being produced...

isn't 4.x kitkat? It's the 3.x devices that cause issues, and those are preeeeetty old.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#230

Post by pfooti » Tue, Jul 28, 2015, 11:24 PM UTC

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…

You know what I want? I want a tag that I can use like but more flexibly- I want to manage cache and authentication on images displayed in-browser, and the fact that I basically have to use URL or Cookie auth for image embeds is ridiculous. My entire API uses tokens, except for when it deals with image resources (and those images need to be protected to only display in the correct place, because they're not pictures of cats, but Highly Sensitive pictures of Important Cats).