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Stop pushing the web forward

quirksmode.org

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Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#291

Post by Margh »

rhaps0dy wrote: post #210
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the choice lies outside of the actual functionality of the web itself but instead in the OS and browsers. Consider someone who ships their iOS app that is basically just a web page instead of using a web page. For doing this, they get two benefits that are not really related to the web. One, they get an icon to tab from the home screen to launch their app, instead of going to Safari and then going to their we…

HTM5 appcache to the rescue! http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/appcache/beginner/ It's rad.

Rad is definitely not my experience.

I've spent A LOT of time trying to get my site's appcache functionality to the point where it's barely usable. Probably more time than all of its users would have spent downloading the resources it was supposed to cache. It has more gotchas than anything else I've ever experienced.

This is incredibly accurate: http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-doucheb...

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#292

Post by notNow »

frik wrote: post #165

What's wrong with that site? quirksmode.org used to be a great resource but it stopped being updated 10 years ago when IE 6 was still the "thing". Nowadays, http://caniuse.com replaced it. So quirksmode transformed to a rant blog, like this one we had on HN three months ago: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/05/web_vs_nativ...

He's clearly over the hill. He feels left behind with all the progress and growth in the community and his cry wolf shouting style from the mountain top is just pathetic.

As we say here, the dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#293

Post by Eric_WVGG »

pfooti wrote: post #230
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…

I thought the futility of protecting image assets online was accepted a long time ago. Or are you being sarcastic? I don't get it.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#294

Post by genericallyloud »

rimantas wrote: post #162
JoshTriplett wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A web app experience is at the mercy of the network I happen to be connected to. That's one of many things that web apps have been fixing. It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app. > In addition, as a user, the "build once, run anywhere" feature of web apps is a disadvantage since it often means that apps are written with the lowest common denominator in mind and don't quite blend in with the look…

> It's entirely possible to write an offline-capable web app. Yeah. It is entirely possible to make web app do a lot of things. Even do them cross-platform. Even to get almost native feel. But when you are done doing it you understand, that going native even on each platform would be faster and cheaper.

And thus the reasons to keep trying to improve those stories. Offline is import for applications. Many web applications make perfect sense to also work offline, and if that can be done easily, then what's the argument? I'd agree that looking like a native app by matching look and feel is probably not a great plan, but I also just fundamentally don't understand the attitude of saying that the web should be relegated to blogs/news/wikipedia style pages and leave everything else to native app silos.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#295

Post by the8472 »

pcwalton wrote: post #196
the8472 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure you can do better than the POSIX APIs, but I think it's hard to argue that POSIX APIs are better than the Web APIs. POSIX is a terrible API with decades of cruft.

web apis are incredibly restrictive, don't interoperate with native code at all and generally are a tiny subset of what native APIs provide.

Personally I prefer to put up with some cruft than not being able to do something at all.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#296

Post by chx »

altcognito wrote: post #224
chx wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, techn…

> Well, if the market sees a technology as solving a particular problem it will adopt it.

Bollocks. The "market" is not a sentient, rational entity. There are many more factors that go into market adoption.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#297

Post by altcognito »

chx wrote: post #296
altcognito wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, techn…

> Well, if the market sees a technology as solving a particular problem it will adopt it. Bollocks. The "market" is not a sentient, rational entity. There are many more factors that go into market adoption.

I hear that people have written entire books on the subject. Do you have a point you were trying to make other than "markets are not sentient and rational"?

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#299

Post by rpedela »

jeena wrote: post #289
rpedela wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the only languages available are HTML, CSS and JavaScript which are just more than bad for application development because of so many reasons. I would have completely agreed with that a few months ago. HTML/CSS/JS is fine for most websites which are primarily text, images, and a couple buttons. But it breaks down quickly when trying to build an application. Then React was invented. I don't know if React will be…

But that is just fiddeling with the symptoms, not doing anything with the root of the problem. It is the same with webcomponents, they're building on such a shaky ground. I like the ideas around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UTWAEJlhww instead.

Based on the video, is security the root problem? Sorry, but that is a problem in every programming environment. Security is hard regardless of using C++, JS, Linux, Windows, etc. Therefore it is not terribly relevant to the question: is JS capable of emulating native functionality and should it?

For that question, the root problem was definitely JS itself historically but the language deficiencies have largely been resolved by ES6. In my opinion, the only major language deficiency is handling int64 and larger numbers which will hopefully be resolved by "value types" in ES7. Then use a React-like framework on top and building applications feels "right", at least to me.

Re: Stop pushing the web forward

#300

Post by ForHackernews »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #181
ForHackernews wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What a hyperbolic analogy. No, porting to new platforms is not like recovering from a natural disaster, and rooting for competing platforms is not like cheering for the misery of a disaster.

And for the record, doing a port well (as opposed to a hacky, broken one) frequently requires lots of creativity and technical ingenuity.

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