The Promise of the Web

Terrible, just terrible ideas.

This is looking only through the perspective of the content creator, ignoring the client. We're only just know trying to add some structure to the content, and we already have Microformats, RDFa and Microdata, all with incompatible formats and semantics. Now we couldn't even rely on the semantics of HTML?

He sees the web as a app distribution mechanism and the browsers as just dumb viewers. I think the web is much more than that: it's an information distribution mechanism, and that's only possible if there is standardization of protocols and formats.

    "Now imagine a world where the browser ran something
    lower level. Where Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, 
    and Apple’s jobs in providing a browser more resembled 
    Intel’s job of providing a chipset: they simply 
    provided hooks for basic technologies like sound, 
    camera, movies, geolocation, etc. And on top of that,
    we the developers wrote HTML, CSS, JavaScript"

here lies the problem, coffeescript was cited in the article, you yourself wrote or at least worked with obj-j, there is haml and sass, writing alternatives to javascript / html / css is not a problem, people are doing it all the time. If browsers cant provide access to higher level API's in a complete and consistent manner, how do we expect them to provide low level ones?

There are 2 main problems with the web right now that I can see being brought up repeatedly

1. Devices / Lower level API's, new android devices have access to the camera but all things considering that is very weak, why do we not have standard solutions for clipboard access, device apis, filesystem apis, storage etc

Phonegap are doing great work for this on mobile, Mozilla have also talked about this in their mobile browser, if phonegap can do this cross platform then how in the hell can browser manufacturers not? why doesnt firefox already ship with this support on the desktop?

2. is performance, is javascript going to ever be fast enough that we can build rich applications and games, right now the smallest page animation triggers ridiculous stuttering, is it javascripts problem or the doms? is it fixable with current solutions? blazing fast hardware accelerated webgl or canvas doesnt matter if the host language cant lookup a variable without random second long pauses.

nacl is often brought up as the solution here, but I have a hard time seeing how providing a sandbox to execute native code is gonna help me build a nice mobile app that uses web technologies (forms, links, standard tools for accessibility) and can still do a decent page transition without stuttering

This article doesnt seem to draw any conclusions about how to solve these, and the "everyone can be the owner of the web" seems almost like its apologizing for Joe Hewitts confusingly completely off base conclusions.

I dont have any answers either, but happy that the conversation is being started.

You also need some extra content-negotiation abilities, but that shouldn't be too hard: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131870 . I'll pull out this bit:

> Finally, the process can chain, so a particular [data/DSL] file might be given to a display program which is a Ruby script which would in turn be given to a generic-runtime interpreter for the appropriate version of Ruby.

So it's untrue that using NaCl or something similar means that all code (let alone all data) has to be sent to the browser already compiled down to assembler (or PNaCl bitcode or whatever). Among other things, this is one important reason why Mozilla is wrong to claim that adoption of NaCl (or whatever) would mean that HLL/scripting-language/whatever code distributed over the Web would no longer be able to benefit automatically from speed improvements to the browser's HLL runtime(s). Chained content negotiation is your friend TM.

You bring up some really good points. I also agree that NaCl is not ideal. In my opinion plain text transmission of data is essential for the web, which would allow things like Google to keep working regardless of the "language" being used, whether it be HTML or Markdown, etc.

Having thought about it more, I think the real issue here is standards. All these other problems are a function of that in my opinion. The problem with standard stagnation and lack of competitiveness, whether it be missing features or hardware access, is not a coincidence in my opinion. This isn't some rut we are currently in that if we work hard enough we'll get out of. Instead, I think that the structurally process itself is predisposed to it. 5 years from now, the web will just have a new set of technologies that its behind native on. In other words, the way things are headed, the web can never be cutting edge. And sure, there will always be things that work well on the web, but I would personally like a cutting edge web.

Additionally, I'd like to add that as I stated in the article, I have discussed these thoughts with Joe on more than one occasion, and even had him look this over beforehand to make sure I wasn't putting words in his mouth. I don't think I was apologizing for Joe, I just think this is a really complex situation where the same analysis can take different shapes.

I think Flash gave browsers the 'excuse' to postpone the implementation of a real standard solution, that we're only know seeing the first steps of.

I bet we'd have seen the video tag on browsers years ago if Flash wasn't there with a poor (GPU acceleration only last year, FFS!) but working solution.