HTML is one of my favourite technologies. Functional, resilient, progressively enhanced.
You really like HTML for system-to-system communication? Or we read two different blog posts?
Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
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Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#12I can agree with this statement: "HTML provides a pretty face, but a lousy system-to-system transaction environment." Imagine if we had something like JSON, but with a more standardized schema to e.g. describe something simple like a table of data. There is so much glue code being written that does nothing else than reformatting data to something an organization can actually use. Think what it would mean if every tab…
There is a lot of glue code written because we are only transporting data through HTTP, that is the problem. A concept that has been buzzing around my head a lot lately is, what if we could model objects/actors? So that I do not only go to google.com to display some HTML, but we have a standardised RPC language I can tell it to "search this query" and it returns a structured object? The same RPC I can use to talk to…
> I want the Internet to be like the Erlang virtual machine. Each server is an independent actor that holds state, can send and receive messages, but they are not very trusted.
you sound quite a bit like Alan Kay there (and that's not a bad thing IMO).
Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#13Disregarding the emphasis on XML -> replaced with JSON, isn't this actually mostly spot-on re the popularity of Single-Page Apps (SPA)? There is very little if any HTML in the form of the text-based markup involved in a modern SPA - the actual display logic is all DOM manipulation in JavaScript, operating on separate APIs providing just the raw data in JSON form.
> Truly powerful applications can be built using combinations of JavaScript and XML. Not only can the data and its format (XML) be shipped to another system, but the associated processing logic to validate data entered into the record or form can be shipped along as JavaScript as well.
The main thrust in this article is that scraping HTML display markup is a terrible form of data interchange between systems. Think in terms of modern banking systems that are based on screen-scraping terminal UIs of that era.
Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#14The web will never catch on. It's just the CB Radio of the 90's.
(I actually remember people saying this.)
Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#15Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#16I can agree with this statement: "HTML provides a pretty face, but a lousy system-to-system transaction environment." Imagine if we had something like JSON, but with a more standardized schema to e.g. describe something simple like a table of data. There is so much glue code being written that does nothing else than reformatting data to something an organization can actually use. Think what it would mean if every tab…
There is a lot of glue code written because we are only transporting data through HTTP, that is the problem. A concept that has been buzzing around my head a lot lately is, what if we could model objects/actors? So that I do not only go to google.com to display some HTML, but we have a standardised RPC language I can tell it to "search this query" and it returns a structured object? The same RPC I can use to talk to…
Are you trusted? The reason g-search and others don’t have an API is not a technical one. They won’t let you neither JSON nor HTML without captcha module injected into your browser because this is the way they earn money.
Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#17Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#18Funny. Among other things, XML is self describing . Yeah sure. We all know how that turned out. That was the day when everybody was crazy about the Semantic Web, and for some reason XML / some convoluted format built on XML was viewed by many as "semantic", apparently because of the many intractable URLs the format called for. Y'know, URLs, or was it URIs or URNs, those little pieces of text that, even when they poin…
XML was just a few steps in the wrong direction and it diverted all users energy nowhere.
When I see sexp as serialization format I miss very few, same for json.. but xml wasn't that different. Just too much noise (ns,attributes) and just not enough genericity (no generic list or map) made it useless. Surprising.
Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#19Re: Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)
#20One would never use HTML to transfer data between two systems*, this author really missed the Forest for the trees.
*unless of course one system is scraping the other and has no control of what it outputs.