111–120 of 717 posts
Here are two more rants on the insanity of the web and what we could probably do with it:
- https://medium.com/@dmitriid/w3c-and-whatwg-should-die-a-qui...
- https://medium.com/@dmitriid/ok-w3c-and-whatwg-dont-die-but-...
Flux is not equivalent to Windows Events. The analogy is DOM Events. Also, Flux is not required for building web apps. After this I thought that it makes no sense to read the article further. For me the problem with web apps is low performance, slow load time. Another problem is people who try to push programming patterns from functional languages (like immutable values) into mainstream JS libraries. Please use Haske…
I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
This is a very dangerous assumption. The interpreters you use have not been built with security in mind.
Go take a look at PHP changelogs for example.
I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
Yep, also on speed: it seems to me that the microsoft office suite for instance slows down every generation despite only having minor improvements and not actually being that different now than from 95. The nature of developers is that they will use whatever resources that they have. Faster computers don't necessarily mean faster applications but faster software development cycles from bigger teams with less need for…
I can't comment on most of the Office suite, but Excel evolved quite a bit since 95. Tables, PowerBI, Apps for Office, etc... If your needs are basic enough then even VisiCalc will do the job, but new features do make an impact for more demanding users.
>In part 2 I’ll propose a new app platform that is buildable by a small group in a reasonable amount of time, and which (IMHO) should be much better than what we have today... Next time: how we can do that. i look forward to that article. This one, on the other hand, seems a little pointless. Does the web have problems? yes, absolutely. But I have a hard time believing the best way to solve them it to tear down every…
I agree. People seem to think that there was a time when the internet was better than it is today. Well, I've been 'online' since before the web was world wide. Frankly, it was never good. In fact, it is better now than it has ever been. It's just people choose to use the worst parts of it. I've seen the various tech that was supposed to rebuild and revolutionize the web. It's just created more kludge. It's just lips…
HTTP and HTML were absolutely not designed for many of the things they are used for today. A bunch of really smart people probably could come up with a much better solution for modern usage, and lots of them have tried. But the web has too much inertia (the users are there and don't care about these problems) and, as you say, it more or less works, or can be made to work.
It does seem inevitable that it will be superseded eventually, but how far off is that?
I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
Back then the compilers sucked. They would take complete crap of code and still it would work. They were like browsers are today. (from my experience from going through one old MUD code)
Today the song is different. Not only will the compilers warn you of many things, there's even tools for static analysis (and dynamic). So the argument that C (and even the more complex C++) is inherently insecure holds much less weight (just go run old code through a static analyzer, or a normal compiler for that matter).
That said there's only one way to write a "secure program", and that is formal verification.
People that talk with a serious tone should back up their claims, at least that's my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most injection attacks are due to this; if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately No it wouldn't. It wouldn't fix sql injection and it also wouldn't fix the path bug the op linked. The problem is not length, it is context unaware strings. The problem is our obsession with primitive types that pervade our codebases.
The point is that if you know the length of some data up-front before starting to parse it, you don't have to inspect the data in any way to see when it ends. This means that you don't need to know what the SQL injection looks like and protect against it, or what JS looks like to sanitise your inputs – the problem does go away to a large extent.
Obviously nobody is going to be typing length prefixes manually, so our tools are going to do it for us.
Now we're back where we started where you accidentally inline user content as HTML, except now HTML has the added cruft of someone's HN comment solution.
What we actually got instead was the Web.
And the reason we got the web was because it was never conceived to be an application platform, and Microsoft crushed the only company who was calling it as such (Netscape) and declared victory, and then were caught completely unaware when new challengers like Google and Facebook sprung up and adopted the web for what it was and then totally ate Microsoft's lunch with it. By not looking like an OS, the web was able to differentiate itself in consumers' minds and not force comparisons to a much bigger, more mature platform until it was so entrenched it was impossible to make go away.
If you want to build a replacement for the web today, your first priority should be to think of something that millions of people will use daily. It can (and should!) be really simple initially - the Web was first used for sharing scientific papers, and then for creating WebRings of band fanpages, and then for porn, and it took 20 years or so before full webapps became viable. But thinking about it from the perspective of how you make a secure, performant, maintainable programming environment for developers is exactly the wrong approach. History is littered with projects that do exactly that and fail to get anywhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a coherent mental model of the architecture of a web application or figure out what the best practices are for web development." If it makes you feel any better, that's because there isn't a coherent mental model. If you've ever heard of the ORM/Relational impedance mismatc…
A lot of the churn is because the web is so young as an application platform. It’s been less than 20years since GMail which was probably the first thing that even approximated an application on the web. Chrome was released in 2008 less than 10years ago, and it was the first time the web had a runtime engine which was perform at enough to even build an app.