What Web Can Do Today • Hacker News Board

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#131

Post by NOtherDev » Mon, Nov 30, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

nandhp wrote: post #51

majika wrote: post #48

What the web is increasingly unable to do today: provide text content without requiring a code execution environment. This site is another example of that. All non-application websites should provide all their content in semantic HTML at appropriate HTTP endpoints, with CSS styling (in as few requests as possible) as required per the design, and JavaScript (in as few requests as possible) that takes the semantic HTML…

> What the web is increasingly unable to do today: provide text content without requiring a code execution environment. This site is another example of that. I was about to argue that this website is actually an excellent example of what you seek -- each link has a separate URL associated with it that returns a page containing that content. The links point to these real URLs so they work with "open in new tab" and "c…

The issue when JavaScript is disabled is now fixed, thanks for pointing this out!

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#132

Post by spion » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 12:35 AM UTC

talmand wrote: post #130

spion wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a web page, and why would a particular design not be a good idea for it? If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute? This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries t…

It's easy to find designs that are bad ideas for web pages. The most obvious culprit is a design that's excellent for a magazine layout. Such designs typically don't take into account the document flow nor the idea that different people open their browsers to different resolutions and browser window sizes. Heck, some won't even take into account different browsers with different capabilities. I think I understand whe…

My second sentence was the entire point. If a web page is not a good idea because it can't support certain designs, then what would you suggest instead (that also has the other properties of the web such as easy distribution and is ubiquitous)?

I was referring to the whole mindset of "the web was not meant to do that". Well, yeah, it wasn't. But its already doing that, so we have to do something to make it properly rise up to the challenge.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#133

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 5:56 AM UTC

spion wrote: post #128

talmand wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, as a front-end developer, the usual reason I need a mess of divs and spans is to support a design that's not a good idea for a web page to begin with.

What is a web page, and why would a particular design not be a good idea for it? If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute? This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries t…

> This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market

And long live them because there is little about the mobile experience that's more infuriating than a web app that should have been made as native. The assumption of being always on-line is baked too deep into the web stack; I have yet to see a well-made web app that could not be made significantly better UX-wise by simply going native.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#134

Post by spion » Tue, Dec 01, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #133

spion wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a web page, and why would a particular design not be a good idea for it? If a web page is not a good idea, then what other technology should be used to achieve that design, as well as remain equally easy to distribute? This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market, and why articles like this one fail to convince me. Nobody (except perhaps Facebook with React) tries t…

> This mindset is precisely why native mobile applications continue to exist on the market And long live them because there is little about the mobile experience that's more infuriating than a web app that should have been made as native. The assumption of being always on-line is baked too deep into the web stack; I have yet to see a well-made web app that could not be made significantly better UX-wise by simply goin…

The UX problem isn't a matter of being online, but of not having a proper mechanism to express application UIs and styles (rather than document UIs and styles).

There are many PhoneGap applications there, and they don't make any "onlineness" assumptions. Their UI does however still suck and does not behave as expected.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#135

Post by laughinghan » Wed, Dec 02, 2015, 7:52 AM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #84

laughinghan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the parent knows exactly what CORS is and you're misunderstanding. There's no fundamental reason browsers can't be configured to not send the user's cookies when making XHR requests, and in fact there's already a mechanism for a webpage to ask certain kinds of CORS requests to be "anonymous": The "anonymous" keyword means that there will be no exchange of user credentials via cookies, client-side SSL certific…

What you characterize as an "arbitrary technical limitation" is there for a good reason, unfortunately: even anonymous requests made by the _browser_ are not equivalent to anonymous requests made by the _server_ the web page came from. That's because the browser and the server have different routing tables. Or to put is more simply, the browser can see the stuff on your LAN, behind your firewall, while the server can…

You're right, there's a really good point here that I didn't acknowledge. The way I think of it is that the browser's security model, while not particularly secure from an academic or theoretical standpoint, is extremely widely deployed, widely studied, and well-understood, and in that very pragmatic sense is very well-trusted. Hence, every little thing that affects the security surface area must be exquisitely scrutinized, necessarily resulting in slow advancement in any such features.

Re: What Web Can Do Today

#136

Post by Raed667 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:34 AM UTC

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #21

Raed667 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is important in case of 2G/3G/LTE distinction. Where phones that can access only 2G networks should get served "light" version of websites.

I think it's likely that most people would prefer the "light" version.

Absolutely not, have you tried 0.facebook.com ? Ux nightmare !