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HTML is the Web

petelambert.com

131–140 of 341 posts

Re: HTML is the Web

#131
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we kind of have Paradigm 2 on our smartphones and tablets? It's not perfect but it's something.

We should replace DNS with DHT, then we can have content addressable (or otherwise verified) apps sideloaded or loaded in chunks from anywhere like in BitTorrent or Dat. To me, the Browser is the most widely distributed sandbox runtime ever! It’s just missing a few crucial things we plan to add soon :-)

Have you seen https://github.com/staltz/dat-installer ?

It can be used to update itself, too :-)

Re: HTML is the Web

#133
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to disagree, but I guess the real problem is that webpages on the internet are being forced to serve both purposes. Paradigm 1 - interconnected, hyperlinked web of text-and-content-based documents: open, accessible, amenable to indexing and tooling and so forth. Paradigm 2 - delivery vehicle for cross-platform, full-featured, somewhat-security-sandboxed, applications. I agree with the article that it's s…

I think what the author is saying is that paradigm 2 is built _on top of_ paradigm 1 and if you can't do #1 right, then by definition _neither_ can be right. It's astounding the number of interview candidates who are super-fluent in JS but can't tell you to save their lives why it's a bad idea to put a click handler on a div. React will die (It's already started to) and we'll migrate back to the actual Web at some po…

> React will die

Hopefully, but people have a large capacity to deal with broken web software. Back when I was young, it was all the Java & .Net websites that turned every friggin link into a POST form so that navigating back, and opening in a new window was completely broken.

Re: HTML is the Web

#134
post #40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly prefer…

The case against Flash was, I think, not so much about what it was, but everything around it. - It wasn't visually scalable. (Today we say "responsive", mostly, but that's too easy to confuse.) - It didn't integrate with HTML and CSS in any interesting way other than sitting there in the middle. - Performance was mediocre to terrible. - A rent-seeking company was in charge of it. As you say, eventually JS supplanted…

[deleted]

Re: HTML is the Web

#135
Gosh please use the correct elements when you make a webpage, even if you're in react vue jsx whatever. It makes browsing the web so much easier for people using accessibility tools, and as the author of this article says, it's very easy to do. There are even automated tools to help test accessibility, with pa11y and lighthouse being the most popular.

Re: HTML is the Web

#136
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. The problem with that name is people seem to stop reading after "Document".

Though the web is made of documents, not the objects within. There's no native way to link to specific objects in the DOM that are not identified as part of the document through an ID; the anonymous objects in the DOM can only be accessed programmatically, URLs have no syntax to traverse the tree like there is an "#anchor" section for accessing chapters.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Web_Components/...

We almost had it at one stage

Re: HTML is the Web

#137

Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are…

The reason browsers use the document as a building block is to provide a consistent and accessible UI to everyone using your site. This is the exact same thing that Windows, Apple, Android, etc do with their UI frameworks that they recommend you use. It also provides the ability for websites to safely degrade on older browsers because unknown elements can still be rendered in the correct hierarchy.

Now in both cases, you can just make your app a fullscreen canvas or opengl/metal viewport or whatever and manually render everything to that while manually handling user input, but you lose interactivity, accessibility, extensibility, etc.

Re: HTML is the Web

#138
post #83

> It’s about usability and accessibility. If you don’t think the semantic structure of your Web page or app is important then you’re essentially saying “Well, it works for me in my browser, ship it”. I'm interested, how close to reality is this view of front end devs? In my day job, it's difficult to get through a project without encountering WCAG 2.x or some other accessibility criteria. Which usually forces you to…

> I'm interested, how close to reality is this view of front end devs?

It rings true to me. Accessibility isn't really on the radar of many of the developers I've worked with, and managers want business reasons to justify the extra effort that WCAG compliance would require. I didn't start thinking about/pushing for it until I saw a talk at a conference last year.

Education, banking, and government sites are mandated by law to be accessible in the US, but outside of that there's no guarantee that anything will be accessible, what I've seen?

Re: HTML is the Web

#139
post #3

I pretty much agree with all the article. Back in 2001, when Web Standards were on the rise, people used to validate their HTML code. It was shown as a badge of prestige when you had 0 errors. Semantic HTML was a hot topic and most of the developers I worked with were a sort of HTML taliban. But the popularity of frameworks helped developers forget the basics and concentrate more on learning how to get the most out o…

All my webpages had the valid xhtml badge! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valid_XHTML_1.0.svg I still have a hard time un-learning ` `

Unlearning...why?

The lax nature of the HTML5 doctype did no one any favors. For most elements (`` included) I still use a variant of XHTML Strict. Granted, it wasn't really necessary to have all the URLs and dates there, but to me, the only "correct" way to do this is with ``.

The fact that validators don't choke on this is an accident of history.

Re: HTML is the Web

#140
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to disagree, but I guess the real problem is that webpages on the internet are being forced to serve both purposes. Paradigm 1 - interconnected, hyperlinked web of text-and-content-based documents: open, accessible, amenable to indexing and tooling and so forth. Paradigm 2 - delivery vehicle for cross-platform, full-featured, somewhat-security-sandboxed, applications. I agree with the article that it's s…

I think what the author is saying is that paradigm 2 is built _on top of_ paradigm 1 and if you can't do #1 right, then by definition _neither_ can be right. It's astounding the number of interview candidates who are super-fluent in JS but can't tell you to save their lives why it's a bad idea to put a click handler on a div. React will die (It's already started to) and we'll migrate back to the actual Web at some po…

> It's astounding the number of interview candidates who are super-fluent in JS but can't tell you to save their lives why it's a bad idea to put a click handler on a div.

Go on?

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