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A clean start for the web (2020)

macwright.com

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#141

Post by discreteevent »

grishka wrote: post #111
MrJohz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.

The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

Exactly. When I first did a web front end it felt exactly like customising MS Word with VBA. No matter what you put on top of it the roots poke their heads through and it feels like a mess.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#142

Post by rchaud »

mattcwilson wrote: post #127
alluro2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your views on the topic. Early days of web were amazing from the perspective of people trying to express themselves despite the technological limitations. and animated gifs, tables, CSS, not to mention Flash... Obviously romanticizing to an extent, but to me personally there was value in people striving to set their content and themselves apart - vs today when it's so much about "streamlining" experiences and…

... so why doesn’t Hacker News do any of that? Isn’t it ironic that it was built by a Silicon Valley VC?

Likely for the same reasons that many of the architects of social media UX design and recommendation algorithms don't let their kids use those apps.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#143

Post by CM30 »

bawolff wrote: post #19

I think the post misunderstands the situation. Its not 100% clear to me what the author's thesis is - but i think its that ever incrasing complexity of web standards results in bad user experience. I dont think that is true - or as they say correlation does not equal causation. The web used to be smaller and the corporate world didn't know what to do with it. It was creative and original. Eventually corporate america…

This times a hundred. It's not that the complexity is the reason, it's simply the audience changing, whether it's the people creating the work or the people consuming it. Look at any online content platform like Medium or Quora or Clubhouse. Quality starts off high, but plummets as more people start finding/using the platform and more businesses see it as a way to make money. Or any entertainment medium. It's not unique to the web, film, television and video games all went a through a similar evolution.

People miss the old days, without realising that those days only happened because no one saw the monetary potential in a medium, and the few people with a deep interest in the field (and enough resources to work for free) created stuff as a hobby.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#144

Post by agumonkey »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

There's also ergonomics voids in the document approach. Humans don't just use documents, they do higher order things.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#145

Post by Devasta »

acabal wrote: post #53
recursivedoubts wrote: post #30

What we need is for HTML to get going as a hypermedia again, to make the hypermedia architecture viable for a larger set of web applications. It's been stalled at anchors and forms (with only GET and POST!) for decades now. It's astounding how much we got built with just that. I'm trying to show where it could go with htmx: https://htmx.org Hypermedia (in particular the uniform interface) is what made the web special…

I've always been shocked that HTML forms only support GET and POST and there's zero interest in supporting more HTTP methods in forms even in 2022. If forms supported the whole range of HTTP methods we could have a user facing web that's identical to a REST API, with different Accept and Content-type headers. Imagine how much development time we could save if forms supported DELETE and PUT!

The W3C attempted to improve HTML forms with xForms, but the browser vendors are deathly afraid of anything XML based so it never got implemented.

These days HTML is really only viewed as a payload carrier for your JS application so doubt that'll ever change either.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#146

Post by krapp »

rchaud wrote: post #142
mattcwilson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... so why doesn’t Hacker News do any of that? Isn’t it ironic that it was built by a Silicon Valley VC?

Likely for the same reasons that many of the architects of social media UX design and recommendation algorithms don't let their kids use those apps.

It's an intentional design choice on the part of the author to only attract a certain kind of user (the kind that cares about information and nothing else) who likely conforms to pg's ideal culture fit of a 'good hacker,' and scare away everyone else.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#147

Post by rektide »

grishka wrote: post #111
MrJohz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.

The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

Having a hypermedia standard is universes more interesting & powerful & enriching than what boils dowm to a way to generate gifs. Computers have dozens of ways to throw pixels at peoplecs faces and none of them are remarkable or particularly noteable.

Having a DOM, having structure, having a hypermedium is a source of immense potential & power. For both developer, but also, capitally & uniquely, for users too.

This longer top-commemt talks some to why documents, why hypermedia is enriching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373988

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#148

Post by grishka »

discreteevent wrote: post #141
grishka wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

Exactly. When I first did a web front end it felt exactly like customising MS Word with VBA. No matter what you put on top of it the roots poke their heads through and it feels like a mess.

Yes, yes. Flash (with AS3) was a first-class web application platform. There were buttons and views and "movie clips" and other stuff for you to place on a blank canvas, all very customizable. Then there was Flex, a full-fledged yet relatively lightweight application framework built on that foundation. You created your layouts with XML, with live preview. There were Android-like layout containers (emulating Android's LinearLayout with HTML+CSS is still not quite trivial in 2022 — the defaults on flexbox are bonkers) and there were ListView/(UI|NS)CollectionView-style lists with reusable cells, among other things. This was 15 years ago! I can't even begin to imagine how many workarounds one would need to implement a list with reusable cells with HTML+JS even if targeting only the latest Chrome and Firefox.

HTML is a document format at its heart and there's no getting around that, but is/was a nice escape hatch.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#149

Post by gjvc »

locallost wrote: post #74

> First, you need a minimal, standardized markup language for sending documents around > Then, you need a browser. I can't not think of the Alan Kay talk "The computer revolution hasnt happened yet" from 25 years ago. Some quotes: "HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes there should be a browser that understands its format." "...ever more complex HTML formats, ever more intractable…

100% agree. This is the reference, for those who are interested -- watch for a few minutes starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=1280s

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#150

Post by Xevi »

brtkdotse wrote: post #108
_448 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One advantage of pushing the computing on the user-side is that it reduces the load on the server: less requests, less processing and smaller request sizes. Thus it reduces the bill for the developers/companies :)

So by spending thousands of dollars on developer time we can save dozens of dollars on server costs? ;)

The developer time isn't higher than if it was server side rendered. And for some applications, like the ones I'm building, it would be impossible to do the work on the server.
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