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It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#231

Post by mmcnl »

flavio81 wrote: post #36

Excellent article. It's time to scream aloud that the emperor has no clothes. This farce has gone too far: Most of the facilites for implementing a web app started as a quick and dirty hack, creating abuse of HTTP Forms, DOM manipulation, etc. Aided by Javascript, itself a hack (the creator was under heavy time pressure to deliver a language.) We've built a whole empire using these flawed pieces. I'm bookmarking this…

What is your definition of flawed, then? It is the most widely used distribution network of applications.

Personally, I would argue the exact opposite. The web in its current state is a brilliant piece of technology that is vastly undervalued.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#232

Post by vbezhenar »

mikebenfield wrote: post #20

It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. 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 c…

I don't think that the web is complex, at least not in a sense I'm understanding "complexity" word. Web is a huge pile of semi-specified standards. There are bunch of written standards, like XML, HTML, DOM, JavaScript, CSS (each with multiple versions). There is a lot of tribal knowledge, that you'll get only with experience, like things that doesn't work with IE 6 (luckily IE 6 is not very relevant today). There is some security-related stuff, things that you should remember if you don't want to make a vulnerable website. But it's not a complexity, it's just a lot of things.

Now there's a bad tools. JavaScript is a bad language and its ecosystem is mostly terrible. If you want to create react app with hot reload using es6 and other things that modern developer expects to have, you'll end up with tons of configuration glues, some experimental hacks and many tools hacked together. Or you can download "starter" template, where those hacks are already glued for you. Good luck to add or change or fix something there. In contrast I can write very simple maven config and it'll support almost everything I would ever need without any configuration. It's difficult to navigate among those tools, but this difficulty will be solved with better tools and better documentation. I'm eager to wait until I can throw webpack and just write ES7 with imports and browser will understand it. I shouldn't need build tools for web.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#233

Post by x0x0 »

alkonaut wrote: post #223
SwellJoe wrote: post #12

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…

I just find the way DOM/CSS does layout and styling to be completely convoluted and crazy compared to any desktop toolkit since 1990. Center anything either vertically or horizontally - that cannot require me to google and most importantly cannot have multiple different solutions . Simple things should not just have simple solutions, they should have one simple solution. Memory-unsafe programs on the desktop should g…

I used vb6 20 years ago and have recently (quite unfortunately) had to learn html/js/css basics. The web is hot garbage for displaying form data compared to microsoft tools circa 1996.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#234

Post by bloaf »

microcolonel wrote: post #207
SwellJoe wrote: post #12

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…

C is not impossible to secure, actually. There are popular C programs which are more robust than your average high-level dynamic language program. It takes a deep commitment (hence a lack of good examples), but there is generally a clear path to a well-behaved program in C, and there's nothing about C itself which prevents you from writing secure code. On the web, you must actively mitigate pitfalls of the platform i…

How many really truly secure C programs have ever been released into the wild? Maybe qmail? But qmail did it by completely rewriting the C standard library.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#235

Post by smitherfield »

vvanders wrote: post #27
avaer wrote: post #19

I sympathize with the sentiment, but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks. Like any technology with decades of evolution it has a thick sediment of peat. Half of Javascript, half of Windows, even half of *nix is garbage you should never use, but it's all there because old things would stop working without it. It's just that the web has a very low barrier to entry and very high reach, so the com…

Having written things targeting WASM, when you can provide me an environment like Visual Studio that has breakpoints(including data) and a debugging I can step then we can talk. Until then WASM is cool, but not nearly as productive for C++ as the native platforms.

We could've had that years ago if Mozilla had not (as all the browser vendors do depressingly often[1]) decided to torpedo NaCl for nonsensical reasons that boil down to "NIH," in favor of creating a far-inferior, crippled spec practically designed to be aimlessly bikeshedded for years.

[1] Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web. See also: WebSQL, Dart, HTML5 vs plugins, HTML5 vs XHTML2. Whether you agreed with their position on those disputes or not, you have to admit there's a pattern.

Again, not picking on Mozilla, everyone's an offender: Microsoft generally slows things down so their browsers don't get too outdated, Apple pursues vendettas against competitors and is myopically focused on moving mobile forward while neglecting desktop, Google's constantly attempting to muscle through user/privacy-hostile misfeatures and highly-specialized features that improve their own web apps more than the web as a whole.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#236

Post by mwcampbell »

This post reminds me of a few old blog posts by Glyph Lefkowitz (of Twisted Python fame):

1. on what's wrong with web development: http://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/09/oh-atangled-web-we-we...

2. on how to fix it: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/09/web-untangled.html

3. earlier, on the problems with generating HTML through string concatenation: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out....

Also, my own personal plea: If anyone tries to create a new platform or front-end framework, targeting the browser or otherwise, please don't neglect accessibility for people with disabilities, i.e. with screen readers and the like. At least the Web sort of gets this right.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#238

Post by imtringued »

krapp wrote: post #49
mikebenfield wrote: post #20

It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. 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 c…

The thing is, though, the web is reasonable - for its intended purpose, which is displaying and interlinking documents. And despite the complaints, faults and shortcomings, it's even remarkably not as bad as it could be at being an application platform. Throwing that out because it's less than optimal at a use case it was never intended to serve would be monumentally short-sighted. Just build something else and leave…

I still haven't found a reliable way to save webpages. Firefox and wget won't download stylesheets or script tags generated by javascript. The only working approach is to print webpages as PDFs. It's a pretty terrible platform for documents.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#239

Post by vbezhenar »

aperiodic wrote: post #123
tannhaeuser wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so I'm in full agreement. It's truly mind-blowing how much energy has been wasted on trying to shoehorn the web into an app delivery platform over the last decade. To what end? To make the browser a general purpose platform? We have that already, it's called an "operating system". Edit: that said, I disagree with many points and the general negativity in TFA

It's a great example of worse is better in action: a technically inferior platform winning out because it's better at one or two things that enable virality, which is the only thing that matters when all the money is looking for high growth. In this case, it's that webapps require zero effort and time from the user to get started with, and allow developers to get the closest to the "write once, run anywhere" dream th…

Also web is open. I don't need Tim Cook's permission to run something. And despite this lack of walled garden, I'm much less likely to get something bad from web, than from app, because web have much better sandbox than app ever will.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#240

Post by giblaz »

marmart wrote: post #225
alkonaut wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find the way DOM/CSS does layout and styling to be completely convoluted and crazy compared to any desktop toolkit since 1990. Center anything either vertically or horizontally - that cannot require me to google and most importantly cannot have multiple different solutions . Simple things should not just have simple solutions, they should have one simple solution. Memory-unsafe programs on the desktop should g…

Gridbox and Flexbox largely make layouts sane again.

This to both. However, the problem with the web is there are old implementations that must be maintained in browsers for backwards compatibility. The issue with this is that it increases the barrier to entry for web development because it's much harder for a new person to even know what options to gravitate to.

Of course, there are books and guides to help people, but how would someone figure out which guides are worth it? There are a lot of highly rated books on the topic of web development and if you don't already know what you need, it can be daunting.

But yes, flexbox is great.

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