271–280 of 717 posts
Quite a bit ironic that you need js to actually see the images in that article.
I can see the images without JS enabled.
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 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…
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For the sake of creativity, suppose browsers were the wrong direction to take for web exploration. What do we do now? The same idea may be applied to an operating system's ability to allow a user to operate on their machine. Edit: It would be useful to consider why the need for a universal interface to the internet was originally sought out.
Telnet? That's the alternative I can remember.
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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.
The problem is that if you present an average web user with the interface you can design (quickly and efficiently) in VB6, they'll spit in your face. Much of the complexity of web design is not in the tools; it's in the fact that users don't expect a standard whatsoever, they just expect their UIs to be as slick and customly designed as magazines. If every website was written using the same standard, predefined set o…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"If you want to rag on JSON, that's fine. It's not a great format" JSON is simple and powerfull. It's success justifies it, to call it a great format, I think. But I am curious, what whould be a great format, in your opinion?
JSON gets the most important thing right: it's simpler than XML. I probably should have rephrased my comment. I literally mean that it's a decent format, but not a great one. One issue is that it's surprisingly poorly specified: http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php . As a data-interchange format, it lacks first class dates/timestamps, the issues about specification are a pain when dealing with numbers (depending on lang…
And I hope, that all the missing things like schemas can and will be added at some point, when there is a consensus on how ... And TOML and Dhall look interesting, but I like the block approach with brackets to data like JSON does it.
However, A lot of what appears to be recreating the same computer technology over and over is actually not recreating but I think selectively rebuilding platforms, picking up pieces of tech and ideas from the junk pile of previous ones and seeing now they might actually be workable. This process also allows discarding the dead weight of bad ideas no one bothers to pick up and bring in.
It's like we do development by tossing useful ideas into a house. Then when they house is literally bursting with the all the orthogonal junk we've tossed in it over the years, but which programs have come to rely on we say ... well that place is a mess, let's start a new house, and we repeat the cycle, taking the best pieces from the old house as we have the resources to carry them over. Sometimes we have a particularly good and consistent plan of what we want in the house, so we can put up a lovely one ... initially. However inevitably, as is the case when you are still discovering new ideas and techniques as we go along, you notice your neighbor with some hot new feature, and rather than lose ... um guests (this analogy is getting pretty stretched) we say, ok we'll add that I guess, not wanting to be hopelessly outdated and lose out on that cutting edge of cool features and dragon chase of increased productivity and nifty little bits of syntax sugar or cool tricks or whatever.
So existing platforms typically can't be hoisted wholesale onto other platforms anymore than a house full of junk can be moved from the country to a different climate on a different foundation. It just usually doesn't work well because the hoisted platform is typically at a stage of high refinement to it's niche, built on a several assumptions, even a few of which failing wipe out the ability of the hoisted platform to function either outright or at an acceptable level.
I think that a variety of competitive pressures from large players capable of making feature bloated browsers is the best we can reasonably expect from a societal system built fundamentally around competition and not collaboration, cooperation, and coordination. Even still we face large locked down platforms like iOS where you cannot run any web rendering engine (e.g. firefox / chrome are just glorified safari browsers due to apple app store policies forbidding custom rendering engines like gecko or blink) or interpreter you please, or my pet peeve even any url with a %s to act as your user set search engine (only a list of 4 options is available), which puts a strong gate in front of users freedom to choose how and what they run on and interact with their pocket computers.
Where am I going with all this? I guess webapps as a platform, as bad as they are only exist as such because they developed as a race between different browser vendors to one up each other with cool features. This process is like throwing useful stuff into a house. Getting each of several different platforms to agree on a standard for applications and then implement that in a consistent portable way seems almost impossible to me.
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…
This tweet is an interesting visual that makes the same point: https://twitter.com/TheoVanGrind/status/888850519564984322