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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

#291

Post by snipethunder »

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…

As an iOS developer, I would say state of web development is not true for iOS. Sure it is slowly evolved to the current state but the framework much more thought out than their web counter part.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#292

Post by Typhon »

untog wrote: post #141
Typhon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but users don't read the HTML, the browser does, and it doesn't care that you're using ten tags for vertical spacing instead of an elegant CSS styling property. Edit : just want to make it clear that I'm trying to paraphrase here, I don't know if I agree (although I do want to point out that HN is built in this philosophy)

I’d argue that in this era of mobile devices, hard-set line breaks like are a bad idea even in the immediate term. Regrettably, the front end isn't simple any more, and while the tooling doesn't help I think it's simply not an easy problem to fix any more.

yeah I was just giving an example of quick-and-dirty HTML that I thought was being advocated.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#293

Post by 52-6F-62 »

untog wrote: post #141
Typhon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but users don't read the HTML, the browser does, and it doesn't care that you're using ten tags for vertical spacing instead of an elegant CSS styling property. Edit : just want to make it clear that I'm trying to paraphrase here, I don't know if I agree (although I do want to point out that HN is built in this philosophy)

I’d argue that in this era of mobile devices, hard-set line breaks like are a bad idea even in the immediate term. Regrettably, the front end isn't simple any more, and while the tooling doesn't help I think it's simply not an easy problem to fix any more.

You're absolutely right, but the comment above seemed to be explicitly making a point about getting acquainted with HTML GUI layouts.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#294

Post by kowdermeister »

hutzlibu wrote: post #270

I rather think, It's time, to completley ignore sensationalistic rant's like this one. First of, killing a technology does not solve anything. It just means less options. So do propose your better solution (and build it) - then we can talk about killing the current thing. But the way it is today, the web works. Definitely not flawless and in large parts really ugly (just browsing with open dev-tools is horrifying, wh…

What's odd is that this article is so well written that it really clicks with bitter developers who are just confused in the vast sea of alternative technologies with the web. At least that's my guess why there's so many upvotes here.

I feel that anyone who rants like this comes from a low level micromanagement world where they have extreme control over everything any they can't have it with web technologies. Fine, but why shit on other developers carpet?

I think the web platform is one of the best innovation the software industry has experienced since the 80's. Can it be better? Of course, yes, definitely and it's getting better.

I have to agree that posting bitter, "everything is wrong" type of articles is really not constructive.

And for god's sake, learn to use your effin' tools.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#295

Post by erikpukinskis »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #96
andrepd wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what he meant was "throw out the web as a platform for applications", not as a platform for document distributions.

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

Are you comfortable running arbitrary binaries built by arbitrary people? If not, then I fail to see how an operating system is a sensible general purpose computing platform.

It worked OK when we just wanted to run software written by a handful of trusted parties... Microsoft, Adobe, id Software. But as soon as there were 1000s of companies writing software that we wanted to try, running binaries ceased to be a good idea. I don't really trust any binary software on my machine that isn't written by Apple. But I will open basically anything in a web browser because I don't have to trust it.

Even now, with all the sandboxing, Microsoft and Apple still have to manually review software in their stores. And truthfully, app stores are basically a naive Web of Trust system. It's not safe at all. Applications constantly open up holes and then say "oops! Security bug!" and what... you're owned now? But Apple doesn't believe it was a maliciously placed hole, so it's all good? Hell of a security model!

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#296

Post by mplewis »

Sure, and what's your plan to replace the webapp? Remember, webapps replaced desktop distribution because they:

• Work on all platforms

• Run without installation

• Provide a quick development and update cycle

So whatever you'd like to replace the webapp with has to do at least _some_ of those things better. And unless it rolls out to nearly everyone who already has access to a web browser, you're going to be competing with the imperfect but "good enough" platform.

Further – the author criticizes open standards because they're not perfect. Sure, no one will be implementing the full HTML5 standard from scratch, and there's a lot of waste in what the W3C produces. But what's your proposed alternative? A return to closed, vendor-proprietary UI frameworks and DLL interfaces?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#298

Post by AdeptusAquinas »

>But Office 2000 was happy with a 75 Mhz CPU and 32mb of RAM, whereas the Google Docs shown above is using a 2.5Ghz CPU and almost exactly 10x more RAM.

The pixel count of that win 98 screenshot could probably fit in the top left corner of the menu in google docs.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#299

Post by coldtea »

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…

> >*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 impossible to secure.

I don't see how this is an argument in favor of the web. If anything, it re-enforces the accusation TFA made against it even more.

If "The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX" then why would be recreating the 90s today a good thing?

If the 90s "slowly reinvented UNIX", then the correct thing to do would be for the web today to either be a fully modern 2017-worthy technology, or at least take its starting point from where the 90s ENDED, not re-invent the 90s.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#300

Post by olmo »

userpass wrote: post #258
jerf wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 coherent mental model of the architecture of a web application or figure out what the best practices are for web development." If it makes you feel any better, that's because there isn't a coherent mental model. If you've ever heard of the ORM/Relational impedance mismatc…

>If you've ever heard of the ORM/Relational impedance mismatch, it's got nothing on the set of impedance mismatches between the way servers like to work, the HTTP protocol (and its still very page-based orientation in a world of streams), the browser's DOM model, and how Javascript works, especially if you want to get excellent performance out of it. Mapping objects to tables is a solved problem. The only noteworthy…

Why LINQ is systematically ignored outside of Microsoftland? It's actually a type-safe expressive and secure AutomaticQueryGenerator
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