371–380 of 717 posts
Make a good replacement for the web, get everyone to want to switch, and then migrate. You might accomplish this in 10 years.
I strongly disagree with the part about REST being a workaround for browser limitations. REST is about manipulating an arbitrarily large namespace with a small number of verbs; an elegant and powerful design pattern that actually deserves a better platform than what HTTP provides. It transcends browsers and protocols and will be reinvented in any well designed system that manages to survive its own evolution. The res…
For an inspirational interaction model, look to SQL.
"...unless you work at Google or Microsoft you can’t meaningfully impact the technical direction of the web"
This doesn't just ensure the web can remain open, but makes the whole architecture (the web itself) an open question and allows all aspects of "the web" to evolve more smoothly.
I was about to say, it's time to kill monolithic native apps that live behind DRM'ed App Stores, can't talk to one another effectively, can't be composed, must be explicitly managed by users lest they run out of storage, and have an enormous transactional cost to trying them out. Or I could point out that explicitly designed application protocols with native clients over the years have also shown themselves vulnerabl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wor…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There were plenty of webapps before Gmail. There was even plenty of other webmail services before Gmail and Gmail wasn't much different from the status quo. I've been using webmail since 1997 and even my University had a web interface (SquirrelMail) for those who preferred using the web interface (almost everyone). This was pre Gmail.
Really? My recollection is that Gmail was substantially different in the extent to which it was an in-browser Javascript app built around server-side data requests. That's in contrast to something where applications were a series of mostly-static pages. At the time this change was known as AJAX, and GMail is listed as a pioneer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming) Squirrelmail, by contrast, rendered a ne…
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.
It is likely to run on over a billion devices.
It should just take a few hours to a few days to code depending on your coding skill level. Did I mention no installation required.
Can a non web app or native app be better than this?