381–390 of 717 posts
It's working fine, you are using it, and millions of other people are happily using it. Web is great for users because they can do arbitrary operations with just a browser without needing to install anything.
I don't know about you, but I build web apps to help users, so it's okay for me to suffer a little pain to make users happy as a developer.
HTML,CSS, and Javascript separate the layers of a web app fairly nicely.
It's all free for the learning and using and even distributing, and it comes with a huge community to lean on for support where many, if not most, of any questions you might have are already answered.
Those parts work pretty well and have a huge user and developer base. You don't just toss that out and tell everyone they need to start over. To even imagine that you first have to ignore the real value of it, which is truly immense. So much so that in reality you cannot ignore it so whatever you do has to be compatible with it, or at least accommodate it.
I have to admit this leaves me curious about what "Part 2" will offer.
The Web is fucking awful, and our industry's rapid acceptance of it represents a massive moral failing across all of us. We have ruined everything, and we need to take responsibility for our actions.
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That's not the point though. The example given in the article was Google Docs which has the same UI paradigm to Word. Under the hood it's massively different obviously with real time collaboration and constantly up to date syncing. So, the reasoning is that UI is fundamentally the same (or worse if not done right) to native UI from the 90's, yet it hasn't had a massive speed increase which seems wasteful. But modern…
> But modern UI in Office is only an evolution of what was there in the 90s and hasn't changed fundamentally either yet it doesn't feel any faster. Sure, and Office in the 90s didn't feel any faster than the word processing I was doing on an Apple II+ in middle school. This is because the people buying (and building) software care about other things than processor efficiency. If it's generally fast enough for their n…
You are also ignoring the notion that a user may want to run a variety of apps, and not want to close or have any of the lot swapped out and pretending the hit on performance, resources, and battery life isn't cumulative.
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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.
It's a pity that (classic) VB's excellent Form Designer is tied to such an ugly language.
This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
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…
The security aspect was an interesting part of this piece, because one of the main reasons webapps took over from Windows apps is because they were perceived as more secure. I could disable ActiveX and Java and be reasonably confident that visiting a webpage would not pwn my computer, which I certainly couldn't do when downloading software from the Internet. And then a major reason mobile apps took over from webapps…
people really thought activex was brilliant...until security became an issue. i can remember when the tide changed.
anyway, fair points otherwise. cheers.
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> "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" I can't comment on most of the Office suite, but Excel evolved quite a bit since 95. Tables, PowerBI, Apps for Office, etc... If your needs are basic enough then even VisiCalc will do the job, but new features do make an impact for more demanding users.
That's not the point though. The example given in the article was Google Docs which has the same UI paradigm to Word. Under the hood it's massively different obviously with real time collaboration and constantly up to date syncing. So, the reasoning is that UI is fundamentally the same (or worse if not done right) to native UI from the 90's, yet it hasn't had a massive speed increase which seems wasteful. But modern…
Sorry, but this is absolutely untrue. The Ribbon UI introduced in Office 2007 was a massive change functionally and visually. You went from a static toolbar that would just show and hide buttons to live categories which not only resize but change their options and layout as you customize or resize the window. There's now drop downs, input fields built in, live previews in the document as you hover over tools and options, and more.
Same for the new Backstage UI introduced in Office 2013 for saving files, viewing recents, and other file and option operations. You have full screen animations and interactions.
Hell, Microsoft even made the text cursor fade in and out instead of blinking, which needs more processing power.
Could Microsoft have optimized it more? Yes. But they definitely have added tons to it since the 90s and even mid-00's to justify why it's slower.
I'm just left wondering why browser vendors don't apply this behavior by default, it would've been much cheaper to fix the broken sites than mitigating the security hell that 3rd-party cookies provide.
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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…
This is pure illusion. Otherwise reddit, 4chan, hn, google (until 2010), craigslist, and even amazon would suffocate and go away. The fact is that what makes a web app / web site / whatever be liked by the users is the content and the value; and often times a 2005 porn pop-under is better at that than a today's chic, pedantically over-designed website with grey huge lettering, multi-MB graphics, and tonnes of wasted…