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It’s time to kill the web app

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Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#391

Post by goatlover »

kowdermeister wrote: post #306
goatlover wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an IDE for a programming language, which is only part of the picture. Compare it to what the Flash IDE or Visual Basic offered developers. Or Smalltalk in terms of a fully customizable, live environment. Maybe something that's a cross between Developer Tools, Flash Designer and the Smalltalk environment. Anyway, VS Code isn't the development environment for the web. It's just one of many options for writing Java…

What would a dream tool for web development would look like to you? Edit: VSCode is not for one language, it supports dozens and dozens of technologies... wait for it... for the web.

Yeah, I've tried it. I've also used Adobe tools and Visual Basic before, and some web layout/theme builders. So it's the IDE plus the visual building environment, with tools for animation and what not.

I also use Jupyter Notebooks, and having a rich REPL is great for prototyping and exploration.

So maybe something like the Smalltalk environment, where the environment is a fully customizeable web browser, and the language is your choice, which would get compiled to WASM or JS.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#392

Post by disordinary »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #388
disordinary wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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…

But the original article was saying that the UI paradigms are the same but the interface is slower. The UI paradigm on the web is as far removed from 90s Windows as modern Windows is if not more.

All these points are no different to how web tech is evolving UI so should be discounted the same way that web technology is.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#393

Post by thecrazyone »

bayonetz wrote: post #379
marmart wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gridbox and Flexbox largely make layouts sane again.

True but it's crazy that it took 20 years to get sane layout control.

Well _it is_ crazy. We can't trace an alternate history and work with that. We work with what we have.

I think, here, we might looking at it with the wrong lens. I'm unable to find the right words to say this. Let me say this statement feels ungrateful. Web is the largest and fastest growing ecosystem of software we've right now (refer: community size, number of projects on github, say, in Javascipt, CSS, and other web technologies).

You're comparing what is what should've been. By that measure, any human activity will fall short of not only yours but anybody's expectations.

You'd think that getting sane layout control is easy, but apparently it's not. Getting a lot of humans to agree on a fast growing technology is hard (it seems like).

PS: I'm not saying "nothing could've been better, be happy with what you have", not at all. I'm just saying this seems like complaining and a better approach is to try and make it better

I needn't have written up a long tirade for such a simple statement. I see that this is the same sentiment that's espoused by several others in this thread, and thought I'd try and provide a different perspective to look at this with

edit: formatting

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#394

Post by jiggunjer »

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'm trying to just build interlinked documents. My bane is variable window/screen sizes and images. Styling is too simplistic for my scaling demands.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#395

Post by KGIII »

3chelon wrote: post #367
KGIII wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. People seem to think that there was a time when the internet was better than it is today. Well, I've been 'online' since before the web was world wide. Frankly, it was never good. In fact, it is better now than it has ever been. It's just people choose to use the worst parts of it. I've seen the various tech that was supposed to rebuild and revolutionize the web. It's just created more kludge. It's just lips…

Kudos for "lipstick on a pig". My thinking entirely. I don't really understand how the web got so broken. But you're right it's not going to be torn down any time soon, any more than the human eye will unevolve to fix the blind spot. Like biology, the web will evolve with kludge upon kludge, as long as it kinda works. I think the best hope is for some language/platform that abstracts the whole thing away safely and l…

Oh yes, one more spec or standard should do the trick!

On a more serious note, it has it's faults but it works. Maybe people are asking too much of it? Maybe they need to adjust their expectations?

There are lots of ways that it can be improved. I can think of one innovation coming down the pipe and it impresses me. HTML5 doesn't, by itself, really impress me. WebVR, or whatever they are calling it, doesn't impress me - I remember VRML and the fiasco that was. No... The new DRM spec doesn't scar me - I figure it's just going to give a standard interface to what is already going on.

What does interest me is the webassembly. That I find interesting though a part of me expects it to end up similar to Java applets from back in the day. It interests me because I am expecting it to be a boondoggle.

The rosy-cheeks on the starry-eyed youth have assured me, quite breathlessly, that this is a game changer. This time, this time it will be different. We're finally killing Flash and they've gone and reinvented it. I'm probably going to have to add another 32 GB of RAM, just to use a browser. But, it's going to be different this time. They've got a plan.

So, I'm interested in seeing how that turns out. I'm the quintessential optimist. I have every hope in the world that someone will come up with a way to selectively block it.

Really, the web is doing okay. When we stop and look at all the crap we've shoveled ont TCP/IP, I'd say it has held up nicely. I really can't think of a single bit of tech that has taken more abuse than TCP/IP. HTML and CSS are up there, but I'm pretty sure TCP/IP can lay claim to the most abused spec.

Yet, the 'net lumbers on. It's kind of amazing and it is a great time to be alive.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#396

Post by chefandy »

mwcampbell wrote: post #335
nostrademons wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You run up against Gall's Law [1]. The root cause is that many of our desires are actually contradictory, but because human attention is a tiny sliver of human experience, whenever we focus our attention on some aspect of the system we can always find something that, taken in isolation, can be improved. (I'd be really disappointed if we couldn't, actually; it'd mean we could never make progress). However, the "taken…

You make a lot of good points. My concern, as readers who have seen some of my other HN comments may guess, is that the next time someone starts over, they'll neglect accessibility (in the sense of working with screen readers and the like), and people with disabilities will be barred from accessing some important things. "How hard can it be?", the brave new platform developer might think. "I just have to render some…

FWIW I'd consider it the opposite of selfishness to want to improve accessibility.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#397

Post by jkmcf »

api wrote: post #263
x0x0 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

MS really had rapid GUI development absolutely nailed in the late 90s. For some reason we forgot all that.

MS had nothing on Sun’s Dev Guide, the easiest and best GUI dev tool i’ve ever seen.

I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#398

Post by goatlover »

goatlover wrote: post #391
kowdermeister wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would a dream tool for web development would look like to you? Edit: VSCode is not for one language, it supports dozens and dozens of technologies... wait for it... for the web.

Yeah, I've tried it. I've also used Adobe tools and Visual Basic before, and some web layout/theme builders. So it's the IDE plus the visual building environment, with tools for animation and what not. I also use Jupyter Notebooks, and having a rich REPL is great for prototyping and exploration. So maybe something like the Smalltalk environment, where the environment is a fully customizeable web browser, and the lang…

To clarify, it's the IDE plus the live environment plus the layout and design tools.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#399

Post by GeorgeTirebiter »

chickenfries wrote: post #30
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…

What did you try to do to learn web development? I'm sure there was something you could do to change your approach, if you're really capable of learning how to build complicated, networked GUI applications in Rust and C, you must be able to grok the basics of web architecture. Honestly these comments that we should throw away the web are just as ignorant as people who think we should just throw away all of our C code…

I consider myself pretty good, too, but had to take a community college class to force myself to spend the time to learn website dev. It's an abortion. HTML/DOM/CSS + JavaScript? Back End / Front End? You simply must use a framework to do anything real. In class, we developed without frameworks, to see how the guts work. Like real guts, Web guts are ugly (although perhaps utilitarian) and not especially streamlined for their job; but given they evolved from simpler times, maybe pasting over the cruft with more cruft is our only salvation today.

I normally do embedded, and, to me, the Web Browser is just an app. Anybody could write an app that accepts text as input and output formatted text, graphics, pictures. It certainly could be optimized for within-the-app apps. I'm not sure why this hasn't been yet done. JSLinux is a proof-of-concept: https://bellard.org/jslinux/

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