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A clean start for the web (2020)

macwright.com

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Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#41

Post by betwixthewires »

fennecs wrote: post #26
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

So are you saying you just want the web as it is? If not, what would you change? How would you prevent it from becoming what it is now?

I don't see why a document couldn't have a link to an application that opened next to it, so that you could view documentation and an application together. We should utilize the organizational ui paradigms built into our operating system, not use the system as a launcher for Chrome.

The effort is being done whether its all in one application or split into two.

It has to be siloed because if it isn't, you won't be able to find the document you want to read without running application code, as we see with the modern web. It's not a search issue, I find the documents I want to read just fine, it's just that they come with megabytes of executable code I don't want to run.

It would be nice if a client could only implement the rich stuff that it wants to, unfortunately, when the rich stuff is all different everywhere, it means only clients that support all of it get used, hence the current state of web browser development.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#42

Post by betwixthewires »

enobrev wrote: post #20
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Sounds like more of an indexing problem than anything else. Add a no-js switch to our search engines and you can read all the plain text your internal organs can handle. I tend to like today's web (a bit too corporate for my taste, but I like the potential for variety). But there's no reason the modern web can't look like the old web with the right filters.

It's not just about finding just text to read, it's about finding the documents you want to read and not having to run arbitrary application code to read it.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#43

Post by virchau13 »

betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Where would https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ fall? In the document web or the application web?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#44

Post by Ecco »

“One codebase, KHTML, split into WebKit and Blink”. That’s inaccurate. Blink is a fork of WebKit that was itself a fork of KHTML. And actually KHTML was really a super tiny project before WebKit.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#45

Post by lifthrasiir »

virchau13 wrote: post #43
betwixthewires wrote: post #11

I personally would love a "document web" and an "application web." I've thought of this before independently and talked about it to some people, I think the author is right, the idea of one client application for everything internet related is a core source for the problems we face with the web. I like Gemini, a lot, and I think it could serve as a "document web" very well, except it's missing certain document featur…

Where would https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ fall? In the document web or the application web?

It can fall under any of these with minimal changes, so your question is not very meaningful. I'd say it is better suited for the application web though, because you expect interactivity. The point here is that there are not many documents that do necessarily need interactivity.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#46

Post by iamcurious »

grishka wrote: post #35
fennecs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear…

Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone?

That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#47

Post by 8note »

betwixthewires wrote: post #41
fennecs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does it have to be so siloed? What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Why must I go through two different protocols? What if I want to read a paper next to the Juyter notebook that made it? I think it should be the clients job to take whatever slice of a richer universe it wants. This also stops duplication of effort, why maintain separate protocols and clients etc. It’s just a search issue, the…

So are you saying you just want the web as it is? If not, what would you change? How would you prevent it from becoming what it is now? I don't see why a document couldn't have a link to an application that opened next to it, so that you could view documentation and an application together. We should utilize the organizational ui paradigms built into our operating system, not use the system as a launcher for Chrome.…

The web is about fine as it is.

The changes we need are around people, improving liberal arts education; and ownership, having government run alternatives to most things like search, login, and payments

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#48

Post by jjcon »

DougMellon wrote: post #9

> Firefox wasn’t the #2 browser - that’s Safari, mainly because of the captive audience of iPhone and iPad users. But it was the most popular browser that people chose to use. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I struggle to see how one can arrive at that conclusion. I imagine a large percentage of users actively chose to not use Firefox over Safari because of it's integration and their familiarity.

Also wouldn't that still be chrome? Even though chrome comes preinstalled in some circumstances, the number of people that choose to use it is certainly far higher than the number of people that choose to use firefox. Not to mention that firefox is virtually in a tie with 5 other no-name browsers.

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#49

Post by e-dt »

Almost all of the companies with power on the web are invested in continuing with it as it is. Given that, the only way to change it so substantially would be to create some kind of grassroots movement for a new version. That's an uphill battle--how are you going to get ordinary people to care? How are you gonna get the average, urgh, "content creator" to ignore network effects and use your platform? What's the "killer app", especially considering it's meant to have less features than the original web?

Re: A clean start for the web (2020)

#50

Post by grishka »

iamcurious wrote: post #46
grishka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if I want documents with a slight bit of inactivity? Then you use Adobe Flash. See, we used to have a decent technology for when you want "a document with a slight bit of interactivity". It worked very well for this exact purpose. More than 10 years later, browsers' native capabilities, that are supposed to be a replacement for what Flash offered, have still not quite caught up. Moreover, Flash defined a clear…

Cool, since you are here , is there any flash editor clone? That was the stuff, animations, games, apps, all so intuitive.

None that I know of. Of course it would be nice to have an open-source editor as well, but an open-source player is much more important. You can get by with abandonware for the creation side of things, but you can't ask your site visitors to install abandonware that is known for an astonishing amount of scary vulnerabilities (if they use an OS that was supported in the first place).
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