Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time to kill the web app

blog.plan99.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 717 posts

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#411

Post by jiggunjer »

oblib wrote: post #382

From an engineering standpoint there are surely some valid points here but I have to say that I don't think things are all that bad. 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 w…

> HTML,CSS, and Javascript separate the layers of a web app fairly nicely.

Except they don't. Most devs aren't even aware of what divs they are using for pure styling vs semantically correct ones. They think all the html they write is by definition semantic.

Then there are the less frequent but even more insidious cases where css is used for content.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#412

Post by smitherfield »

hutzlibu wrote: post #358
smitherfield wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could've had that years ago if Mozilla had not (as all the browser vendors do depressingly often[1]) decided to torpedo NaCl for nonsensical reasons that boil down to "NIH," in favor of creating a far-inferior, crippled spec practically designed to be aimlessly bikeshedded for years. [1] Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web. See…

Erm, "Mozilla usually pulls such NIH moves to sabotage the introduction or use of languages (even DSLs) other than JS on the web." maybe it is also because their ressources are limited and implementing a new language like dart is somewhat expensive. And NaCL even more I think. But I actually have some anger as well on them for enforcing indexedDB and killing everything else. So now we have to use f indexedDB for stor…

Again, if it were a one-time thing it'd be different, but it's a pattern with Mozilla.

> maybe it is also because their ressources are limited and implementing a new language like dart is somewhat expensive. And NaCL even more I think.

If I recall correctly, Google offered to donate their engineers' time to implement Dart and/or NaCl in Firefox and Mozilla still refused.

Also, WebAssembly is enormously more complex to implement than NaCl.

And, both of these events occurred while Mozilla was napalming skyscraperfuls of $100 bills with their Firefox OS nonsense.

BTW, of the things I mentioned the only ones I'm really "angry" at Mozilla for are WebSQL and NaCl, the others I can see both sides.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#413

Post by BuckRogers »

Agreed. This is why I'm retraining myself on C# in 2017. Native is better and the web should remain a primarily lean and fast text document delivery system. I'm loving C#/.Net so far, It's almost as good as Java serverside but has the (well-supported) ability to natively produce iOS and Windows apps (the two most important platforms IMO). One stop shop, and it's output is native code. It'll also support wasm when that's a widely used thing as well. Having to learn one platform like Java or C# and work out the rest of my career is a bonus too. I've had it with fashionable technology one year to the next and I certainly don't want to maintain these leaning Tower of Pisa stacks. Not to mention, on a similar chord as the author stated, we learned a lot of lessons over the decades. Part of that lesson is industrial-strength tooling (IDEs) and languages (typed) are important.

C#, Java or discard IMO for most greenfield projects. At least if I'm to maintain it longterm. Others may differ and that's fine, but at least all of this is my philosophy at this point with everything that I've seen and experienced. I'm really looking forward to his part two.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#414

Post by jiggunjer »

overgard wrote: post #386

At my last job, the app we were creating had both a web frontend and a Qt ui, so it was pretty easy to compare the relative difficulty of the two approaches since we were generally doing the same thing in both. Honestly it was kind of a wash. Qt was a little nicer as a developer because it meant never leaving visual studio, but I can't say that Qt offered some great advantage over HTML/CSS in terms of UI paradigm. I'…

You can program in much more complex scaling behavior. Bet you just tested on a single 21" monitor at 96dpi.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#415

Post by johnvega »

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…

This is a WEB APP https://3d.delavega.us using 3js. It can run on most iOS and Android smartphones, most Windows and macOS machines and Linux computers.

It is likely to run on over a billion devices, and no installation required. Can a non webapp or native app be better than this?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#416

Post by brlewis »

If you're trying to prove that a platform is unfixable and present as evidence the assertion that it's reinventing things from a previous era, you're doing it wrong. Even assuming it's true, reinventing in no way makes the platform unfixable. Quite the opposite; you're asserting it's being fixed.

If you're trying to prove that a platform can't be made secure and present as evidence security issues that have been made into non-issues (SQL injection, XSSI) you're doing it wrong.

If you're arguing that it's time to start over from scratch don't criticize things that could be fixed without starting over from scratch, e.g. lack of a binary RPC format.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#417

Post by projektfu »

always_good wrote: post #118
danpalmer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that if you know the length of some data up-front before starting to parse it, you don't have to inspect the data in any way to see when it ends. This means that you don't need to know what the SQL injection looks like and protect against it, or what JS looks like to sanitise your inputs – the problem does go away to a large extent.

That doesn't make sense. Obviously nobody is going to be typing length prefixes manually, so our tools are going to do it for us. Now we're back where we started where you accidentally inline user content as HTML, except now HTML has the added cruft of someone's HN comment solution.

The solution suggested is not-html, a specific thing for web apps, where data is separate.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#418

Post by EGreg »

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…

"Buffers that don't specify their length"

Instead of thinking of it as buffers, you just have to encode/decode for the proper environment. Such repetitive stuff is easily implemented in stack layers.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#419

Post by pcwalton »

catnaroek wrote: post #406
int_19h wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VB6's form designer (and UI framework that underlies it) has one crucial problem: it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window, or font size or family changes (even if it's something as simple as accommodating high DPI), or you localize the dialog and some strings become longer. This lack of support for anything other than har…

> it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some au…

CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning.

It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#420

Post by ehnto »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #405
ehnto wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those communities are all very niche, and in fact part of their brand and image is in their design. Even though they are less flashy, that is the point. Try to convince the owner of a clothing ecommerce site that their store should look like a 4chan bulletin board while trying to sell high priced garments to the public, or that the Coke website can't have a vibrant design in line with the rest of their branding.

I'd like to pose a WhatsApp commerce group as a counterexample.

A good counter! However it also helps the argument that the web is diverse enough that having a hyper flexible UI system is beneficial.
Post reply on HN