It’s time to kill the web app • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#461

Post by dispo001 » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:40 AM UTC

You would think text documents work wonderfully but weirdest parts of html [to me] are...

1) the rendering of things outside the viewport. The way wrapping of divs and lines works it seems impossible to make it render the way pdf did from day 1(?) I don't even know if there is a maximum length for pdf but in html you really should try to stay under 20 000 lines. I know, it seems like I'm splitting hairs here, but before the early 90's you could easily scroll though the entire memory of the system as if it was a single document. The amount of code was kind of a lot smaller than the infinite scroll web page requesting pre-cut chunks of xml or json where you get to manually measure the size of elements then get to do crazy calculations with the scroll offset if a new element needs to be inserted above the stuff the user is looking at.

And 2) not having a nice way of doing a reference section summarizing the stuff linked in a text kind of ruins the joy of having links in the text. One ends up building a kind of disposable experience if the text is long enough.

Combined, it's like having a pile of pages that are all the entry point. This is lovely for short reads but far from what books use to be.

I suppose the ultimate creation is one such article that promises everyone a fire breathing pony with laser eyes in the soon to follow up.

When you write one, be sure to rage at the thing everyone loves and to suggest abolishing it - to be replaced by that pony you will get in the next episode!

I for one am all ready to be disappointed by this holy grail of subscribe baiting.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#462

Post by andreineculau » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:42 AM UTC

Fej wrote: post #433

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 might be the biggest dichotomy I've yet seen on HN. An opinion piece voted all the way to the top of the front page (with a clickbaity title, might I add), yet the top comment soundly debunks the article's arguments. Yeah, this is why everybody clicks on the comments link first.

The article itself is click bait since the real meat is to be expected in the follow-up article.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#463

Post by Endy » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:48 AM UTC

RUG3Y wrote: post #423

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other commenter said, flexbox and gridbox help alleviate many issues that used to be commonly raised a few years back. Check out Yoga [0]. It's a small layout engine based on flexbox and the CSS box moel. It doesn't cover all use-cases, but it's pretty powerful for its size. I It's important to remember that CSS and the DOM was initially created and developed with certain kinds of documents in mind. Both are c…

That sounds awesome except for that fact that my customers refuse to use modern browsers that support modern CSS features. GRRR.

Your customers sound like the smartest and most sensible people I've heard about in a while. The current way the Web is changing makes it almost impossible for in-house use in a large corporate environment. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to avoid it entirely; so instead do the smart thing and put a hard stop on it and refuse to hit the moving target.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#464

Post by oldpond » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:56 AM UTC

Yes, the browser is now the universal thick client. Full circle.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#465

Post by naasking » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:57 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #134

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…

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…

> A programmer thinks of all the ways that a program could fuck up your computer; it's a large part of our job description. The average person is terrible at envisioning things that don't exist or contemplating the consequences of hypotheticals that haven't happened.

I'm not sure programmers are much better. There's a long history of security vulnerabilities being reinvented over and over. Like CSRF is simply an instance of an attack first named in the mid 80s ("confused deputies"). And why are buffer overflows still a thing? It's not like there's insufficient knowledge about how to mitigate them.

And blaming this on the market is a cheap attempt to dodge responsibility. If programmers paid more than lip service to responsibility, they'd push for safer languages.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#466

Post by Endy » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 5:57 AM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #350

gkya wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 don't understand one point here - why wouldn't Coke be able to have vibrancy? Animated .GIF images have worked very reliably for web layouts since... forever; and I don't think anyone's going to start calling for everything to be pastels online or in a fixed color scheme. I don't feel that Reddit is by any means 'niche', either. And of course a clothing store (which is an e-commerce product) should look different from an image board; again, no one in their right mind is going to demand otherwise. But they should be able to be defined by the same set of tools (personally, when I design webpages, even under WordPress, I still use HTML tables and the center tag. Heck, I've used the marquee tag in the last year.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#467

Post by wruza » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 6:04 AM UTC

sanbor wrote: post #127

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…

Probably you spent several years at low level programming and you're fluid and productive in that world. In the other hand, I spent my last 10 years dealing with websites and I feel fluent and productive with the web, while I feel frustrated and overwhelmed by low level programming. The web is 20 years of quirks. Low level stuff is 40 years of quirks. If you want send me a message and maybe I can help you with learni…

For me (not your parent commenter) the problem is not that I can't understand things or need help to grasp something new. I have 2 decades of desktop, low-level, server, business programming in bunch of languages and frameworks behind; didn't touch games and 3d though. The problem is that every time I start to read yet another html/css/js tutorial or advanced guide, I get almost physically sick of it. It is like learning [al]chemistry before analytical method appeared. You're presented to the fragmented facts, none of them covering the entire picture, none of them having any design thoughts. For first few times I thought that it is just a bad tutorial, but with time I realized that it's the nature of web. You can't do a right guess there. You can't metaprogram it, because there is no common basis between all the "technologies". You can add new unnecessary flavor though. Millions of failed frameworks represent the supporting evidence for that. It is so detached from programmers reality that even gives "powerful" names to reinvented things: services, routing, reactivity to name a few. Which are simply modules, callbacks and two-point bindings, the insignificant nomenclature under programmer's feet. Most web devs don't even know what real reactivity is and that is was a regular thing to have circular, heavy-threaded formula references as evaluation model in '84 supercalс working on 96Kb RAM. Do you know why it isn't widely used in today's programming? Because you normally have only one place to set your data and only one way to propagate it. You DO NOT need reactivity in a sane design. You have to be aware of your data flow and be able to analyze it. Native programming overwhelms you because it is saturated with disciplines you was never convinced to follow (or allowed to break for local benefit), not because it is twice as old. Just pick few classic programming books to introduce.

Web is long done, you'll never see it being any better than now, or yesterday, or a year ago. The article may be ranty, but it is right that web still reinvents the '90s having 100x processing power at hands. It simply goes nowhere. I don't hope, I know it will be dead some day, because that bubble becomes too heavy to not pop itself.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#468

Post by Endy » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 6:05 AM UTC

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…

As someone who had to help "teach" JAWS about UI elements on a friend's computer back in '05-'07, accessibility should be the first concern. If anything, that's one upside to Google - the spider "sees" like a blind person. The better-crawled a page is, the more likely it is you won't lose massive page elements.

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#469

Post by aperiodic » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 6:07 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #137

aperiodic wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a great example of worse is better in action: a technically inferior platform winning out because it's better at one or two things that enable virality, which is the only thing that matters when all the money is looking for high growth. In this case, it's that webapps require zero effort and time from the user to get started with, and allow developers to get the closest to the "write once, run anywhere" dream th…

True, but I think the push for web apps is mostly about lock-in and ad-financed web services.

How do web-apps help lock-in? Because you can force users to update?

Re: It’s time to kill the web app

#470

Post by int_19h » Sun, Sep 24, 2017, 6:12 AM UTC

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…

Again, "anything fancy" here includes something as simple as a localized dialog. In most commercial apps, this means pretty much everything would require "drawing it yourself".

At which point you can basically throw the designer away, since you'll be writing code to manage layout for all widgets anyway.